“As of today, Amp, our agentic coding tool, is available to everyone. The waitlist is gone — go, go and sign up and use it!” exclaimed Thorsten Bell (of Sourcegraph then Zed then Sourcegraph fame).
We have seen Sourcegraph go through pivots of sorts over time. From the original “Google’s grok tool but for the rest of us” to Cody when the AI for code revolution started and now with Amp.
At first Amp was a lil mysterious. It showed up as an unbranded webpage that was more of a simple manifesto than anything else. It took me a second to even know that this was Sourcegraph, and then I pondered how it fit with Cody.
Now that the waitlist has been lifted, we can all try it out. It feels somewhat similar to a Claude Code (and OpenAI Codex and …) with its CLI, but the main UI is still via a VSCode extension (which can be used with forks such as Cursor and Windsurf), allowing you to be close to your code while still focusing most of your time on the interactive experience.
A great way to get a feel for how a tool is meant to be held, is to hear from those who are chistling it. Thorsten Bell kindly goes into nice detail of how he uses Amp at a high level:
I don’t have exact numbers, but my guess is that Amp now writes 70-80% of the code I commit. That’s right — I barely write code by hand anymore. — Thorsten Bell
He then gets into the detail of how he prompts and communicates with Amp, e.g.
I don’t write prompts like this:But instead something like this:
The comprehensive set of these are invaluable to read through, not just for Amp usage, but for any of the other agents that you are working with!
After all, just as with so many things in life… the more you put in, the more you get out.
There is more gold where that came from too, such as the delightfully transparent FIF: Frequently Ignored Feedback, where you can see the opinions that the team has.
With the waitlist gone, download Amp and give it a shot!
