Quinn Slack
Co-founder and chief executive of Amp, the AI coding-agent company spun out of Sourcegraph in December 2025, and Sourcegraph's CEO until then; writes about code search, AI coding agents and how large codebases get understood.
Quinn Slack did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsAnthropic has created a dangerous, destabilizing mess by lobbying for and getting US government restrictions on models like Mythos, Fable, and GPT-5.6.
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Their wordsWe need to fight for our freedom of intelligence, the freedom from government restrictions on who can use which AI models. If we allow government to decide what level of intelligence someone can access, no matter how well intended, we’ll be less safe and forever divided.
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Our reading
Governments must not require licensing of AI model labs or approval of models before release.
Their wordsThis means that the government must not require licensing of model labs, or approval of models prior to release. Otherwise government inevitably will use that power to restrict releases to certain favored individuals and companies (as we’ve just seen) and to introduce biases.
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Our reading
The government should not be allowed to prohibit people from downloading and running open AI models.
Their wordsFreedom of intelligence also means that the government may not prohibit you from downloading and running open models.
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Their wordsThe government must not force a model lab to release a model against its wishes. If a model lab chooses to release their own model to only a few privileged people and companies (as Anthropic did with Mythos), or to keep it internal, that is their right.
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Their wordsThere’s no way to sustain a stable, democratic arrangement where government controls access to intelligence. The more powerful you think AI is, the less stable is any attempt to regulate access to intelligence.
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Their wordsI favor freedom of intelligence for the same reasons. Like speech, AI is powerful and sometimes dangerous. But it’s far more dangerous and unstable to give someone the power to decide what intelligence everyone else can use.
- 2 years earlier
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Their wordsThe best AI dev is the one with the best ƒ(code), assuming equal access to equally capable, cheap, and fast LLMs. Everything else about an AI dev is undifferentiated.
↗Context-first approach to code AIslack.org 1st of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsHuman code review and slow CI will start becoming obsolete/irrelevant in a world with AI devs with better-than-~80%ile-human ƒ(code)s.
↗Context-first approach to code AIslack.org 2nd of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsI believe today’s SOTA LLMs, used by an AI dev with an ƒ(code) that is feasible to build today (but well beyond what anyone has actually built yet), are sufficiently capable to automate coding way beyond what most people think possible.
↗Context-first approach to code AIslack.org 3rd of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsAnd since the best AI dev is the one with the best ƒ(code), and the best ƒ(code) comes from having the most comprehensive context and using it smartly, that means that context is the most important part of an AI dev.
↗Context-first approach to code AIslack.org 4th of 5 in this piece
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Their wordsAny AI built by a vendor that only integrates with that vendor’s own tools will be very limited compared to one that can slurp up info from all the tools you use.
↗Context-first approach to code AIslack.org 5th of 5 in this piece
- 10 years earlier
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Their wordsBut if you calibrate your idea so that 90% of people like it, it’s probably insufficiently ambitious—and you are overvaluing feedback and neglecting faith. You should be aiming for an idea that a lot of people reject for the same reason, and you should have faith in your ability to overcome that specific issue better than anybody else.