Coding-assistants
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AMP Code: First Impressions of a Claude Code Competitor
I tried AMP Code last weekend and came away genuinely impressed. I didn’t think there was anything at Claude Code’s level currently available.
That said, AMP is in a somewhat unfortunate position. Similar to Cursor, they have to pay the Anthropic tax, and you really want your primary model to be Opus 4.5 for the best results.
So while I was able to get some things done, once you start paying per token… you feel constrained. I’m speaking from a personal budget perspective here, but I blew through ten dollars of credits on their free tier pretty easily.
I could see how with billing enabled and all the sub-agents they make super easy to use, you could burn through a hundred-dollar Claude Code Max plan budget in a week, or even a day, depending on your usage.
What I Really Like
There’s a lot to appreciate about what AMP is doing.
Team collaboration is a standout feature. It’s incredibly easy to share a discussion with other people on your team. Being able to collaborate with your team on something using agents is extremely powerful.
Their TUI is exceptional. I mean, it’s so much better than Claude Code’s terminal interface. They probably have the best TUI on the market right now. It’s definitely better than Open Code.
Sub-agents work out of the box. All the complicated sub-agent stuff I’ve set up manually for my Claude Code projects? It just comes ready to go with AMP. They’ve made really smart decisions about which agents handle which tasks and which models to use. You don’t have to configure any of it, it’s all done for you.
The Bottom Line
I think for enterprise use cases, AMP Code is going to make a lot of sense for a lot of companies.
For individual developers on a personal budget, the cost model is something to think carefully about.