Time Capsules
Recordings of Quinn working with Amp, from the Chronicle.
Where do you talk to Amp most: terminal, editor, web, phone, Slack?
Web, then phone, then Slack. Terminal a few times per week, editor never anymore. Also: I dictate 90% of my prompts with Amp’s builtin dictation.
Favorite mode, and when do you switch?
Medium usually, Ultra when doing a big brand new feature.
Do you still develop locally? If so, when?
No.
What’s a workflow with Orbs that you absolutely love?
Two of them: telling it to go get a macOS Safari performance profile and fix slowness and prove each step’s impact, and telling it to use a feature in its local dev server as real users (btw gonna try something where I ask it to spawn 10 of these, each as a different persona, like a Megawatt price-sensitive user or an Enterprise coming-from-CLI user, and identify areas of confusion that these users would have).
How do you review changes?
Always spot-check in changes tab at least. For bigger changes, click the Review in the changes tab
for an oracle review, and sometimes even ask it to run multiple amp --mode ultra -x ... for
review. Sometimes a multi-step true code review in changes tab (never PRs obviously). Almost always
using it in the portal tab and asking it for verification. For new UI flows, asking for a video as
proof.
Which skills, plugins, or MCPs do you use? Anything you built for yourself?
Plugins to automate site admin tasks like granting free credits and sending emails and gathering diagnostics submitted in user bug reports. Also for Gmail and X access. No intentional skill/MCP usage.
How do you use Puck?
Finding threads or kicking off work that might conflict or duplicate existing WIP from me or other team members, and as a partial replacement for general AI chat usage for general-knowledge questions.
What’s a prompt or phrase you keep reusing?
What do you still do by hand, and why?
Writing prose (100% of the time), writing UI copy (60% of the time).
Anything else? A surprising thing Amp did, a thing that didn’t work, a thing you wish it did.
Use dictation! Dictation is the fastest way to get information from your brain to the agent, which is the biggest factor that determines whether the agent gets it right.