Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

much easier to raise money as a frontier lab

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?

What model does Amp use?