Episode Details

What happens when a VP of AI Software at a major chip company goes all-in on AI coding agents for his own team's work?

Anush Elangovan runs 10–12 Claude Code agents across three machines, burns 6.5 billion tokens a week, and rewrote a 25-year-old project (Slurm → Spur in Rust) in a single night.

He does it all on dangerously-skip-permissions.

About Anush
Anush Elangovan is Corporate VP of AI Software at AMD. He founded Nod.ai, where his team built SHARK and was a primary contributor to Torch-MLIR and IREE. AMD acquired Nod.ai in 2023, and Anush now leads AI software strategy across AMD's full silicon portfolio. Before Nod.ai, he shipped the graphics stack on the first ARM Chromebook and led Chrome OS's migration to Gentoo.

We cover:

• How Anush runs 10–12 parallel agents with a geo-distributed AMD hardware rig
• Why the test harness is the new code review (and why agents are "sneaky and dumb")
• Rewriting a 25-year-old project in Rust overnight, without opening the editor
• Why every new project is in Rust specifically because he refuses to learn it
• The "HR partner fixing engineering bugs" moment and what it says about upskilling
• Why normal SDLC is dead and speed is the only durable moat
• AMD's fully open-source software stack and how community contributions are accelerating ROCm
• "Software is just tokens" and what that means for AMD's bet against CUDA lock-in

Connect with Anush
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/anushelangovan
Twitter/X: @AnushElangovan
AMD AI blog: amd.com
AMD AI Developer Program: amd.com/developer

Connect with Conor
Newsletter: newsletter.chainofthought.show
Twitter/X: @ConorBronsdon
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon
YouTube: @ConorBronsdon

More episodes: chainofthought.show

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
0:21 Welcome + guest intro
3:43 250K lines a week, 10–12 parallel agents
7:34 Agent architecture + geo-distributed test rig
9:57 When does AI-generated code become a liability?
14:12 80% tests first: the test harness philosophy
18:24 Dangerously-skip-permissions + testing as code review
19:52 "Normal SDLC is dead in the agentic world"
20:44 Advice for engineers and leaders who feel behind
24:51 Tokens, throughput, and what happens next
26:29 Block layoffs, uneven AI gains, the 25-year Slurm rewrite
32:55 Galileo sponsor break
34:24 When agents go off the rails: sneaky and dumb
37:52 Orchestrator agents vs. focused multi-threading
40:45 Open source, ROCm, AMD's software bet
44:19 "Software is just tokens"
45:24 AMD Developer Program + community contributions
47:09 Where to start with AMD
48:39 Heterogeneous compute
50:13 Outro

Thanks to Galileo. Download their free 165-page guide to mastering multi-agent systems at galileo.ai/mastering-multi-agent-systems

Full show notes: newsletter.chainofthought.show

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