Quinn and Thorsten sit down together in San Francisco to answer the question they get asked most: how does the Amp team work? They walk through a week at Amp, from Thorsten's Sunday post and the single Monday meeting to writing down goals in silence. They explain why Amp has no quarterly goals, no departments and no territory, and how feature flags and the work in progress, orb good and orb bad channels keep a team of 21 in sync. They also cover reviewing changes with agents, pushing to main without mandatory code review, and why they think more companies will soon work like this.
Quinn and Thorsten record a late-night Hot Take Thursday. They start with a company that capped each engineer at €50 of tokens a week, then talk about why cheap models end up costing more and why some people will be priced out of frontier models. They explain how agents now ship, monitor and fix production, not just write code, and why code review and other old processes get in the way. They also cover not waiting on your agents, simple evals in Orbs, why Amp has runners, and the hot takes Thorsten left out of his post.
Quinn and Thorsten discuss what they can hand off to agents now, from coordinating work across projects to following up with users after a fix ships. They explain how they test agent behavior and use production data to improve performance, and talk about Amp's recent outages and the work to improve reliability. With more of their work happening in Orbs, they ask what the personal computer is still for, and why changing how you work matters as much as changing models.
Quinn and Thorsten predict that intelligence will get cheap and tokens will be everywhere, then ask what that does to software. They debate build versus buy in the age of agents, why Orbs are worth paying for while Thorsten one-shotted a bug tracker, and why developers should do X instead of building software to do X. They also explain the two Amps, why building Amp feels like owning a house instead of renting, and how they plan to bring the Amp way to more teams.
Quinn and Thorsten discuss how isolated Orbs remove the friction from running agents in parallel. They explain how they use agents for exhaustive verification and production feedback loops. Then they introduce jellyware, where teams use agents to change software and fix bugs quickly without lowering the quality bar.
Quinn and Thorsten discuss why the Amp team went heads-down the last few months to rebuild Amp around remote-controllable, parallel agents, running locally or in orbs. They also talk about how this shift changed our development workflows and what that means for the future of local development.
Quinn and Thorsten announce that the Amp editor extension will soon self-destruct. The time of the sidebar is over.
In this episode, Quinn and Thorsten discuss how everything seems to have changed again with Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 and what comes after — the assistant is dead, long live the factory.
In this episode, Beyang sits down with Camden to discuss how the Amp team evaluates new models: why tool calling is the key differentiator, how open models like K2 and Qwen stack up, what GPT-5 changes, and how qualitative "vibe checks" often matter more than benchmarks. They also dive into subagents, model alloys, and what the future of agentic coding looks like inside Amp.
In this episode, Beyang and Thorsten discuss strategies for effective agentic coding, including the 101 of how it's different from coding with chat LLMs, the key constraint of the context window, how and where subagents can help, and the new oracle subagent which combines multiple LLMs.
In this episode, Quinn and Thorsten discuss Claude 4, sub-agents, background agents, and they share "hot tips" for agentic coding.
In this episode, Beyang interviews Thorsten and Quinn to unpack what has happened in the world of Amp in the last five weeks: how predictions played out, how working with agents shaped how they write code, how agents are and will influence model development, and, of course, all the things that have been shipped in Amp.
Thorsten and Quinn talk about the future of programming and whether code will still be as valuable in the future, how maybe the GitHub contribution graph is already worthless, how LLMs can free us from the tyranny of input boxes, and how conversations with an agent might be a better record of how a code change came to be than git commit tools. They also share where it works and simply doesn't work.
Quinn and Thorsten start by sharing how reviews are still very much needed when using AI to code and how it changes the overall flow you're in when coding with an agent. They also talk about a very important question they face: how important is code search, in its current form, in the age of AI agents?
Thorsten and Quinn talk about how different agentic programming is from normal programming and how the mindset has to adapt to it. One thing they discuss is that having a higher-level architectural understanding is still very important, so that the agent can fill in the blanks. They also talk about how, surprisingly, the models are really, really good when they have inputs that a human would normally get. Most importantly, they share the realization that subscription-based pricing might make bad agentic products.
In the first episode of Raising an Agent, Quinn and Thorsten kick things off by sharing a lot of wow-moments they experienced after getting the agent at the heart of Amp into a working state. They talk about how little is actually needed to create an agent and how magical the results are when you give a model the right tools, unlimited tokens, and feedback. That might be the biggest surprise: how many previous assumptions feel outdated when you see an agent explore a codebase on its own.
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