Connor O'Brien

Hi! I'm the guy putting ads in your editor (VS Code and CLI) with Amp. AKA, the worst person in dev tools. I thought, amidst all the Anthropic / ToS drama and Amp launching a new and updated free offering, I'd take the opportunity to talk about our ads network. (Long post; sorry in advance) A little about the free offering: > you get $10 in free credits every day (up to $300 / month! | $3,600 / year!) > use them however you want with Smart mode (Opus 4.5), Rush mode (Haiku), or specialized subagents like the oracle (GPT 5.2) and the librarian (Sonnet 4.5). > we replenish credits at $0.42 per hour > If you run out, wait an hour or continue with pay-as-you-go How can we do this? Simple: Enterprise customers and **ads**. These fund free usage for users, teams, and even enterprises. More about our ads network: > we only partner with reputable dev tool companies, so you aren’t going to get a Burger King ad while debugging a YAML file (see screenshot below). > ads are unobtrusive by design so they don't f&*k with your focus and flow > your code is safe; our ads network follows all of our established security conventions (link in comments) > we don't train on your data to service ads > if you don't want ads (or, free credits) just pay for usage Why did we go this route? > inference. is. expensive. > if it isn't painfully obvious, a $200/month, or $20/month plan doesn't pay for the amount of tokens people actually use with these tools > this is why we viewed the AI coding space as a house of cards: every company (ours included) was and is subsidizing usage to attract users. > and, it works / worked! Cursor, Claude Code, Cody, etc. all did it, but it felt unsustainable > so, we experimented with product changes, pricing & packaging changes, and business model changes to find something sustainable that wouldn't leave us beholden to another company's whims > after many failed experiments, we realized subsidizing inference with ads $$$ (not VC $$$) was the best, most sustainable way to provide an accessible and high quality product to as many users as possible > quick aside: it's funny how we got here... it was a running joke internally that ads would solve all our problems, hell, one of our competitors made an entire april fools joke about burger king ads in the editor > despite this... slowly... and then suddenly, we realized ads **were** the best path forward, but only if done 'right' > so, we built our ads network on the principles that our ads must be: unobtrusive, highly relevant, and immediately useful Where are we today? > we serve ~10 million ad impressions monthly > we have received (and I'm keeping an actual log of this) **7** complaints about ad quality and disruptiveness since our launch (internally... it's much higher, but that's how we ensure a high quality bar) > some complain about the exchange of free inference for ads, but you can always pay instead! I think we've threaded the needle well, but we are constantly iterating. If you are interested in becoming an ads partner to help drive this crazy experiment and put your tools and services directly in our users editors, click the 'become and ad partner link' in the comments. Lastly, a MASSIVE thank you to all of our advertising partners who make this crazy experiment possible. My DMs are wide open. Blow me up on the timeline. Whatever works best for you, just please share any and all feedback you may have!

Real innocence lost moment tonight with the kids: my wife told them what an enterprise webinar is. I saw the light leave their eyes.

Similarly, this is why I memorized every phone number when I first got one of those Nokia brick cell phones back in the day. The friction of navigating the contacts list was too high so found it was easier to just memorize everything. Pretty much do the same thing now with email but the volume is too high.

Here's what I do to find the Google Workspace email of a colleague: I open Gmail, hit c to start email editor, type their name in the sender field, hit cmd-a cmd-c to copy email. This is what I've done for 10 years. There has to be a better way?!

@NBABlackburn I’ll believe it when I see it

Peyton Watson back tomorrow! That’s gonna be interesting.

A genie appears. It offers: never write another line of SQL again, never write a Bash script again, never write a Dockerfile again, never write a benchmark or an elaborate test again — it will all be done for you. You say: nah, wouldn't make me more productive.

Somebody tried to own me by posting my profile pic and the people immediately came to my defense. When you are 41 with two small children destroying your sleep/exercise routine for six years, hearing "you look like a normal Korean guy" is a bigger win than you can imagine.

This is the dumbest shit I’ve seen in a very long time. This is such a preposterous bit that can only be green lit because everyone around him has no clue what this technology does and how it works. Sadly common, though. I remember when I worked on The Hill and I interacted with John McCain’s staff. I asked if my principle could send him a BlackBerry Message (rip) on whatever it was they were collaborating on and they replied, “he doesn’t use a blackberry”. He was the former head of the commerce, science, and transportation committee just a few years before. Anyway, this is arguably as bad as Ted Stevens’, ‘[THE INTERNET] IS A SERIES OF TUBES’ comment who WAS also the head of the commerce, science, and transportation committee at that time. Democrats need to get their shit together on AI and stop having blind opposition to it if they want to try and win young, tech-forward (any highly wealthy) voters.

Smart mode in Amp now lets you use Opus 4.6 wth 300k input tokens of context, up from 168k. Also, tokens above 200k are now charged at the same (not higher) per-token rate. Why not 1M tokens in smart? Quality/cost aren't right. If truly needed, use (hidden) large mode.

Turns out free lunch isn’t free. x.com/gergelyorosz/s… x.com/bdmorgan/statu…

Come for the Bis, stay for the Tris and maybe learn a bit about AI.

@NBABlackburn The announcers are so bored they are talking about the eastern conference. That’s bad.

Alright, the basketball has been relatively subpar in the 2nd half, but Christian Braun ends his night with 22 points on 9 shots. He torched this Sixers team in transition and hit some threes to boot.

@Tatianaclinares Do you have the original foul on Jim that prompted this? Missed the first half. Just curious to see!

Oh ok cause when Jokić does it. It’s a foul and a technical foul???!!! Lmao be so for real

@BobbyMlRE I mean that’s a 52 win season?

I know the schedule is light but we fr have to go 9-5 to win 50 games LMFAO we’re so sad

@TurnerNovak No creatine? Not even remotely serious.

BREAKING: a16z is now including 50g of PROTEIN in each term sheet

It was quite fun to watch the spectacle of Travis Kalanick's comeback. The whole media sphere was tripping over itself. Here is my day two take of the news. What's fact. What's fluff. From someone who is seen him play the game for a long time. om.co/2026/03/14/the…

Every now and then I leave @AmpCode for cheaper or more hacker-friendly tools (like @badlogicgames 's pi coding agent or even codex)... but then I come back, and it is just so so good. The Amp team really just knows how to beat the models into the right shape. True craftsmanship!

The @AmpCode team just wrapped up an onsite working with a big banking customer to kick off a Mainframe ETL -> Cloud migration. I can confidently say that this demo doesn’t begin to model the complexity of an actual legacy enterprise system. There is still such a huge opportunity for code understanding

BAAAMMMMMMMM

@DuvalierJohnson I’m so happy.

People are soooo mad that Bam got Kobe record. 😂 😂

Hell yea Bam!

We’ve always just had ours at chipotle. It works.