Raising An Agent

Quinn and Thorsten announce that they will kill the Amp editor extension. It will self-destruct soon, because the time of the sidebar is over.

Quinn and Thorsten are back! It's been a while since they published a Raising An Agent episode and in this this episode, they discuss how everything seems to have changed again with Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 and what comes after — the assistant is dead, long live the factory.

In this episode of Raising an Agent, Beyang and Camden dive into how the Amp team evaluates models for agentic coding. They break down why tool calling is the key differentiator, what went wrong with Gemini Pro, and why open models like K2 and Qwen are promising but not ready as main drivers. They share first impressions of GPT-5, explore the idea of alloying models, and explain why qualitative "vibe checks" often matter more than benchmarks. If you want to understand how Amp thinks about model selection, subagents, and the future of coding with agents, this episode has you covered.

In this episode, Beyang and Thorsten discuss strategies for effective agentic coding, including the 101 of how it's different from coding with chat LLMs, the key constraint of the context window, how and where subagents can help, and the new oracle subagent which combines multiple LLMs.
00:53 Intros
03:35 How coding with agents is very different from coding with prior AI tools that use chat LLMs
10:46 Example of an agentic coding run to fix a simple issue
14:28 Example of debugging an issue with an MCP server
22:05 Example of unifying two build scripts that share logic
25:24 How context window size has emerged as a key constraint on agentic automation
31:16 Why it's best to focus on one thing at a time per agentic thread
33:24 Subagents and how they help extend the effective context window
34:04 The Amp codebase search subagent
38:48 General-purpose subagents
44:20 When to use subagents
47:04 The oracle subagent and o3
51:47 Multi-model agents and using the best model for each job

In this episode, Quinn and Thorsten discuss Claude 4, sub-agents, background agents, and they share "hot tips" for agentic coding.