7 ms·
Microsoft Amplifier
- ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 11mo ago[flagged]
- dang 11mo agoPlease don't post like this to this site. It's against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) because we're trying for something else here.
- ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 11mo agoMy apologies, won’t happen again
- ridruejo 11mo ago[flagged]
- quantumwoke 11mo agoCommon etiquette is to declare your conflicts of interest
- ridruejo 11mo agoAgreed, it is in my bio but I updated the post in any case
- firemelt 11mo agoah 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?
- ridruejo 11mo agoThe 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
- shermantanktop 11mo agoFwiw 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.
- shermantanktop 11mo agoNo 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.
- ridruejo 11mo agoHow 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
- hansmayer 11mo agoHow on earth does this compare to a Linux distro? What are you even talking about here?
- ridruejo 11mo agoI 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
- hansmayer 11mo agoAh yes an easy to install package, totally the hallmark of your average Linux distro :)
- ridruejo 11mo agoNot 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
- rs186 11mo ago> 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.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ridruejo 11mo agoOur “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.
- majkinetor 11mo agoThanks for making it public. I love the zen architect. Will definitely try it.
- ridruejo 11mo agoWe do Rover, which is different from the Microsoft product but the goal is similar. I was just responding to the above comment. I agree with you, it is a pretty good project and will be taking a look. We are so early there are tons of things to learn and try.
- hn_throw_bs 11mo ago[flagged]
- hansmayer 11mo ago>"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...
- zb3 11mo agoREADME files in the "ai_context" directory provide the ultimate AI Slop reading experience..
- qsort 11mo agoYeah, 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.
- rectang 11mo ago"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.
- firemelt 11mo ago[flagged]
- hansmayer 11mo agoWell, stop asking silly questions. How will the execs get their bonuses, if it turns out we fucked up the web search and invested an equivalent of a moonbase in ... well, I hate to use the phrase, but statistical parrot ?
- alganet 11mo agoThat'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.
- PantaloonFlames 11mo agoSounds 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.
- vachina 11mo agoWhy are you doing free research work for a profit making entity. Are you paid for it.
- nine_k 11mo agoSorry, is this Hacker News? This kind of project is exactly what I'd expect hackers to create. Not using AI in boring limited practical ways where it's known to somehow work, but supercharging AI with AI with AI... etc, and seeing what happens!
- nba456_ 11mo ago[flagged]
- estimator7292 11mo ago[flagged]
- rectang 11mo agoFrom 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." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- SilverElfin 11mo agoIt seems like this discussion is full of shallow dismissals and smug takes though. See the sister comment to yours.
- rectang 11mo agoIn 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!
- NarwhalBacon 11mo ago[flagged]
- kkotak 11mo agoI see you're being down voted, Reddit style. But you're on the mark about the hate tone of comments. If you don't like Amplifier, don't use it. No need to spew hate.
- npalli 11mo agoContributors claude Claude Interesting given Microsoft’s history with OpenAI
- wiether 11mo agoHistory in AI is rewritten on a daily basis https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/09/microsoft-to-lessen-reliance-on-openai-by-buying-ai-from-rival-anthropic/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/09/microsoft-to-lessen-relian...
- mark212 11mo agomore than history -- early, massive investment in OpenAI by Microsoft and formerly their exclusive compute provider. This stood out to me too, seems like a months-long project with heavy use of Claude
- neuroelectron 11mo agoaka Winamp
- bgwalter 11mo agoCan 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.
- SilverElfin 11mo ago> 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.
- falcor84 11mo ago> 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.
- bgwalter 11mo agoTheir own employees have to be surveilled and coerced to use their own dog food: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540174
- jug 11mo agoI'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.
- dr_dshiv 11mo agoBased 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.
- qlm 11mo agoThis 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.
- yunnpp 11mo agoHis comment must be fueled by his own lack of creativity. He has engulfed himself in the AI, and his own knowledge gap prevents him from even scratching the surface of his own stupidity.
- dr_dshiv 11mo agoThat’s pretty rude. And wrong.
- dr_dshiv 11mo agoIt’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_Thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrance_Tests_of_Creative_Thi...
- tcdent 11mo ago> 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?
- redhale 11mo agoI 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.
- chews 11mo agoBillions in investment into OpenAI and this is a wrapper for Claude API usage. This is very much a microsoft product.
- rco8786 11mo agoA lot of snark in these comments. Has anyone actually tried it yet?
- SilverElfin 11mo agoI’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.
- ridruejo 11mo agoExactly. I don’t understand the cynicism in the comments and they literally are just trying to make the technology more accessible
- nozzlegear 11mo agoThat's a very altruistic outlook on Microsoft's intent with getting everyone to use and depend on AI.
- vachina 11mo agoMicrosoft is on a roll, on a roll at repackaging open source efforts and branding them, and then saying they made it.
- otterley 11mo agoIsn’t that what every company that sells technology does—build demos and showcase uses in order to provoke the imagination and motivate sales? No company is perfect, but what Microsoft is doing here is hardly unusual.
- username223 11mo agoI 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.
- rs186 11mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- alganet 11mo ago> "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.
- tclancy 11mo agoYeah, this seems like the opposite of invention. You can throw paint at a canvas but it won’t make you Pollock. And will you feel a sense of accomplishment?
