Quinn Slack

Lately, whenever I open this app and see the latest tricks, and hacks, and notes, and workflows, and spec here and skill there, I can't help but think: All of this will be washed away by the models. Every Markdown file that's precious to you right now will be gone.

An uncomfortable truth about building agents/models: By default, your most lucrative, most-smitten customers will be those using intricate out-of-band techniques that are exorbitantly expensive and probably net negative (but that they love). It's a very weird incentive. You can't and don't want to indulge this. There's nothing wrong with experimentation, but if you saw what every agent company sees, you'd know this goes way beyond experimentation. Amp tries really hard to prevent this: limiting long context, showing prices, not recommending swarms or loops prematurely, strongly advising against big MCPs, killing features that have high usage but that aren't worth it anymore, and just generally staying away from any hype train we don't have a good gut feeling about. Pi and OpenCode are also particularly good and outspoken here. But if you have growth targets to hit, investors to pitch, and salespeople to keep happy, or if you didn't start this way from day 1, I can see it being tricky. At Amp, we're profitable, don't have salespeople, and have no sales/growth targets to hit, so we have it relatively easy. I often wonder what this tension is like inside other companies building agents. (And for the record: if you've shown me your Amp workflow and I haven't told you this directly, this post is not about you. :)