Microsoft Amplifier
github.com249 points by JDEW a day ago
249 points by JDEW a day ago
I think that letting an LLM run unsupervised on a task is a good way to waste time and tokens. You need to catch them before they stray too far off-path. I stopped using subagents in Claude because I wasn't able to see what they were doing and intervene. Indirectly asking an LLM to prompt another LLM to work on a long, multi-step task doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I think community efforts should go toward making LLMs more deterministic with the help of good old-fashioned software tooling instead of role-playing and writing prayers to the LLM god.
When the task is bigger than I trust the agent to work on it on its own, or for me to review the results, I ask it to create a plan with steps. Then create a md file for each step. I review the steps, and ask the agent to implement the first one. Review that one, fix it, then ask it to update the next steps, and then implement the next one. And so on, until finished.
Have you tried Scoped context packages? Basically for each task, I create a .md file that includes relevant file paths, the purpose of the task, key dependencies, a clear plan of action, and a test strategy. It’s like a mini local design doc. I found that it helps ground implementation and stabilizes the output of the agents.
I read this suggestion a lot. “Make clear steps, a clear plan of action.” Which I get. But then instead of having an LLM flail away at it could we give to an actual developer? It seems like we’ve finally realized that clear specs makes dev work much easier for LLMs. But the same is true for a human. The human will ask more clarifying questions and not hallucinate. The llm will role the dice and pick a path. Maybe we as devs would just rather talk with machines.
Yes, but the difference is that an LLM produces the result instantly, whereas a human might take hours or days.
So if you can get the spec right, and the LLM+agent harness is good enough, you can move much, much faster. It's not always true to the same degree, obviously.
Getting the spec right, and knowing what tasks to use it on -- that's the hard part that people are grappling with, in most contexts.
> Maybe we as devs would just rather talk with machines.
This is kind of how I feel. Chat as an interaction is mentally taxing for me.
Separately, you have to consider that "wasting tokens spinning" might be acceptable if you're able to run hundreds of thousands of these things in parallel. If even a small subset of them translate to value, then you're far net ahead vs with a strictly manual/human process.
> hundreds of thousands of these things in parallel
At what cost,. monetary and environmental?
If the system provides value that is greater than its cost, then paying the cost to gain the value is always worthwhile - regardless of the magnitude of the cost.
As costs drop exponentially (a reasonable expectation for LLMs, etc.) then increasing agent parallelism becomes more and more economically viable over time.
>As costs drop exponentially
Not a reasonable expectation anymore. Moore's Law has been dead for more than a decade and we're getting close to physical limits.
This is built into Cursor now with plan mode https://cursor.com/docs/agent/planning
How does Cursor plan mode differ from Claude Code plan mode? I've used the latter a lot (it's been there a long time), and the description seems very similar. The big difference with the workflow I described is that with that plan mode you don't get to review and correct what happened between steps.
I've not used Claude Code, so my answer might not be that useful. But I would think that because both are chat-based interfaces you would be able to instruct the model to either continue without approval or wait for your approval at each step. I certainly do that with Cursor. Cursor has also recently started automatically generating TODO lists in the background (with a tool call I'm assuming), and displaying them as part of the thinking process without explicit instruction. I find that useful.
Please comment under this thread if you have actually tried this and can compare it to another tool like Cursor, Codex, raw Claude, etc.
I’m super not interested in hearing what people have to say from a distance without actually using it.
A lot of snark in these comments. Has anyone actually tried it yet?
I’ve seen people discuss these types of approaches on X. To me it looks like the concepts here are already tried and popular - they’re just packaging it up so that people who aren’t as deep in that world can get the same benefits. But I’m not an expert.
Exactly. I don’t understand the cynicism in the comments and they literally are just trying to make the technology more accessible
That's a very altruistic outlook on Microsoft's intent with getting everyone to use and depend on AI.
I mean this in the best possible way, but I don't think you're using "altruistic" correctly. Altruism is "showing a selfless concern for the well-being of others." I think you're looking for "naive," and Microsoft is some combination of cynical and manipulative.
I think most of us are irritated by the constant A/B Testing and underwhelming releases. Lets just have the bubble pop so we can solve real problems instead of this.
Hehe suddenly many people will have the real problem of paying bills unfortunately
I'm super confused how anyone can actually afford to pay per token for llms to actually do dev.
