Steve Yegge Joins as Head of Engineering

Sourcegraph published this in October 2022 to announce Steve as its new Head of Engineering, and Steve wrote it himself: a six-episode Star Wars parody whose section headings are the part people quoted back to him at conferences for the next year. The real subject is Grok, the code-intelligence platform he started at Google in 2008. The idea was to pull intelligence out of production compilers, aggregate it into a queryable knowledge graph, and serve it to every other tool. Grok and Google Code Search together let Google engineers navigate a multi-billion-line monorepo better than almost any comparable group anywhere, and the early episodes are his account of why nobody managed it outside Google: heterogeneous build systems, many languages, no flat-permission monorepo. That problem, in his telling, is orders of magnitude harder, so the rest of the industry settled for heuristic intelligence that is often just wrong. Then the interview. Sourcegraph was the first company in a year of leadership loops to ask him to write actual code, and the homework turned up two surprises: Sourcegraph was the best multi-repo code explorer he had used, and a few of its backend engineers had quietly shipped SCIP, the source-code intelligence protocol, in the open. The Episode IV line runs four words. "Sourcegraph, you see, has built Grok."

By the end, the unfinished work of his career has been rebuilt by someone else, with the door left open for him to come help finish it. The closing pitch casts code intelligence as a recurring industry party that ran through Borland, then Microsoft, then Google, and was, he argued, about to start up again. It also opens the Sourcegraph and Cody arc that runs through the next three years of essays. Its central image for precise code intelligence, diamonds in an economy of glass marbles, keeps coming back.