Amp is the coding agent and development environment that runs anywhere and everywhere.
amp-devs@ampcode.com
- Tweets 344
- Following 64
- Followers 27,166
- Likes 1,133
Is your agent still just the thing that writes code?
@thorstenball says the latest models let you aim much higher:
“Previously the agents went fully vertical in the stack… But now I think it's time to go horizontal, meaning the whole lifecycle.”
Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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Don't wait for your agent. Let it wait for you.
@thorstenball on why he never watches agents work: let them take as long as they need to comprehensively test changes in orbs, and focus on something else.
They don’t take up resources, or cost anything while they wait. We get back to them once we’re ready.
Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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“I thought you guys were all about non-local dev, so why do you have the runners?”
@thorstenball on runners, which run Amp agents on machines you own: a Raspberry Pi at home, a lab of test hardware, GPU boxes, a macOS build machine.
“I think runners on different machines are non-local too, you know?”
Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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“Code review in so many companies, it's a farce now. Nobody can review the volume of code, and they're not even the best at reviewing it.”
@sqs and @thorstenball on rethinking the old rules for working with agents:
“I wish I could do this, but we don't have a monorepo… then get a monorepo.”
Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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How do you make your codebase more agent-friendly?
@thorstenball had an agent built a dev-only login route, documented it in AGENTS.md, then spawned three blank-slate agents (and a control group) to check they’d actually use it.
“If you tell them, ‘This is the thing I want to test. Help me spawn and test other agents,’ they know how to write instructions.”
Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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You don't need a PhD to run evals.
@sqs had agents build fake shopfronts and permit sites, complete with annoying cookie banners, to improve browser use in orbs.
“It's like with usability testing: you learn most of the insights from the first three people you talk to”
Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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Amp retweeted
We worked with @OpenAI so you can now (officially) Sign in with ChatGPT on @AmpCode and use your sub and credits on Amp.
You can use Amp totally for free this way (and only pay for Amp Megawatt/Gigawatt when you need orbs).
Go get orbin'!
ampcode.com
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"Just use a cheaper model" sounds like saving money.
But fiber didn't just make your internet faster. It made whole new businesses possible. @thorstenball and @sqs discuss how the same is true with frontier models.
Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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Would you prefer to save money with dial-up when your competitors are using fiber?
Recorded on Hot Take Thursday, @sqs and @thorstenball are back with a new Raising An Agent. In this episode they discuss how cheaper models end up costing more, why they do not not wait for agents, running evals in Orbs, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his X post last week.
00:00 Intro: Engineers who forget the history of technology
01:55 Hot Take Thursday & a €50-a-week token budget
05:14 Why cheap models cost more than frontier models
08:11 Token budgets & who gets priced out
14:06 Disrupt yourself with small teams & unlimited tokens
16:38 Agents go horizontal across the software lifecycle
20:56 Rollouts, bug reports & "I'm feeling Pucky"
23:53 Code review, monorepos & other walls around the agent
25:30 How to show a cautious company what agents can do
29:48 Why most people haven't seen what agents can do
31:57 Don't wait for your agent
33:38 Simple evals & agents testing agents in Orbs
38:27 Why Amp has runners too
40:47 Follow your energy & stay aligned
46:33 The hot take Thorsten left out
54:14 Do languages & frameworks still matter?
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/3v7dIHh15dk
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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Amp retweeted
I'm in Sydney this week, along with half of the Amp team.
Come hang out with us on Thu. Will ship your bugfixes and (good) feature ideas to main on the spot.
luma.com/9layr5ts
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Amp retweeted
Amp is now free to use when you bring your own compute and model subscriptions/keys.
No more limits or fees for BYOK.
ampcode.com/news/free-agent
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"I'm just pointing at things and saying, make it like this and ship this and do this. The altitude is so high. It's wild. Even compared to two months ago."
