Amp Code

Amp Code builds AI tools for software developers. It began within Sourcegraph and announced its separation as Amp Frontier Corporation, an independent research lab, in December 2025. Its subsequent product decisions moved Amp beyond editor-based assistance: a rebuilt CLI enabled remote control and automatic context management, while September 2026 pricing made Amp free with user-supplied compute and model access.[1][2][5][7]

Before the separation announcement, Amp was a Sourcegraph product. A September 25, 2025 Latent Space interview featured Sourcegraph’s Quinn Slack and Thorsten Ball discussing Amp Code. In October, Amp introduced the Librarian, a subagent for searching remote codebases—a concrete extension of its coding workflow into dependencies and multiple repositories.[1][2][6]

The Librarian searches public GitHub code and users’ private repositories through a configured GitHub connection. Its published examples included inspecting React’s effect cleanup implementation, tracing documentation deployment across repositories, and finding the Zod validation logic behind an error. These examples positioned repository search as a way to connect a developer’s code with the libraries and infrastructure it relies on.[6]

On December 2, 2025, Amp announced that it was spinning out of Sourcegraph. Twenty signatories were identified as co-founders, including Beyang Liu, Quinn Slack and Thorsten Ball. Amp stated that it was profitable and attributed the separation to its traction. It described its research approach through a short declaration: “We believe that shipping is the best way to do that.” Its stated goal was to put AI capabilities in software builders’ hands through products.[2]

On February 10, 2026, Amp temporarily closed admission to Amp Free. Existing participants retained an ad-supported $10-per-day usage allowance. Amp said it wanted to spend less time on new-user support and fraud and abuse prevention, and more time building the next version. The pause made that operational tradeoff explicit while preserving the allowance for existing users.[4]

Nine days later, Amp announced plans to retire its VS Code and Cursor extensions, scheduling their shutdown for March 5 at 8 p.m. Pacific Time and directing users to the CLI. Amp argued that newer models needed less guidance from agent prompts and tools, and that codebase organization and organizational use had become the larger bottlenecks. In its view, editor sidebars constrained agents capable of working while the user was absent. It retained the CLI as a flexible interface that could run anywhere and change quickly.[3]

On May 6, 2026, Amp began a staged rollout of Neo, its rebuilt CLI. Threads started in the CLI could be controlled from ampcode.com: users could see live updates, send messages, manage the message queue and cancel the agent’s current work. Amp described the new architecture as preparation for agents prompted from more places and running beyond a single terminal. A May 12 update briefly paused further beta admissions while bugs were fixed.[5]

Automatic compaction replaced manual handoff between threads. At 90% context-window utilization, Amp summarizes the current context, starts a fresh window with that summary and continues working. Messages sent while the agent is busy are queued by default. Users can steer a queued message into the ongoing work before the agent becomes idle—for example, when the next tool result is delivered—or interrupt immediately.[5]

Neo also released the Amp Plugin API, allowing plugins to handle tool and lifecycle events, register tools and commands, display interactive UI and ask AI classification questions. Permissions became a built-in plugin. For users without configured permissions, Neo defaults to running tools without permission prompts; existing settings that opt into permissions activate the plugin in both interactive and execute modes. Amp justified the change by arguing that generated scripts and chained shell commands made static checks of tool arguments increasingly unreliable.[5]

For one thread containing approximately 5,000 messages, Amp reported mean CPU usage falling from 84.1% ± 1.6% in the old CLI to 17.4% ± 8.8% in Neo, and idle memory falling from 1,814 MB to 540 MB. These figures describe Amp’s specific comparison, rather than a general performance benchmark.[5]

On September 13, 2026, Amp made its software free to use with users’ own compute and model subscriptions or keys. A monthly Amp plan was no longer required to use a ChatGPT subscription, and Amp removed BYOK token fees and limits except for its Enterprise tier. Users could run agents on their own computers through runners, or pay Amp for orbs, its remote computers where agents run independently and in parallel. Model inference could still be purchased through Amp without markup; external compute and model access remained separate costs.[7]

The same announcement introduced a free Hobby tier and Teams at no extra charge. Workspaces could mix free and paid members, share threads, portals, plugins and skills, and pool credits for hosted compute. Workspace-wide SAML/OIDC single sign-on was free when at least one member had a paid tier. This pricing structure separated access to Amp’s collaboration features from spending on hosted agent execution.[7]