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wiki/entities/amp.md

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+# AMP (Sourcegraph)
+
+#entity
+
+## Summary
+
+Agent product from Sourcegraph, where [[thorsten-ball]] is a founding engineer. The vault's **second reference [[harness]]** after [[claude-code]], and the one that pushes hardest on remote execution: its unit of work is the **orb**, a sleeping remote sandbox tied to one conversation. Officially self-described as "AMP Frontier Corporation."
+
+## Current Understanding
+
+**Operating principle:** don't optimize for what looks safe today, optimize for the ability to move fast tomorrow. They could have made money in 2025 building "a single agent in a VS Code sidebar with an enterprise permission system and per-line attribution" — and that model would have been obsolete within a year. Instead they publicly kill their own features on `ampcode.com/news` (the VS Code extension went first). Some users churn; the ones who stay respect the pushing. See [[shedding-weight]].
+
+**Shape of the product:**
+
+- Installed as a **PWA** from `ampcode.com` (Thorsten suspects the acronym itself blocks mass adoption of the install flow).
+- A **low / medium / high / ultra dial**, each level mapping to a model *and* a sub-agent choice. Default is medium.
+- Sub-agents: **Oracle** (reviewer, gives advice) and **Painter** (generates images). Meta-agent **Puck** controls other agents, spawns orbs, messages them, and runs flows.
+- Multi-model: GPT, Anthropic and GLM models all supported.
+- **Orbs**: one URL packages the thread + the agent + the computation + the diff; the sandbox sleeps when idle and wakes on typing; the same conversation streams to phone, laptop and TUI; share the URL and a teammate takes over. Agent-to-agent communication shipped recently. See [[async-by-default]].
+
+**What customers actually buy:** the most common question AMP gets is "guys, what's the meta? What model, what prompt?" — customers are paying for the research decisions as much as the software. That is a commercial restatement of [[harness|harness-over-model]].
+
+**Internal practice:** ~99% of AMP's own code is AI-written; a bug is screenshotted, sent to AMP, and returned as a fix from an orb for spot-check and merge; side-bugs get their own parallel orb, branch and checkout.
+
+## Evidence
+
+- Frontier bet, feature-killing, PWA install, model dial, Oracle/Painter/Puck, orbs, multiplayer, velocity anecdotes, live production ship — [[2026-07-28-agentic-engineering-10x-developer]].
+
+## Related Pages
+
+- Entities: [[thorsten-ball]]
+- Concepts: [[harness]], [[async-by-default]], [[shedding-weight]], [[build-for-the-agent-not-the-human]], [[code-as-throwaway]]
+- Related tools: [[claude-code]] (the vault's other reference harness; local-first where AMP is sandbox-first), [[hermes]] (skills-first, the axis AMP ignores)
+
+## Contradictions / Uncertainty
+
+- AMP ships sub-agents and a meta-agent but no user-authored skills layer — a harness design that assumes the *vendor* curates structure, where [[hermes]] and [[claude-code]] assume the *user* does. Whether that is a philosophy or a roadmap gap is unstated.
+- "15+ sandbox providers racing to zero margin" is Thorsten's own prediction about the infrastructure his product depends on; he calls it unsustainable without saying what AMP does about it.
+- All internal metrics are self-reported by a founding engineer. Status: tentative.
+
+## Next Questions
+
+- Does the orb model survive [[enterprise-ai-reality|enterprise compliance]] — code and conversation living in a vendor's remote sandbox is exactly what Sebastian's clients lock down?
+- Is "bring your own agent" ([[build-for-the-agent-not-the-human]]) compatible with selling an agent?

wiki/entities/claude-code.md

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@
 
 ## Summary
 
-Anthropic's agentic coding CLI/harness, cited across all four ingested sources as the reference [[harness]]. Used interactively and in fire-and-forget / scheduled modes.
+Anthropic's agentic coding CLI/harness, cited across most of the corpus as the reference [[harness]] and used by every practitioner in it except [[thorsten-ball]] (who runs [[amp]]). Used interactively and in fire-and-forget / scheduled modes.
 
 ## Current Understanding
 
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ Claude Code recurs as the concrete example of the "universal agent" pattern: a s
 
 - Concepts: [[harness]], [[skills-as-memory]], [[agentic-loops]], [[context-as-scarce-resource]], [[integration-dead-ends]], [[leave-less-room-for-imagination]]
 - Entities: [[eugene]], [[larysa]]
-- Related tools: [[hermes]] (skills-first harness), Codex CLI, OpenClaude (a Claude Code fork), Cursor, Conductor
+- Related tools: [[hermes]] (skills-first harness), [[amp]] (sandbox-first, vendor-curated — the contrasting harness design: orbs instead of a local working directory, Oracle/Painter/Puck instead of user-authored skills), Codex CLI, OpenClaude (a Claude Code fork), Cursor, Conductor
 
 ## Contradictions / Uncertainty
 

wiki/entities/theo-browne.md

@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ His second source in the vault sharpens the disposable-code stance into a discip
 
