Orbs, Explained
Here are some of the letters we received in the last weeks: “Orb? What’s an orb?” “Ralph, loops, graphs, and now orbs?” “What the fuck are orbs?” “You can’t call them orbs” “I hate it when people say ‘it’s orbin’ time’ - I hate it when people have fun!” Okay, that last one’s made-up, threw it in there as a joke. You gotta keep your humour when people get offended by names. And at the same time, it’s easy to laugh because we also get many letters like this one: Original But how do I make you go from angry to happy? I’d say: try orbs! Go to ampcode.com and try them! But it looks like the name’s the problem, so, let’s talk about names. Amp is the name of our company and our product: a coding agent and a development environment. Orbs are part of our product: they are remote agents — coding agents that run in a remote machine (i.e. not your local computer) — and you can remote control them from ampcode.com, from your phone, or from our CLI. Yes, they are VMs, or sandboxes, or whatever you want to call them. Remote machines that we spin up for you, put your code into, and start the Amp agent on. They come in different sizes. But with orbs you don’t really have to think about the “remote” or the “machine” parts. Here’s how you run an agent in an orb: Go to ampcode.com Click New thread and type in your prompt Submit An orb will spawn up, with your code on it, and the agent will start running. This is what it looks like, uncut: Once the agent is idle, the orb will go to sleep. When you send another prompt, it will wake up again and so too will the agent. (Orbs can sleep for as long as you want: we’ve had orbs asleep for weeks and then came back to them. Doesn’t cost anything. You only pay when the orb is running.) You can watch and control the orb from anywhere: on your phone,…