@thorstenball on using agents for the whole lifecycle of a feature: building, testing, shipping, monitoring the rollout, toggling feature flags, talking to users.
What is the computer for now?
In Raising an Agent S2E4, @sqs and @thorstenball explore how agents can do more than just ship code, discuss recent outages, and ask what happens to our computers when more work moves into Orbs.
00:00 Intro: What is the computer for now?
01:32 New models & aiming higher with agents
04:42 An agent's job after the code ships
10:19 Mini evals & keeping the team's context in threads
13:38 Performance testing & production canaries
18:36 Amp's recent outages & what went wrong
24:44 Shipping faster & the tradeoffs of redundancy
28:34 How fast can an engineering team go?
32:27 Making production logs & metrics useful to agents
37:15 Beyond local development
41:30 Agents building 3D models & virtual worlds
43:35 Simpler devices & dictating work on the go
47:29 What happens to the tools we love?
49:27 Steering, queuing & changing workflows
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What is the computer for now?
In Raising an Agent S2E4, @sqs and @thorstenball explore how agents can do more than just ship code, discuss recent outages, and ask what happens to our computers when more work moves into Orbs.
00:00 Intro: What is the computer for now?
01:32 New models & aiming higher with agents
04:42 An agent's job after the code ships
10:19 Mini evals & keeping the team's context in threads
13:38 Performance testing & production canaries
18:36 Amp's recent outages & what went wrong
24:44 Shipping faster & the tradeoffs of redundancy
28:34 How fast can an engineering team go?
32:27 Making production logs & metrics useful to agents
37:15 Beyond local development
41:30 Agents building 3D models & virtual worlds
43:35 Simpler devices & dictating work on the go
47:29 What happens to the tools we love?
49:27 Steering, queuing & changing workflows
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/7pstrDQ4xLs
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
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Amp retweeted
Queueing your messages to the agent made sense for easily distractible models.
Now? Amp sends your message to the agent without waiting.
It's way faster and more natural. Plus, more information makes the agent do better.
ampcode.com/news/steer-dont-…
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"I could just replace that with EC2 and some shell scripts and get the same thing."
But could you?
Thoughts and question of when to build and when to buy.
And @sqs putting @thorstenball fully on the spot by asking him whether people should build their own Amp or not.
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Amp retweeted
Amp now has GPT-6 Astra. It's very good and uses your linked ChatGPT sub.
Amp's `high` mode is gpt-6-astra medium (not xhigh, why in thread). In other Amp modes soon.
BTW: customize your Amp dial at ampcode.com/settings/dial or pick any GPT-6 Astra effort level in Raw Models
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Amp retweeted
Your orbs now have their own high-res interactive Linux desktop.
Good for native app dev. Next up: computer use, but on orbs.
ampcode.com/news/desktop
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Quinn on everyone now building developer tooling:
"Just building software to do X is only valuable if you can get people to pay and I think that's going to be a lot harder."
Raising an Agent, S2E3: When Tokens Flow Like Electricity.
@sqs and @thorstenball on what happens when intelligence gets cheap: build vs. buy flips, why everyone building software to build software to do X is probably incorrect, and when software starts to feel like owning a house instead of renting one.
00:00 Intro: Cheap intelligence & doing X instead of building software to do X
01:06 Back home after Munich & what's changed in how we build
02:06 Predictions: the price of intelligence drops, tokens flow like electricity
05:54 Everyone is building dev tools & why that's the wrong bet
06:57 Pet theory: engineers can't believe it's this easy
10:33 Orbs vs. EC2, a VPN & tmux
17:18 Build vs. buy when the models keep changing
20:14 If Amp is worth buying, why isn't an issue tracker?
27:34 Killing features & vibe coding the 2% of a SaaS product you need
30:03 Build on a solid core: glue code is the worst part
33:19 The two Amps: jellyware, homeowners & renters
37:01 Exporting the Amp way to more teams
43:42 Opinionated software from people you trust
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