Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph

[truekonrads]

I love AMP, it delivers great results. I like that it’s opinionated in how it should be used and for example tells me that I need to hand off context.

I love that I am not welded to one model and someone smart has evaluated what’s best fit for what. It’s a bit a shame they lost Steve Yegge as their brand ambassador. A respected and practicing coder is big endorsement.

To anyone on the fence - give it a go.

[riwsky]

Where did he go/what’s he doing now? He’s clearly still big on AI coding, given https://steve-yegge.medium.com/six-new-tips-for-better-codin...

[neom]

What are the chances we see local models rendering these paid IDEs useless? I presume it will be a very long time before we see a good enough local model that can compete with their ad supported frontier models on the vast majority of machines out there (I presume most people don't have the latest and greatest)?

I was watching the CEO of that Chad IDE give an interview the other day, they are doing the same thing as amp just with "brain rot" ads/games etc instead (different segment, fine), they are using that activity to produce value (ads/game usage or whatever) for another business such they can offset the costs of more expensive models. (I presume this could extend out into selling data also, but I don't know they do that today)

Congrats to the amp team on all the success btw, all I hear is great things about the product, good work.

[lukev]

I do wonder what the moat is around this class of products (call it "coding agents").

My intuition is that it's not deep... the differentiating factor is "regular" (non LLM) code which assembles the LLM context and invokes the LLM in a loop.

Claude/Codex have some advantage, because they can RLHF/finetune better than others. But ultimately this is about context assembly and prompting.

[sergiotapia]

There is no moat. It's all prompts. The only potential moat is building your own specialized models using the code your customers send your way I believe.

[ramraj07]

Can folks who have compared Amp with other agents share their experience? Some of my colleagues swear this is the best agent out there.

[incoming1211]

As someone who switches between most CLIs to compare, Amp is still on top, costs more, but has the best results. The librarian and oracle make it leagues ahead of the competition.

[the_mitsuhiko]

I think it’s great but also pricey. Amp like Claude Code feels like a product used by the people that build it and oddly enough that does not seem to be the case for most coding agents out there.

[Maxious]

https://www.askmodu.com/rankings independently aggregates traffic from a variety of agents and amp consistently has the highest success rate for small and large tasks

That aligns with my annecdata :)

[embedding-shape]

To be honest, I've gave it a try a couple of times, but it's so expensive I'm having a hard time even being able to judge it fairly. The first time I spent just $5, second $10 and the third time $20, but they all went by so fast I'm worried even if I find it great, it's way too expensive, and having a number tick up/down makes me nervous or something. And I'm the type of person who has ChatGPT Pro so I'm not exactly stingy with paying for things I find useful, but there is a limit somewhere and I guess for me Amp is that.

[lvl155]

It was really good in early stages (this past summer). But that was before Claude Code and Codex took off big time. I would say the biggest downside of Amp is that it’s expensive. Like running Opus the whole time expensive. But they don’t have their own model so what are you really paying for? Prompts? Not so sure. Amp is for people who are not smart enough to roll their own agents. So in that case, they shouldn’t be using agentic workflow.

[sergiotapia]

Amp blew me away and was my primary workhorse. Much better than anything out there for a time.

But then I switched to GLM 4.6 using Claude CLI tool and that was good enough and significantly cheaper/faster.

Then Opus 4.5 came out with better pricing and might as well just use that directly. Still working great.

With Amp I was spending $5 here and there every day. Great, but pricey.

[tonictato]

I’d love to know the internals here. Is equity being split? Seems like a legal minefield to split a company like this.

Amp was built by Sourcegraph, so I assume all investors and employees of Sourcegraph now get equity in Amp?

[traceroute66]

No insight here either, but I would guess it is a spin-off ... mostly because it is a US company and in the US spin-off's are generally tax free to both company and shareholders.

Spin-off is where the parent company creates a subsidiary and distributes the shares in the subsidiary to the existing shareholders. So the shareholders end up holding shares of two companies. Share allocation is done on a pro-rata basis so each shareholder still has the same exposure they did before.

[foota]

I have no insight, but I would assume it's a 1-1 sort of split, that is that everyone that previously had one share of sourcegraph now has one share of sourcegraph and one of amp? That seems like the least legally fraught way to do it.

[esafak]

You have to pay by the token, without being able to use your subscription, right? If so, is it better enough than the coding agent that the others ship with to make up for that loss? This is a crowded space.

[Touche]

So the point of this is to clean the cap table, right? Current investors aren't getting a stake in the new company?

[htrp]

much easier to raise money as a frontier lab

[ics]

Is Amp the thing that supplanted Cody (which was either developed or acquired by Sourcegraph, can't remember)?

[hud_dev]

Yep, it was all developed by Sourcegraph in-house.

[alberth]

Who is Amp’s competition?

Because if I understand them correctly, aren’t they a wrapper around all the major LLMs (focused specially on developer use cases?

[brcmthrowaway]

What model does Amp use?

[Leynos]

https://ampcode.com/models