Raising An Agent

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, then 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-shot 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.

This episode was recorded in person in Munich, where the whole Amp team had gathered for a week of building.
Quinn and Thorsten discuss why isolated Orbs make it easier to run agents in parallel, how the team asks agents for exhaustive verification, and how production itself can become a feedback loop.
They also introduce jellyware: high-quality software that is designed to change quickly. When agents make software more malleable, teams can fix bugs faster and raise the quality bar instead of lowering it.

In the first episode of season 2, 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.