Thorsten Ball

Most predictions I see are still way too conservative. Here's mine

Already looking very different than this morning. "It should feel calm to work in Amp"

I want to tweet so much more about this, but I'm also heads down shipping and fixing and polishing things. We'll record a podcast tomorrow though.

So many boxes created over night! Love to see it.

It's a joke, but seriously: that's kinda the whole thing. Amp isn't a snapshot in time. It's a moving object. And when you're signing up, you're buying a ticket to always be pulled along to where the puck is going.

Okay, I had to

Loose thoughts on the future of abstractions: At first glance, it seems evident that shared abstractions (stdlibs, frameworks, libraries) will still be beneficial in a world of agents. Centralized and shared knowledge, lower costs (no tokens needed) are just two reasons for why this is good. But, looking back at the last ten years, it's clear that a lot of frameworks and libraries were made due to (to simplify) personal preference: framework X is Y but in language Foo which has same runtime characteristics as Bar but I like it better, or framework X was born out of frustration with syntax of Y, or framework X uses TOML instead of YAML and is container-native or ... <insert favorite thing here>. Meaning: a lot of abstractions in the last twenty years were made for reasons that no longer seem valid. That makes me think that there will be less need for more abstractions (as we've known them!) in the future. But if you look around, you'll see that there's a thousand new things being created every day. I think that's a temporary phase. There are other, deeper (for lack of a better term) abstractions though that still seem valid: abstractions that introduce a different way to compute. Think: type systems, Lisps, CUDA, unikernels, IaC, k8s. (That's not a final and super confident list, more a general pointing in a direction. I'm unsure here.) I do think that in the future people will still create new abstractions of this latter type. Sharing those is still valuable, because they go along with a platform or a product. But the former type -- different languages that just switch syntax, frameworks that fix one grievance, util-like stdlibs -- for that I can see a future in which we're just endlessly remixing and "vendoring" existing abstractions. And just to say this out loud: I do think a lot of code-level abstractions (MVC, composition over inheritance, avoid-god-objects, classes vs. modules) don't matter in the future, because they're born out of the ability of humans to understand and maintain code. Even if new abstractions in this realm might make sense in the future, I think the barrier for them to spread is now incredibly high. Example: friend reported that in his company they're trying to introduce a new pattern because "adding a new country to our system requires changing all of these places in this 1500-line long class" -- who gives a shit about that anymore? Oh and another thing: I think the "is it in the training data?" concern is way overblown by now. Intelligence generalizes to a certain degree and the latest models have 0 problems writing in a language or framework that you just made up. Try it.

Exactly. Theory: we all diligently review code Practice: "plz stamp"-clubs, review fatigue, auto-approvals

The Amp app now lets you open different accounts in different windows. Complete game changer. I now have so many more automations and use Puck like I used ChatGPT.

I just spent the last three hours with the HVAC guy because our heat was out. It's wild how universal the process and the skill for debugging is. 1. Define hypothesis 2. Try to prove it 3. If proven: done, else: binary search over the problem space, go to 1

Portals on your machines :)