Quinn Slack

Quinn Slack co-founded Sourcegraph in 2013 and served as its CEO until late 2025, when Sourcegraph and Amp became separate companies. He is now CEO and Member of Technical Staff at Amp and remains on Sourcegraph's board. He studied computer science at Stanford and previously worked at Bleacher Report and Palantir.

Code search as the prerequisite

On his personal site Slack writes that he loves programming and wants to "make it so everyone can code (i.e., get computers to do things for them)." Sourcegraph began as code search and intelligence for big repositories. In the December 2025 split announcement he and Dan Adler wrote that the founding mission was "to tame and eventually automate the tedious parts of working in big, messy codebases," and that searchable code was the prerequisite.

Amp and the company split

Amp started as a Sourcegraph experiment in coding agents and grew quickly enough that the team concluded code search and frontier agents needed different distribution engines. Adler became Sourcegraph CEO; Slack and co-founder Beyang Liu launched Amp Inc. while staying on Sourcegraph's board. Slack described Sourcegraph as mission-critical enterprise infrastructure and Amp as a product that must stay on the frontier for teams who want to be a year ahead.

On agents meeting code search

His public argument is that AI is writing and searching more code than humans ever could, so code understanding matters more, not less. Agents need deep search when local context runs out; human developers still need to maintain the growing codebase those agents produce.