From Code Search to AI Agents: Inside Sourcegraph's Transformation with CTO Beyang Liu

This is the first time in computer science I can think of where we've actually abdicated, like, correctness and logic to it. Right? Like, in the past, it was a resource. Right? So maybe the performance is different. Maybe the availability is different. But, like, whatever I put in, I'm gonna get back out. But now we're like, figure out this problem for me. You talk to some devs and they're like, you know, I've never been more productive, but, coding isn't fun anymore. That's one of the things that we're trying to solve for. It's like amazing new technology. It feels like magic. Never experienced anything like this before in my life. Then the the the narrative that was spun was like, this thing will just, you know, run our lives for us, or it's gonna kill us all. Total annihilate. Yeah. Like Terminator. And there's just, like, absolutely no danger that, like, this thing's gonna, you know, acquire a mind of its own and, like, try to reach out because it's gonna kill you. If if you use this every day, right, this idea that this thing could take over the world, it's funny. Exactly. That narrative, I think, is largely been dispelled within our circles, but I think that it's sort of taken on a life of its own in other circles, and it's made its way to some of the halls of policy making in The US. This is the old adage of, like, you know, do you blame it on ignorance or or malice? Malice. I honestly don't know, but it is clearly, like, nonsensical and I think very much in the the the national interests to be still telling this story. The United States invented the AI revolution. We built the chips, trained the frontier models, and created the entire ecosystem. But right now, if you're a startup building AI products, you're probably writing your code on Chinese models. Today's guest is Bian Liu, one of the cofounders of Sourcegraph. Bian is joined by a 16 z's Martin Casado and Guido Appenzeller to talk about the shift he's seeing on the front lines of software development today. Sourcegraph's coding agent, which has hit number one on the benchmark for merge pull requests, runs on open source models. Many of them are Chinese. Not because of ideology, but because they work better for what the company needs. Here's the tension. Beyond studied machine learning under Daphne Koller at Stanford. He spent a decade building developer tools. He knows the technology dependency problem. Not because Chinese models are dangerous, but because American policy has made it nearly impossible to compete in open source AI. We dig into why the Terminator narrative around AI safety might be our biggest strategic mistake, whether it's already too late to catch up, and what happens when the atomic unit of software isn't a function anymore, but a stochastic subroutine you can't fully control. B Thanks for coming and joining. So …