Joy & Curiosity #92

This week was busy: we shipped a lot of things, recorded quite a few things, I worked on my Laracon talk, chatted with amazing programmers in different timezones, and our local public swimming pool celebrated its 50th birthday.

There wasn’t a lot of reading this week, but a lot of thinking and wondering and questioning and aha! -ing. And I kinda can’t shut up about it. So…

Some of you might remember my original description of this newsletter: “It’s very informal; it’s what I’d send you if you were to ask me what’s on my mind this week in an email.”

Now, here is what I’d say if you were to ask me what’s on my mind this week, on a phone call:

Finally: Amp now has subscriptions. Yes, you read that right. Go there, get a subscription, pair it with your ChatGPT subscription so you get infinite GPT-5.6 tokens, and spawn those orbs.

We also shipped agent-to-agent communication in Amp: agents can now spawn other agents — anywhere you have a Amp instance running or in an orb — and then send messages and files to them. The number of “holy shit, it just…” messages this produced in our internal Slack is insane. To give you a taste: this morning I was hacking on something in our orb, but the agent in the orb lacked the permissions to upload an asset to our bucket. So the agent said: hey, start amp —no-tui on your machine, where you have permissions, then I’ll start a thread there, send it that asset, and ask it to upload the file. And… it fucking did it! Exactly like that! I started amp —no-tui, I saw the new thread being created, I watched both of them, and saw how they sent messages to each other. Wild!

Raising An Agent is back! Here’s the first episode of the new season: The Local Dev Env is Dead. Or listen on Spotify.

I know what you’re thinking: “Thorsten, your voice… I need more of it.” Don’t worry, I got you. Dominic and Morten invited me to be a guest on the go podcast and our episode came out this week: Agentic engineering is here to stay with Thorsten Ball.

Ye…