I tried it with a feature, took about 10 minutes and a lot of iterations, and would easily have used hundreds of thousands of tokens. Doing this 20, 30 times a day would be crazy expensive.
I have two hypotheses:
1. It affects the fundamental ego of these engineers that a computer can do what they thought only they could do and what they thought made them better than the rest of the population. They might not realize this of course.
2. AI and all these AI systems are intelligence multipliers, with a zero around IQ 100. Zero multiplied by zero is zero, and negative multiplier just leads to garbage. So the people who say "I used AI and its garbage" should really think hard about what it says about them. I thought I was crazy to think of this hypothesis but someone else also mentioned the exact statement and I didnt think I was just being especially mean anymore.
Nothing to do with ego, but you may want to check your own projections, you know how when you speak of the others, you mainly speak of yourself (Jung or Freud, not sure). No need to be bitter about not having the grind and focus to become an engineer yourself, it is after all much harder than say, earning an MBA and you should be OK with whatever you turned out to be. Not to mention that the tools themselves, were in fact built by engineers and not by the "rest of the population", like yourself. Now having said that, I am early adopter myself, was happy to pay the premium costs for my entire company, if the tool was any kind of amplifier. But the crap just does not work. Recently the quality is degrading so much that we simply reduced it to using it for simple consultation - and we only do it because unfortunately the search has been ruined. Otherwise most of the folks both internally and externally that I know using these tools would be happy to just go back to google search and SO. Unfortunately that's not an option. Also see if your second argument makes any sense at all. Maybe it comes out of a lacking math background? Firstly, you don't need two zeroes to get a zero out at the end of the multiplication. And secondly, if an average engineer is a zero, what are folks like you then? But again, it maybe just your own projections...
For some reason youre assuming Im not an engineer which is funny and revealing.
I am an engineer and my vibe coded prototype is now in production, one of the best applications of its type in the industry, and doing really well. So well, I have a pretty large team working on it now. This project was and still is 95% written by AI. No complaints, never going back. That's my experience.
Clearly the eng community is splitting into two categories, people who think this is all never going to work and people who think otherwise. Time will tell who's right.
To anyone else reading and thinking closer to the second side, we're hiring :)
Hey no need to prove yourself to a stranger on the Internet. I'll take your word for it, including your "pretty large team working on it", which for some reason is necessary, although you have "vibe coded 95%" of your application. So if you were to be taken by your word, the LLMs are fantastic and you can do 95% production-ready on your own, just using the LLMs, but for some reason, you'll still need a "pretty large team" to work on it afterwards. Yeah, that sounds very consistent with your main line. Also feel free to share your company and product name, so we can avoid it - thanks.
hansmayer, I think your "debate" skills need some improvement.
>"no need to prove yourself to a stranger on the Internet"
In this case, the stranger is you, and you say it as if he is debating with someone else. This proves you lost the debate and are now attacking personally.
People can easily detect these little nuances.
> Recently the quality is degrading so much
You can say it sucked and still continue to suck, but that LLM/agentic AI is degrading is simply false. Such a statement really makes me question the genuinity of the rest of the comment.
Well, unlike mine, "simply false" as we know, is the ultimate argument to prove one's point, isn´t it?
> unlike mine
"unlike"? You made a claim and has nothing to show for either. Only difference is that the claim is actually way more ridiculous. Somehow technology advanced backward and you're the only one noticed.
Alternative hypothesis is that you work on trivial problems, and therefore you get a lot of help from LLMs. Have you considered this?
I've actually written my own a homebrew framework like this which is a.) cli-coder agnostic and b.) leans heavily on git worktrees [0].
The secret weapon to this approach is asking for 2-4 solutions to your prompt running in parallel. This helps avoid the most time consuming aspect of ai-coding: reviewing a large commit, and ultimately finding the approach to the ai took is hopeless or requires major revision.
By generating multiple solutions, you can cutdown investing fully into the first solution and use clever ways to select from all the 2-4 candidate solutions and usually apply a small tweak at the end. Anyone else doing something like this?
There is a related idea called "alloying" where the 2-4 candidate solutions are pursued in parallel with different models, yielding better results vs any single model. Very interesting ideas.
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks.
I've been doing something similiar: aider+gpt-5, claude-code+sonnet, gemini-cli+2.5-pro. I want to coder-cli next.