 - Concepts: [[think-wider-not-bigger]], [[code-as-throwaway]], [[make-more-cheap-code]], [[decoupling-identity-from-profession]]
 - Timeline: [[ai-agent-evolution]]
-- Compare: [[konstantin]] (model-builder's orchestration view), [[allie-miller]] (personal-OS view)
+- Compare: [[konstantin]] (model-builder's orchestration view), [[allie-miller]] (personal-OS view), [[thorsten-ball]] (nearest ally — independently reaches "slop is a human problem" and code-is-cheap from inside a shipping company; where Theo defends cheap code with *verification discipline*, Thorsten defends it with *taste*)
 - Comparison: [[theo-konstantin-allie]] — three-lens side-by-side (Theo/Konstantin/Allie)
 
 ## Contradictions / Uncertainty

wiki/entities/thorsten-ball.md

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+# Thorsten Ball
+
+#entity
+
+## Summary
+
+Founding engineer at [[amp]] (Sourcegraph's agent product); author of *Writing an Interpreter in Go* and *Writing a Compiler in Go*. The corpus's most extreme practitioner datapoint: **99% of the code at his company is written by AI**, and he uses **no skills, no MCP servers, and no custom slash commands**.
+
+## Current Understanding
+
+Thorsten's position is that the frontier has moved past tooling questions. What matters is (1) where the agent's information comes from, (2) how agent-friendly your codebase and workflow are, and (3) knowing what you want to build. Everything else — model choice, effort levels, prompt tricks — he treats as diminishing returns or hobby.
+
+His operating discipline is **[[shedding-weight]]**: aggressively deleting processes and products that only made sense when humans were the bottleneck. AMP publicly kills its own features (the VS Code extension: "who has the editor open anymore?"), and he applies the same knife to backlogs, CI that repeats the agent's tests, and admin panels.
+
+He is also the corpus's clearest voice on **taste surviving automation**: 99% AI-written code plus 15 AI-generated icon variants he picks between is not slop, because "slop comes from humans not having good product." This is [[theo-browne]]'s position stated from inside a company rather than from a podium — the two are the corpus's closest allies.
+
+**Where he cuts against the vault:** his answer to "how does the agent know things?" is a good prompt plus a good codebase plus `AGENTS.md` — not [[skills-as-memory|skills]]. He talks to the model "like a Slack message to a senior engineer": set the standard, state intent, riff on design, specify process, set sub-agent economics. Worth holding as a live alternative rather than dismissing: he is a professional engineer working daily in one codebase he controls, which is the situation where codebase-as-context works best and portable skills matter least.
+
+## Evidence
+
+- Interview "Agentic Engineering, explained by a 10x developer" (42:33, with David Andre): shed weight, orbs, Emacsification, internal software, first-principles thinking, prompt structure, predictions — [[2026-07-28-agentic-engineering-10x-developer]].
+- Built a club food-ordering app from a menu photo in 3 × 5-minute iterations; encoded a 20-person club's ordering process in ~2 hours of phone typing.
+- Forked the diff viewer **hunk** and had AMP add a Gruvbox theme + sidebar file-checkoff in two minutes of agent time; never upstreamed.
+- Shipped a change to production live during the podcast recording.
+
+## Related Pages
+
+- Tools/orgs: [[amp]]
+- Concepts: [[shedding-weight]], [[build-for-the-agent-not-the-human]], [[emacsification-of-software]], [[explosion-of-internal-software]], [[async-by-default]], [[code-as-throwaway]], [[context-as-scarce-resource]], [[product-ownership]]
+- Compare: [[theo-browne]] (nearest ally — same slop-is-human, same code-is-cheap stance), [[konstantin]] and [[allie-miller]] (both build the skills layer he skips), [[sebastian]] (the enterprise reality that resists "kill your process")
+
+## Contradictions / Uncertainty
+
+- **The skills rejection.** "No custom slash commands, no skills, no MCP servers" is a direct counter to the vault's machine-side spine ([[skills-as-memory]], [[evolution-of-agent-tooling]]). Unresolved; likely scoped to his situation, but he does not scope it himself. Status: tentative.
+- **Model choice doesn't matter.** He says stop tuning between models; [[eugene]] deliberately runs 4.7 over 4.8 for over-proactivity ([[leave-less-room-for-imagination]]). Status: tentative.
+- The 99%-AI-written figure and the team poll are self-reported from inside a company that sells an agent. Status: tentative.
+- "Local dev is going away" is a prediction from someone selling remote sandboxes.
+- **The remix/internal-software predictions now have a sourced counter.** [[2026-07-29-what-if-we-vibe-code-it]] argues the cost of software is [[maintenance-is-the-real-cost|maintenance, not writing]], and offers an observed reversal (in-house Jira clone → back to Linear in four months). His club app passes that source's build-vs-buy checklist; his "teams will remix Riverside" prediction is exactly what the checklist rejects. Status: tentative on both sides — one anecdote against one prediction.
+
+## Next Questions
+
+- Would he still skip skills if he worked across many unrelated codebases, or as a non-engineer with no codebase to encode context into?
+- What is actually in AMP's `AGENTS.md`, and how is it maintained? That file carries the entire load his setup places on it.