Amp coding agent
Ranked 7 of 18 AI coding agents by recommenders
Popular AI coding agent that people find capable and fast on hard tasks, with a free tier that shows ads. Caveat: usage costs can add up quickly.
Popular AI coding agent that people find capable and fast on hard tasks, with a free tier that shows ads. Caveat: usage costs can add up quickly.
82 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 50
- criticize it
- 32
- approval share
- 61%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 50 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong results on coding tasks
“Amp blew me away and was my primary workhorse. Much better than anything out there for a time.”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph” “has the best results. The librarian and oracle make it leagues ahead of the competition.”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph” “is really solid agent and delivered much better results than many others”
Comment from 6 Jan 2026 in “Welcome to Gas Town” - Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph”
- Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Unrolling the Codex Agent Loop”
Handoff and context management
“It has better search and context management under the hood, which matters for big companies.”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Cursor: Past, Present, and Future” “its "handoff" feature is so much nicer than CC's compaction”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “Claude Code's compaction discards data that's still on disk” “Amp Free I go on and on about handoff is so so good.”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Amp Free Is Full” Avoids risky destructive actions
“Using them since July I haven't found any problem with data loss and the clanker have not tried to delete my $HOME.”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: How are you sandboxing coding agents?” “Amp Code doesn't go making random commits or dropping databases.”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Usage costs add up quickly
“give it I try and you will not go back, except the price may a bit expensive”
Comment from 29 Aug 2026 in “Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX” “I find the concept pretty appealing but the pricing is a bit scary.”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Cursor: Past, Present, and Future” “I've used Amp a bit, and it's quite nice, but a bit more expensive”
Comment from 15 May 2026 in “Elevated error rates on Opus 4.7” - Comment from 19 Dec 2025 in “GPT-5.2-Codex”
- Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Electricity use of AI coding agents”
- Comment from 6 Jan 2026 in “Welcome to Gas Town”
- Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Electricity use of AI coding agents”
- Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph”
Other AI coding agents people recommend
The four most recommended other AI coding agents, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 4,522 | 3,788 | 54% | 13 | 6 mo417 owners | — |
| OpenAI Codex | 2,474 | 1,289 | 66% | 13 | 3 mo165 owners | — |
| OpenCode | 1,060 | 572 | 65% | 13 | 2 mo41 owners | — |
| Gemini CLI | 172 | 321 | 35% | 12 | 3 mo9 owners | — |
| Amp coding agentThis page | 50 | 32 | 61% | 12 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 100 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“There have been a few very good harnesses - like Amp, which is excellent”
“I loved Amp Codes UI/UX and was incredibly inspired by iy”
“Amp has been in the lead for almost a year now and doesn't seem to be relinquishing it.”
“it plays all your local files including rarer things like FLAC + Cue, midi and all the tracker files you could want!”
“give it I try and you will not go back, except the price may a bit expensive”
“By default conversations are shares in your team (you can also make them private), and the agent has access to them.”
“Amp tries to give you a plug and play experience, where you can always see the actual costs”
“Their CLI seemed very well thought out to make you do things”
“Big fan of Amp but pretty sure it only uses Flash for search”
“I've used Amp a bit, and it's quite nice, but a bit more expensive”
“Same model, opus, works better in 3P harnesses such as Factory Droid or Amp”
“Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it”
“this was one of the things that the AMP straightjacket prevented”
“Converters are pure functions — no network calls, no accounts, runs entirely on your machine.”
“I actually use their free tier for agentic coding and the ads are actually great”
“its "handoff" feature is so much nicer than CC's compaction”
“Amp "feels" much better. Also like in Amp how I can just send the message whenever and it doesn't get queued”
“Amp is an amazing product that I love recommending for so many reasons.”
“Amp Free I go on and on about handoff is so so good.”
“We saw this play out beautifully with amp, kilo, roo, cline, continue”
“Amp Free Plan (with ads and you get about $10 of daily value)”
“Amp finishes the task in the time it takes Codex to build context”
“ended up with bills of 100-150$ for them which is somewhat less (but similar order of magnitude) as contracting out to LCoL countries”
“we pay per token because we use a third party tool (amp) and it is very pricy”
“it's a lot less verbose and concise on what it says, just sticking to the facts”
“Amp can do small utility scripts and changes for free (especially if you enable the ads)”
“it's easy to understand, simple to implement and works well.”
“Amp Code doesn't go making random commits or dropping databases.”
“Powerful but expensive, uses a mix of models and capabilities to do something that's greater than the sum of the parts.”
“is really solid agent and delivered much better results than many others”
“Using them since July I haven't found any problem with data loss and the clanker have not tried to delete my $HOME.”
“it's not integrated into either github or git, it is sufficiently awkward that I don't leverage it enough”
“amp code is better, but seems to burn through money pretty quick”
“Amp blew me away and was my primary workhorse. Much better than anything out there for a time.”
“amp consistently has the highest success rate for small and large tasks”
“has the best results. The librarian and oracle make it leagues ahead of the competition.”
“it's way too expensive, and having a number tick up/down makes me nervous”
“their architecture allows interacting with amp from different contexts”
“It has better search and context management under the hood, which matters for big companies.”
“I find the concept pretty appealing but the pricing is a bit scary.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.