A main problem with this approach is summarizing the different approaches before drilling down into reviewing the best approach.
Looking at a `git diff --stat` across all the model outputs can give you a good measure of if there was an existing common pattern for your requested implementation. If only one of the models adds code to a module that the others do not, it's usually a good jumping off point to exploring the differing assumptions each of the agents built towards.
This reminds me of an an approach in mcmc where you run mutiple chains at different temperatures and then share the results between them (replica exchange MCMC sampling) the goal being not to get stuck in one “solution”
I do a lot of work with claude code and codex cli but frankly as soon as I see all the LLM-tells in the readme, and then all the commit messages written by claude, I immediately don't want to read the readme or try the project until someone else recommends it to me.
This is gaining stars and forks but I don't know if that's just because it's under the github.com/microsoft, and I don't really know how much that means.
Future LLMs are going to be trained on this. Github really ought to start tagging repos that are vibe-coded.
I'd rather have in-depth commit messages then three word ones
When I blind-commit claude code commit messages they are sometimes totally wrong. Not even hallucinations necessarily - by the time I'm committing the context may be large and confusing, or some context lost.
I'd rather have the three word message than detailed but wrong messages.
I think I agree with you anyway on average. Most of the time a claude-authored commit message is better than a garbage message.
But it's still a red flag that the project may be filled with holes and not really ready for other people. It's just so easy to vibe your way to a project that works for you but is buggy and missing tons of features for anyone who strays from your use case.
You're not wrong.
I'd never encourage anyone to blind commit the messages But if they are correct they seem a lot more useful than 90% of commit messages.
I found the biggest mistakes that I've seen other people do are like - they move a file, and the commit message acts like it's a brand new feature they added because the llm doesn't put it together it's just a moved file
Contributors
claude Claude
Interesting given Microsoft’s history with OpenAI
History in AI is rewritten on a daily basis
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/09/microsoft-to-lessen-relian...
Starting in Claude bypass mode does not give me confidence:
WARNING: Claude Code running in Bypass Permissions mode │ │ │ │ In Bypass Permissions mode, Claude Code will not ask for your approval before running potentially dangerous commands. │ │ This mode should only be used in a sandboxed container/VM that has restricted internet access and can easily be restored if damaged.
The Readme clearly states:
Caution
This project is a research demonstrator. It is in early development and may change significantly. Using permissive AI tools in your repository requires careful attention to security considerations and careful human supervision, and even then things can still go wrong. Use it with caution, and at your own risk.
Claude Code will not ask for your approval before running potentially dangerous commands.
and
requires careful attention to security considerations and careful human supervision
is a bit orthogonal no?
As a token of careful attention, run this in a clean VM, properly firewalled not to access the host, your internal network, GitHub or wherever your valuable code lives, and ideally anything but the relevant Anthropic and Microsoft API endpoints.
And even then if you give it Internet access you're at risk of code exfiltration attacks.
It’s not orthogonal at all. On the contrary, it’s directly related:
“Using permissive AI tools [that is, ones that do not ask for your approval] in your repository requires careful attention to security considerations and careful human supervision”. Supervision isn’t necessarily approving every action: it might be as simple as inspecting the work after it’s done. And security considerations might mean to perform the work in a sandbox where it can’t impact anything of value.
A lot of the ideas in this aren't bad, but in general it's hacky. Context export? Just use industry standard observability! This is so bad it makes me cringe. Parallel worktrees? These are prone to putting your repo in bad states when you run a lot of agents, and you have to deal with security, just put your agent in a container and have it clone the repo. Everything this project does it's doing the wrong way.
I have a repo that shows you how to do this stuff the correct way that's very easy to adapt, along with a detailed explanation, just do yourself a favor, skip the amateur hour re-implementations and instrument/silo your agents properly: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-04-hacking-claude-cod...
I'll always be skeptical about using AI to amplify AI. I think humans are needed to amplify AI since humans are so far documented to be significantly more creative and proactive in pushing the frontier than AI. I know, it's maybe a radical concept to digest.
I think I'm more optimistic about this than brute-forcing model training with ever larger datasets, myself. Here's why.
Most models I've benchmarked, even the expensive proprietary models, tend to lose coherence when the context grows beyond a certain size. The thing is, they typically do not need the entire context to perform whatever step of the process is currently going on.
