Using Amp

How I use Amp

Tim Culverhouse

Engineer · @rockorager

Last updated

Where do you talk to Amp most: terminal, editor, web, phone, Slack?

Web, phone is my second most used. I don’t use the TUI at all anymore, even over ssh… I prefer using amp --no-tui and driving it from the web/phone.

Favorite mode, and when do you switch?

Medium, but right now high for GPT-6. I don’t switch except to use a new model.

Do you still develop locally? If so, when?

Yes. When I need to do GPU testing (GUI framework/wayland stuff). Even then I drive this from the web… I don’t really know that it’s running on my machine, I just need the GPU resource. Aside from this, I use my local runner to edit configuration files as needed.

What’s a workflow with Orbs that you absolutely love?

I have 2 laptops running at home with amp --no-tui with different GPUs. I have an orb working on some wayland stuff and it needs to run GPU testing. It spawns a thread on a runner, runners do work with whatever their resources are, and reports back to orb. Maybe they found we need to modify a dependency, the orb spins up an orb for the dependency to make the change - dep messages orb back that it’s done, orb updates, fans out to runners with specific resources, etc.

How do you review changes?

Video, screenshots, tables of data, “irrefutable proof”, vibe-check the diff size.

Which skills, plugins, or MCPs do you use? Anything you built for yourself?

  • Skills: just one (outside what’s in the amp repo), a commit messages skill. Don’t really need it anymore.
  • Plugins: I have a github webhook that gets events for anything on OSS repos of mine.
  • MCP: none.

How do you use Puck?

I don’t use Puck. The few times I have was to do bulk archiving of threads, but now I am at steady state managing them so I don’t use Puck.

What’s a prompt or phrase you keep reusing?

keep going
commit, push, mark the bug as done, email the user

(for whatever reason I don’t use the ship button)

What do you still do by hand, and why?

Prose, agent prose mostly sucks.

Anything else? A surprising thing Amp did, a thing that didn’t work, a thing you wish it did.

Discover other threads working concurrently, even when I haven’t asked it to. For example, I’ve had multiple threads spawned on a runner to do GPU testing - one of these threads discovered the GPU was in use, found the thread that had the GPU lock and then the threads began to coordinate shared usage.