StartupEst. 2025
Amp
Frontier coding agent that runs each thread in its own remote machine.
Amp is a coding agent and development environment that spun out of Sourcegraph in December 2025 to become an independent company, with an announcement signed by its co-founders including Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu. Each Amp agent thread runs in a remote machine called an orb with your code, plugins and tools, so work continues unattended; orbs can wake on Linear issues, failing CI or schedules, be shared with teammates, and, since October 2026, be self-hosted. Amp also offers a CLI (including a headless mode for servers and CI), subagents, code review, Slack and Linear integrations, and an MCP-exposed feature.
What the community says
User reports from Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub and reviews, as of Oct 29, 2026. Not our verdict.
Pros people report
- Loyal users say it is fast and often right on the first try; it routes different models per mode and has an "oracle" second-opinion subagent.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2Hacker News 3
- Ad-supported free tier (even with frontier models) for small tasks.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2Hacker News 3
- Seen as less reckless (no random commits or dropped DBs); thread = VM model liked.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2
Cons people report
- Expensive: credits burn fast and you pay for the agent's mistakes.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2
- Removed features users liked (handoff, which beat compaction).Hacker News
- Less polish and features than Claude Code; low mindshare.Hacker News 1Hacker News 2
- Best for
- Developers who want an opinionated, multi-model agent and accept pay-per-use.
- Watch out for
- Cost on usage pricing and fast-changing feature set.
Adopting an open-source harness? Read the best-practices guide.
People
2.85K subscribers
Official YouTube channel
Talks & interviews · Tutorials & getting started
Co-founder & CTO
Open harnesses · Context engineering & memory
In the news
Community · OpenAI Blog · Oct 14, 2026
See how Amp pushes the frontier of what agents can do with GPT-6 Astra, Ultrafast, GPT-Live-1, and Sign in with ChatGPT.
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Connections
Relations from the Harness Hub knowledge graph, as charted in the State of Harness reports.
Built on · 1
- Model Context ProtocolProject
Sources
Verified Oct 29, 2026