Amp and Agentic coding

I’ve been having a bit of fun with Amp recently. Amp is an agentic software development tool, backed onto Claude 4 Sonnet. You can interact with it via VSCode (and derivatives) or via the cli.

I started out with using it to do things where I could easily verify the output - add a link to an SVG in our Chrome Extension. It did that right, first time, and I’ve been throwing more and more complex tasks at it, with less and less prompting. I’ve had a few fails - easy to verify, but wildly wrong. But overall, the results are astonishing, even on a large “legacy” codebase (5 years old - is that legacy? IDK).

While it’s a very new company, Amp have a good blog/news feed, as well as a podcast called Raising an Agent.

One of the first articles I read was Thorsten Ball’s “How to Build an Agent”. A lot of LLM/AI stuff looks like magic, so it was quite refreshing to go thru how to build a basic loop of LLM, tools and a basic chat interface.

While I can read Go just fine, I wondered if I could get Amp to rebuild the same in Typescript. So I made a new folder, and fired up Amp with this prompt:

Hi Amp! I was reading this blogpost (https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent) about writing a basic Claude API client and making it use basic tools. But it's in Go, and I want it in Typescript. Can you do that
for me?

It’s first cut didn’t build, so I told it so:

when I run npm run dev I get errors. Can you fix them please?

It dutifully went off and checked for errors, found the mis-typed item, worked out what the correct type was, and ran the app to make sure it worked.

Those two lines were literally all I did. To test it out, I grabbed an Anthropic API key from their console, and fired it up.

and… it worked.

I’ve put the code up on github, but really, there isn’t a lot there - and none of it I wrote. My next experiment is seeing if Claude Code can do the same, or similar. Battle of the bots, if you will.

This post (the original, not mine) really did an amazing job of demystifying what agents and tool use looks and works like. Tools like Amp have a lot of secret sauce, but most of it is in the prompts, tools, and wiring. The basics of tool use are pretty easy to get your head around, and its not magic - even if the LLMs themselves kind of are.

Another good podcast on this is Steve Yegge, who works for Sourcegraph now, on Pragmatic Engineer. Sadly, his book isn’t out yet… Hopefully Vibe Coding is still a thing when it’s released!