Amplifying human agency @ampcode Prev: founder @sourcegraph
San Francisco, CA
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Beyang retweeted
If you use Orbs for 5 minutes in @AmpCode you’ll wonder how you lived without them. And if you can get your whole company coding on cloud sandboxes, you’ll be 10x more capable than your competitors.
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Beyang retweeted
If you have the patience to watch your agents work step-by-step, you're giving them too short a leash.
So: ampcode.com/news/less-noise
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Great if you’re doing iOS or Mac app dev and need to get xcodebuild to do something
Launched just now in amp - if you have the mac app installed, it can automatically spawn runners for you!
No more pesky terminal windows lying around :^)
ampcode.com/news/the-mac-app…
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An interesting corollary to this is how the divergent evolution of iron in the post-Bronze world impacted the history of the East vs. West.
In classical Europe, iron was predominantly wrought iron, the kind a blacksmith painstakingly beats into shape over an anvil.
Meanwhile in China, high-temp blast furnaces emerged that would produce cast iron two millennia before it appeared in Europe.
Wrought iron has more tensile strength (e.g., Damascus steel, chainmail), but requires more specialized labor to produce. Meanwhile, cast iron furnaces require more upfront capex, but once built can produce weapons cheaply enough to arm, say, a large peasant army.
This likely had an impact on the composition of militaries (peasants vs. noblemen) and whether the arena of warfare favored decentralized feudalism or centralized empire.
The transition from bronze to iron does not appear to have led to the same decentralization of power in China as it did in Europe and the Near East. In fact, it would seem quite the opposite. Pre-Qin China, in its political organization, looked more like medieval Europe (weak nominal dynasty with actual power in the hands of regional feudal lords). Post-Qin China saw two millennia of predominantly "all under heaven" imperial rule.
(Disclaimer: obviously, human history is not monocausal and there were a lot of other forces at play, but it's fun to extrapolate.)
And for those looking for an AI angle (because of course), it's an interesting question whether models as a technology analogize more to the decentralized landscape of wrought iron smitheries or the centralized production system of blast furnaces. So far, it's the mega models with huge capex that have captured the majority of spend and investment. But the open model landscape is not far behind and the ability to post-train with specific datasets is likely differentiating in at least some industries and domains. Ironically, the roles of the East (China) and West (USA) are switched here, in terms of which picture the big economic players are pushing for.
Which way, Western and Eastern man?
I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron.
Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence.
Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons.
Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist.
After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence.
New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today?
worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…
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A company’s stance on per-token price constraints may indicate whether they see in their software a capped upside cost center or an unprecedented opportunity to deliver and capture more value in the age of AI.
Unexpectedly found myself in a conversation about agents yesterday evening with someone who now has to use Qwen at work, because company wants to save money.
Really struggled with expressing how much of a category change using latest frontier models is vs. using Qwen.
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This reflects one usage pattern I have with orbs, which is to use medium/high (with fast mode enabled) to iterate on product behavior, and then invoke the oracle to cross the t's and dot the i's.
A proposal for how software developers can move beyond browsing twitter all day and accepting agent suggestions every 10 minutes:
The 9-5 will consist of spending all day in extremely fast feedback loops, prototypes will be built using smaller models that prioritise instant responses.
Overnight, frontier intelligence will turn those prototypes into production systems.
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Agentic webhooks are really powerful.
Or did you realize you don't need a separate integration for every third-party app anymore; you can just ask the agent to create a webhook to receive events from whatever service you want.
Hey! Try prompting amp with something like:
`Create a plugin that registers a webhook with the key `linear-issues` and captures the `linear-signature` header. When a Linear issue with the `amp` label moves to `In Progress`, create a new Orb thread to work on the issue. Verify the signature before acting and dedupe on the event ID. Load the plugin and give me the webhook URL and setup steps for Linear`
Docs are here: ampcode.com/docs/orbs/event-…
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Beyang retweeted
Some other popular agents cost ~25-60% more than Amp, based on est prices w/their different compaction thresholds.
Interesting and obv incomplete comparison (thus names withheld). Amp's compaction exploits persistent thread storage, pointing to details in the thread rather than just getting the summary.
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It's funny how contrarian "no plan mode" was back in late 2025. Folks got mad at us for saying it wasn't necessary.
And no, it wasn't a model issue (you just had to say "make a plan", same as now).
Follow Amp folks if you wanna be 9 months ahead of the curve, I guess.
we’re thinking of killing plan mode and using the shift+tab hotkey to adjust effort levels
I don’t think the models need plan mode anymore, but if you’re a plan mode diehard would love to get your feedback on why
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Beyang retweeted
I know people who spent $12k in tokens and built nothing.
@Westpac spent $12k in tokens on @AmpCode and built a new intranet for their 35,000 employees (vs. ~$3–5M pre-AI cost).
"Amp is unlocking a huge amount of value in engineering" from itnews.com.au/news/westpac-s…
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You can now use Grok 4.7 in Amp.
To do so, go to ampcode.com/settings/dial, select the agent mode you'd like to set to use Grok 4.7 and select it for the main agent and/or the oracle.
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Beyang retweeted
Everyone should copy "The Amp Way" for bugfixes:
1. Make it easy to report a bug in-product
2. Fix bugs fast
3. Find every other affected user
4. Email proactive, personalized apologies & credits
5. Get delightful replies & increase chances they report bugs -> virtuous cycle
Try this with one bug fix this week and see how it goes.
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I asked @impliedinsights to summarize the AI transformation strategy of Australia's first bank (and 1st company, $100B market cap today) and this is what it said.
I'd say we're in good company here 🙂
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