And there appears to be a lot of experimentation going on along the line of having subagents in charge of curating the long term view of the context to feed more focused work items to other subagents, and I find that genuinely intriguing.
My hope is that this approach will eventually become refined enough that we'll get dependable capability out of cheap open weight models. That might come in darn handy, depending on the blast radius of the bubble burst.
Based on clear, operational definitions, AI is definitely more creative than humans. E.g., can easily produce higher scores on a Torrance test of divergent thinking. Humans may still be more innovative (defined as creativity adopted into larger systems), though that may be changing.
More creative? I've just seen my premium subscription "AI" struggling to find a trivial issue of a missing import in a very small / toy project. Maybe these tools are getting all sorts of scores on all sorts of benchmarks, I dont doubt it, but why are there no significant real-world results after more than 3 years of hype? It reminds of that situation when the geniuses at Google offered the job to the guy who created Homebrew and then rejected him after he supposedly did not do well on one of those algorithmic tasks (inverting a binary tree? - not sure if I remember correctly). There are also all sorts of people scoring super high on various IQ tests, but what counts, with humans as with the supposed AI is the real world results. Benchmarks without results do not mean anything.
This is absurd to the point of being comical. Do you really believe that?
If an “objective” test purports to show that AI is more creative than humans then I’m sorry but the test is deeply flawed. I don’t even need to look at the methodology to confidently state that.
It’s a point, I suppose, about being clear about what we mean. In psychology, we need to define terms in terms of measures — and we’ve traditionally measured human creativity that way. Not without critique, but true!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrance_Tests_of_Creative_Thi...
> Never lose context again. Amplifier automatically exports your entire conversation before compaction, preserving all the details that would otherwise be lost. When Claude Code compacts your conversation to stay within token limits, you can instantly restore the full history.
If this is restoring the entire context (and looking at the source code, it seems like it is just reloading the entire context) how does this not result in an infinite compaction loop?
I think the idea would be that you could re-compact with a different focus. When you compact, you can give Claude instructions on what is important to retain and what can be discarded. If you later discover that actually you wanted something you discarded during a previous compaction, this could allow you to recover it.
Also, it can be useful to compact before it is strictly necessary to compact (before you are at max context length). So there could be a case where you decide you need to "undo" one of these types of early compactions for some reason.
Project looks interesting, but no demos. As much I want to try it because of all cool concepts mentioned, but I am not sure I want to invest my time if I don't see any demos
I mean that's fair but doing a make install and providing your API key is pretty easy?
multiply it by 20 other similar projects and assume 20% have security issues, your environment will be messed up before you even understand if you need it or not. Not even talking about time you lost
> "I have more ideas than time to try them out" — The problem we're solving
I see a possible paradox here.
For exploration, my goal is _to learn_. Trying out multiple things is not wasting time, it's an intensive learning experience. It's not about finding what works fast, but understanding why the thing that works best works best. I want to go through it. Maybe that's just me though, and most people just want to get it done quickly.
There are hundreds of these on github. Why should we care? Why not release any benchmarks or examples?
The very first line in the readme is a quote, attributed to "the problem we're solving".
That's cute
Is this is a Claude Code wrapper?
Didn’t GitHub create something similar called Spec.
>"Amplifier is a complete development environment that takes AI coding assistants and supercharges them with discovered patterns, specialized expertise, and powerful automation — turning a helpful assistant into a force multiplier that can deliver complex solutions with minimal hand-holding."
Again this "supercharging" nonsense? Maybe in Satiyas confabulated AI-powered universe, but not in the real world I am afraid...
I was hoping this was going to be an awesome new music player, but no, everything new thing is AI now. Welcome to the future
Billions in investment into OpenAI and this is a wrapper for Claude API usage. This is very much a microsoft product.
README files in the "ai_context" directory provide the ultimate AI Slop reading experience..
Yeah, I'm not even that opposed to using AI for documentation if it helps, but everything from Microsoft recently has been full-on slop. It's almost like they're trying to make sure you can't miss it's AI generated.
"Eat your own dog slop" isn't bad practice, though.
Some people in the organization will experience the limitations and some will learn — although there are bound to be people elsewhere in the organization who have a vested interest in not learning anything and pushing the product regardless.
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Ok, but please don't post shallow dismissals of other people's work to HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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Sounds like a research project, they're sharing it out to get some feedback and get a discussion going.
