Amp is the coding agent and development environment that runs anywhere and everywhere.
Joined March 2025
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“Imagine you could snap your finger and working with data would be now your dream setup.”
@thorstenball: with agents, you can finally build the tooling you used to brush off.
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:
@thorstenball pushed a migration that removed a column old pods were still writing to. 500s for the whole rollout.
Would mandatory review have saved him? Maybe. Would it have been worth the churn and moving slower? Definitely not.
“How do you not ship slop if everybody can just push to main?”
@sqs and @thorstenball answer the replies to The Company of the Future, and explain how Culture Stops Slop.
00:00 Intro: Tough luck, get the tokens
01:08 The responses to The Company of the Future
02:06 Don't meet people where they are
03:45 Self-hosted Orbs: a big architecture change without an RFC
09:16 Adapters are cheap now: customers fill in the last 20%
12:51 "You're only 21 people" is the point
15:58 Do what gives you energy & Quinn's secret Android app
20:44 macOS Satellites & capital-A Agile
27:21 A feature's whole life in one thread
29:26 Culture stops slop
33:21 No PMs in the middle & adopting a customer
36:54 Avoiding the everything app & not hiring your way out
40:43 A shared sense of urgency & removing features
46:29 "Why believe you?" You've got it backwards
48:29 Unit tests vs proof: videos & screenshots
53:53 The real cost of code review
58:17 Get to the tokens
You can also watch it on YouTube: youtu.be/tEse6n4hEJQ
Or listen to it on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1AL44J…
If you want to listen to all of them: ampcode.com/podcast
“How do you not ship slop if everybody can just push to main?”
@sqs and @thorstenball answer the replies to The Company of the Future, and explain how Culture Stops Slop.
00:00 Intro: Tough luck, get the tokens
01:08 The responses to The Company of the Future
02:06 Don't meet people where they are
03:45 Self-hosted Orbs: a big architecture change without an RFC
09:16 Adapters are cheap now: customers fill in the last 20%
12:51 "You're only 21 people" is the point
15:58 Do what gives you energy & Quinn's secret Android app
20:44 macOS Satellites & capital-A Agile
27:21 A feature's whole life in one thread
29:26 Culture stops slop
33:21 No PMs in the middle & adopting a customer
36:54 Avoiding the everything app & not hiring your way out
40:43 A shared sense of urgency & removing features
46:29 "Why believe you?" You've got it backwards
48:29 Unit tests vs proof: videos & screenshots
53:53 The real cost of code review
58:17 Get to the tokens
Amp’s one weekly meeting ends in silence: everybody writes down their goals for the week.
@thorstenball on aiming high when everyone can see what you wrote last week.
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:
“We could take any person on the team and drop them in front of our most important customer and we would feel safe.” — @thorstenball
Plus @sqs on the unscheduled talk at a big bank that left him “serenely happy.”
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:
A user reports a bug. Amp waits for the fix to roll out, then emails them: the fix is live, and here’s $10 in free credits.
Then it finds everyone else who hit the bug and emails them too. — @sqs
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:
Code review, other teams, schedules: “it's easy to tell yourself, well, no, that’s just how companies work.”
@sqs on why zero friction beats a little friction.
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:
At Amp, the story behind a change lives in the thread, legible to humans and agents, and richer than any commit message or AI-generated PR description.
@thorstenball and @sqs: “the human intent is in the Amp thread.”
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:
One of Amp’s principles: do what gives you energy.
“It sounds like super woo-woo, but if something gives you energy, you’re going to do it way better.” — @sqs
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: