I’ve been following Torsten Ball’s newsletter for a while and it’s giving me great insights into where AI tooling is right now, what articles to read and so on. And he was always teasing some product he’s working on, but I didn’t understand really what it was. And yesterday it went live for the general public. It’s called AMP and it’s a Coding agent (stand-alone, not another VSC fork).

It can be run from the terminal, inside Visual Studio Code or Windsurf or Cursor.

The UI was very easy to use. After all, by now we all have some experience with chatting inside these editors.

It’s very interesting to follow along what the agent is doing, see what commands is running, what thoughts, in quotes, it’s having while doing the work. And yeah, it’s really capable. I’m usually not doing much with the frontend, but with the agent’s help, I actually got somewhere. I progressed my project around building a second UI with HTMLX and Kotlin’s html DSL. It’s not fully done yet, but I like the idea of having something left there to continue, so I am not rushing it. The coding agents also get better and better, so it is okay to come back later to a side project.

PS: Amp so far has been the best experience and I plan to extend this post, instead of creating a new one each time. In the meantime, you can follow Amp directly from the source, they share a lot!