How is this different than Google's Jules thing? Both sort of experimental exploratory things.
That's essentially what a CI environment does. "Multiple tabs" and "swarms". This part should feel familiar to any developer. Having multiple things running in the background to help you is not a new concept and we've been doing it for decades.
Whether these new helpers that explore ideas on their own are helpful or not, and for which cases, is another discussion.
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Please don't post like this to this site. It's against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) because we're trying for something else here.
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From the Hacker News Guidelines:
"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
It seems like this discussion is full of shallow dismissals and smug takes though. See the sister comment to yours.
In my experience, those get downvoted or flagged (they also aren't in line with the guidelines). Let alone shallow dismissals, even good Reddit-esque short, pithy jokes often get downvoted, because a discussion thread where everybody's just trying to be funny doesn't tend to lead to where most HN participants want to go.
Talking about downvoting also violates the guidelines (meta-discussions are boring and repetitive), so this comment could arguably succumb, haha. If so, it won't be the first or the last time a comment of mine gets poorly received!
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No it doesn’t. It’s dead easy to get a decent level, and going further requires individual effort and skill—-just like any other field of endeavor.
Gatekeepers who claim otherwise have something to sell.
How can it be gatekeeping when they are literally making it easier to use? The analogy is probably closer to a Linux distro. You can put everything together yourself but if someone gives you a pre integrated environment with best practices it makes it easier to get started
How on earth does this compare to a Linux distro? What are you even talking about here?
I see a Linux distro as a collection of libraries that someone puts together following best practices and conventions (ie all config files go into /etc). The similarity with this project is that Microsoft has taken a collection of tools and best practices and put them together in an easy to install package
I find that analogy weak.
Picking a Linux distribution is a commitment, and if I want to change it out I have a lot of work to do, much of which is unwinding my own work that was distro dependent.
Changing out an agent setup is as easy as installing an IDE, and if I don’t like it I can go back easily. My work is not dependent on the setup - the value I get is transactional, and the quirks of each model or agent approach are not difficult to learn or live without.
All of which suggests that selling ease of use to someone like me will be pointless. I’m sure there are clueless F500 managers out there who might go for it. But a business model based on selling to people who don’t know anything isn’t very durable.
Ah yes an easy to install package, totally the hallmark of your average Linux distro :)
Not sure if you are being serious or not. That was indeed the point of the very first Linux distros and why most people use them nowadays vs the alternative.
I started using Linux before there were distros (circa 1993) and it was not a pleasant experience compared to when Slackware came out
> A lot of developers either don’t use coding agents to their full potential
Define "full potential".
Sounds like you are just making things up to sell your product.
Our “product” is a tool we developed internally and found it so useful that decided to open source it.
With full potential I refer to getting the best possible results. For example, being able to work on tasks in parallel without Claude instances interfering with each other vs , well, no doing so.
Thanks for making it public. I love the zen architect. Will definitely try it.
Common etiquette is to declare your conflicts of interest
Agreed, it is in my bio but I updated the post in any case
ah I just realize actually u are rover dev
I wonder why do you think we need rover? what is the use case? I got confused
before that we ask ai with a chat feature
the next we need a multiple swarm of ai why though?
The main use case why we developed Rover internally (and still is) was the ability to run agents in parallel. It allows us to go much faster but requires tooling around it.
Secondarily it makes it easier for everyone to share those best practices and tooling among us, but is less of an issue because we are a small team
Fwiw in my company there’s a lot of interest in sharing best practices but it seems the learning is not as portable as hoped. My view is that it’s a personal learning journey and smoothing that journey beyond a certain point turns into spoonfeeding and reduces learning effectiveness significantly. Give a man a fish, and so on.
aka Winamp
Can we get Windows 7 back instead? Nadella rode the cloud wave in an easy upmarket, his "AI" obsession will fail. No one wants this.
The Austrian army already switched to LibreOffice for security reasons, we don't need another spyware and code stealing tool.
> No one wants this
There are many many people who want better AI coding tools, myself included. It might or might not fail, but there is a clear and strong opportunity here, that it would be foolish of any large tech company to not pursue.
> Nadella rode the cloud wave in an easy upmarket
I would say it’s more the result of anti competitive bundling of cloud things into existing enterprise contracts rather than the wave. Microsoft is far worse than it ever was in the 90s but there’s no semblance of antitrust action in America.