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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%
Each figure is one person. RecommendsCriticizes

Recommended in 12 of 13 months

  1. November 2025: recommended
  2. December 2025: recommended
  3. January 2026: recommended
  4. February 2026: recommended
  5. March 2026: recommended
  6. April 2026: recommended
  7. May 2026: recommended
  8. June 2026: recommended
  9. July 2026: recommended
  10. August 2026: recommended
  11. September 2026: recommended
  12. October 2026: recommended
  13. 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”
  • 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

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.

Amp coding agent compared with 4 alternatives
ProductRecommendCriticizeApprovalMonthsOwnedBadge
Claude Code4,5223,78854%136 mo417 owners—
OpenAI Codex2,4741,28966%133 mo165 owners—
OpenCode1,06057265%132 mo41 owners—
Gemini CLI17232135%123 mo9 owners—
Amp coding agentThis page503261%12——
See all 18 AI coding agents, ranked

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”

RecommendsComment from 3 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Bise – a multi-agent harness, made for humans”

“I loved Amp Codes UI/UX and was incredibly inspired by iy”

RecommendsComment from 15 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: Bough, the agent I built to replace Claude Code at work”

“Amp has been in the lead for almost a year now and doesn't seem to be relinquishing it.”

RecommendsComment from 10 Sep 2026 in “Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra”

“it plays all your local files including rarer things like FLAC + Cue, midi and all the tracker files you could want!”

RecommendsComment from 1 Sep 2026 in “Fastpotify”

“give it I try and you will not go back, except the price may a bit expensive”

RecommendsComment from 29 Aug 2026 in “Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX”

“By default conversations are shares in your team (you can also make them private), and the agent has access to them.”

RecommendsComment from 8 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop”

“Amp tries to give you a plug and play experience, where you can always see the actual costs”

RecommendsComment from 1 Jul 2026 in “Claude Sonnet 5”

“Their CLI seemed very well thought out to make you do things”

RecommendsComment from 1 Jul 2026 in “Claude Sonnet 5”

“Big fan of Amp but pretty sure it only uses Flash for search”

RecommendsComment from 29 Jun 2026 in “Semgrep: GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our Cyber Benchmarks”

“I've used Amp a bit, and it's quite nice, but a bit more expensive”

MixedComment from 15 May 2026 in “Elevated error rates on Opus 4.7”

“Same model, opus, works better in 3P harnesses such as Factory Droid or Amp”

RecommendsComment from 4 May 2026 in “DeepClaude – Claude Code agent loop with DeepSeek V4 Pro, 17x cheaper”

“Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it”

RecommendsComment from 3 May 2026 in “VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage”

“this was one of the things that the AMP straightjacket prevented”

MixedComment from 14 Apr 2026 in “A new spam policy for "back button hijacking"”

“Converters are pure functions — no network calls, no accounts, runs entirely on your machine.”

RecommendsComment from 9 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: AMP – Open protocol for AI conversation portability”

“I actually use their free tier for agentic coding and the ads are actually great”

RecommendsComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's "free" and ad-supported”

“its "handoff" feature is so much nicer than CC's compaction”

RecommendsComment from 21 Feb 2026 in “Claude Code's compaction discards data that's still on disk”

“Amp "feels" much better. Also like in Amp how I can just send the message whenever and it doesn't get queued”

RecommendsComment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Claude Code Is Being Dumbed Down”

“Amp is an amazing product that I love recommending for so many reasons.”

RecommendsComment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Amp Free Is Full”

“Amp Free I go on and on about handoff is so so good.”

RecommendsComment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Amp Free Is Full”

“We saw this play out beautifully with amp, kilo, roo, cline, continue”

RecommendsComment from 6 Feb 2026 in “Claude Code Agent Teams”

“Amp Free Plan (with ads and you get about $10 of daily value)”

RecommendsComment from 6 Feb 2026 in “Claude Code Agent Teams”

“Amp finishes the task in the time it takes Codex to build context”

RecommendsComment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Unrolling the Codex Agent Loop”

“ended up with bills of 100-150$ for them which is somewhat less (but similar order of magnitude) as contracting out to LCoL countries”

CriticizesComment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Electricity use of AI coding agents”

“we pay per token because we use a third party tool (amp) and it is very pricy”

CriticizesComment from 21 Jan 2026 in “Electricity use of AI coding agents”

“it's a lot less verbose and concise on what it says, just sticking to the facts”

MixedComment from 13 Jan 2026 in “Remote Code Execution in OpenCode, update now”

“Amp can do small utility scripts and changes for free (especially if you enable the ads)”

RecommendsComment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Remote Code Execution in OpenCode, update now”

“it's easy to understand, simple to implement and works well.”

RecommendsComment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon”

“Amp Code doesn't go making random commits or dropping databases.”

RecommendsComment from 9 Jan 2026 in “AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse”

“Powerful but expensive, uses a mix of models and capabilities to do something that's greater than the sum of the parts.”

MixedComment from 6 Jan 2026 in “Welcome to Gas Town”

“is really solid agent and delivered much better results than many others”

RecommendsComment from 6 Jan 2026 in “Welcome to Gas Town”

“Using them since July I haven't found any problem with data loss and the clanker have not tried to delete my $HOME.”

RecommendsComment from 27 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: How are you sandboxing coding agents?”

“it's not integrated into either github or git, it is sufficiently awkward that I don't leverage it enough”

MixedComment from 22 Dec 2025 in “A year of vibes”

“amp code is better, but seems to burn through money pretty quick”

MixedComment from 19 Dec 2025 in “GPT-5.2-Codex”

“Amp blew me away and was my primary workhorse. Much better than anything out there for a time.”

MixedComment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph”

“amp consistently has the highest success rate for small and large tasks”

RecommendsComment 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.”

RecommendsComment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph”

“it's way too expensive, and having a number tick up/down makes me nervous”

CriticizesComment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Amp, Inc. – Amp is spinning out of Sourcegraph”

“their architecture allows interacting with amp from different contexts”

RecommendsComment from 16 Nov 2025 in “You should still be writing code from your editor”

“It has better search and context management under the hood, which matters for big companies.”

RecommendsComment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Cursor: Past, Present, and Future”

“I find the concept pretty appealing but the pricing is a bit scary.”

MixedComment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Cursor: Past, Present, and Future”

Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.