Amp

What is Amp?

Amp is a coding agent and development environment from ampcode.com. Its core idea is the orb, a cloud sandbox where each agent thread runs with your code, plugins and tools and can keep working after you close your laptop. It can also run locally by typing amp in a terminal.

Key capabilities of Amp

• Orbs: a fresh cloud sandbox for each thread, so there are no worktrees to manage or port conflicts.
• Portals: run your app inside an orb and try the agent's changes live.
• Automations and webhooks: agents can wake on events such as a new issue or failing CI, or on a schedule.
• Multiplayer: teammates can share control of the same agent, code and running app.
• Review from anywhere: review changes, browse files and edit from any device.
• Extensibility: plugins, skills, MCP and an AGENTS.md file that tells agents how to work in your codebase.

How Amp works

You can run amp in your own terminal against local files, run amp --no-tui on servers or CI runners, or start work in an orb on the web. The amp sync command mirrors an orb's changes into your local checkout. Amp is multi-model: its manual says it uses several models, including GPT-5.6 and Claude Fable 5.1, chosen per task, and you can optionally sign in with a ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscription to use OpenAI models.

Who uses Amp?

The vendor targets developers and teams who want agents running in the background while they review and ship from any device. Team features include shared threads, Spaces, service accounts and GitLab integration. Individual developers who prefer a terminal agent are also covered by the CLI.

Amp pricing

The vendor says its tiers include agent usage and orb time, and publishes tier details on its pricing docs page at ampcode.com/docs/pricing. Exact prices are available from the vendor.

Amp alternatives

Claude Code is Anthropic's terminal-based coding agent, which runs against your local repository rather than in vendor-hosted sandboxes by default. Gemini Code Assist is Google's coding assistant for IDEs and the command line. Ellipsis focuses on automated code review and pull request tasks, a narrower scope than a general coding agent.