Amp is the coding agent and development environment that runs anywhere and everywhere.
amp-devs@ampcode.com
Based in United States
- Tweets 354
- Following 64
- Followers 28,658
- Likes 1,140
On graduation day, a Navy aircraft mechanic checks the jet alone. No senior mechanic. Not even the pilot.
@sqs on why skin in the game makes people better, and what that means for code review.
21 people, a single meeting a week, no quarterly goals, no pull requests, no mandatory code review, no titles (except one dictator), a hundred releases a day, bugs fixed in minutes, famous for killing features.
@sqs and @thorstenball on how the Amp team works:
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“You defined those teams based on the capabilities of humans in 2019.”
When agents let every engineer reach 10× further, the old team boundaries start to collide. @thorstenball and @sqs on bigger fish in the same pond.
21 people, a single meeting a week, no quarterly goals, no pull requests, no mandatory code review, no titles (except one dictator), a hundred releases a day, bugs fixed in minutes, famous for killing features.
@sqs and @thorstenball on how the Amp team works:
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You can also watch it on YouTube: piped.video/deiLxNZH_DM
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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21 people, a single meeting a week, no quarterly goals, no pull requests, no mandatory code review, no titles (except one dictator), a hundred releases a day, bugs fixed in minutes, famous for killing features.
@sqs and @thorstenball on how the Amp team works:
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Amp retweeted
You can use your Claude plan in Amp now. Free and open to everyone.
(By very very very very popular request.)
ampcode.com/news/use-your-cl…
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“Planning is dead. Or it's going to change 99.99%.”
The hot take @sqs would add to @thorstenball’s list.
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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Imagine the collective hours lost to reading AI-generated Slack messages, PRDs, and slide decks.
@thorstenball and @sqs discuss how AI can meaningfully accelerate product development -- just not by bolting it onto old rituals and processes.
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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Only care about writing the code?
@thorstenball: “that game is over.”
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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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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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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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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