- cynicalsecurity 11mo ago[flagged]
- Zetobal 11mo ago[dead]
- vincnetas 11mo agoStarting 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.
- nine_k 11mo agoThe 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.
- vincnetas 11mo agoClaude 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?
- otterley 11mo agoIt’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.
- koakuma-chan 11mo agoIs this is a Claude Code wrapper?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- skrebbel 11mo agoYes
- xorgun 11mo agoIs this going to be another HN dropbox moment?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- furyofantares 11mo agoI 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.
- nightshift1 11mo agoFuture LLMs are going to be trained on this. Github really ought to start tagging repos that are vibe-coded.
- typpilol 11mo agoI'd rather have in-depth commit messages then three word ones
- furyofantares 11mo agoWhen 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.
- typpilol 11mo agoYou'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
- nightshift1 11mo agoI 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.
- hu3 11mo agoYeah in my experience, LLMs are great but they still need babysitting lest they add 20k lines of code that could have been 2k.
- danmaz74 11mo agoWhen 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.
- thethimble 11mo agoSeparately, 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.
- pjc50 11mo ago> hundreds of thousands of these things in parallel At what cost,. monetary and environmental?
- thethimble 11mo ago
- lpcvoid 11mo ago[flagged]
- estimator7292 11mo agoThe very first line in the readme is a quote, attributed to "the problem we're solving". That's cute
- nvader 11mo agoIf you think about it, that's because "the problem we're solving" is running out of time. Once it's solved it won't be able to try out ideas.
- theusus 11mo agoDidn’t GitHub create something similar called Spec.
- janpio 11mo agoYou are thinking of https://github.com/github/spec-kit https://github.com/github/spec-kit
- CuriouslyC 11mo agoA 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-code-for-fun-and-profit/ https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-04-hacking-claude-cod...
- stillsut 11mo agoI'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? [0]: https://github.com/sutt/agro https://github.com/sutt/agro
- thethimble 11mo agoThere 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. https://xbow.com/blog/alloy-agents https://xbow.com/blog/alloy-agents
- michaelbarton 11mo agoThis 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”
- stillsut 11mo agoExactly 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.
- nopelynopington 11mo agoI was hoping this was going to be an awesome new music player, but no, everything new thing is AI now. Welcome to the future
- willahmad 11mo agoProject 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
- fishmicrowaver 11mo agoI mean that's fair but doing a make install and providing your API key is pretty easy?
- willahmad 11mo agomultiply 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
- lordofgibbons 11mo agoThere are hundreds of these on github. Why should we care? Why not release any benchmarks or examples?
- ripped_britches 11mo agoPlease 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.
- payneio 11mo agoI've tried it. It works better than raw Claude. We're working on benchmarks now. But... it's a moving target as amplifier (an experimental project) is evolving rapidly.
- payneio 11mo agoFWIW, finished an eval of claude code against various tasks that amplifier works well on: The agent demonstrated strong architectural and organizational capabilities but suffered from critical implementation gaps across all three analyzed tasks. The primary pattern observed is a "scaffold without substance" failure mode, where the agent produces well-structured, well-documented code frameworks that either don't work at all or produce placeholder outputs instead of real functionality. Of the three tasks analyzed, two failed due to placeholder/mock implementations (Cross-Repo Improvement Tool, Email Drafting Tool), and one failed due to insufficient verification of factual claims (GDPVAL Extraction). The common thread is a lack of validation and testing before delivery, combined with a tendency to prioritize architecture over functional implementation.
- payneio 11mo agoHey all! I'm one of a handful of developers on this project. Great to see it's getting some interest! For context, we are right in the middle of building this thing... multiple rebuilds daily since we are using it to build itself. The value isn't in the code itself, yet, but in the approaches (UNIX philosophy, meta-cognitive recipes, etc.) We are really excited about how productive these approaches are even in this early stage. We are able to have amplifier go off make significant progress unattended for sometimes hours at a time. This, of course, raises a lot of questions on how software will be built in the near future... questions which we are leaning into. Most of our team's projects, unless they have some unresolved IP or are using internal-only systems, are built in the open. This is a research project at this stage. We recognize this approach it too expensive and too hacky for most independent developers (we're spending thousands of dollars daily on tokens). But once the patterns are identified, we expect we'll all find ways to make them more accessible. The whole point of this is to experiment and learn fast.
- payneio 11mo agoHere's a writeup of the project for more context: https://paradox921.medium.com/amplifier-notes-from-an-experiment-thats-starting-to-snowball-ef7df4ff8f97 https://paradox921.medium.com/amplifier-notes-from-an-experi...
- paradox921 11mo agoHi all, I'm the primary author/lead on the "research exploration" that is Amplifier at Microsoft. It's still SUPER early and we're running fast and applying learnings from the past couple of years in new ways to explore some new value we're finding early evidence of. I apologize that the repo is in a very rough condition, we're running very fast and most of what is in there now has been very helpful but will very soon be completely replaced with our next major iteration of it as we continue to run ahead. I did want to take a pause today and put together a blog post to capture a little more context for those of you here who are following along: https://paradox921.medium.com/amplifier-notes-from-an-experiment-thats-starting-to-snowball-ef7df4ff8f97 https://paradox921.medium.com/amplifier-notes-from-an-experi... For those who find it useful in this very early stage, to find some value for yourself in either using it or learning from it, happy to be on the journey together. For those who don't like it or don't understand why or what we're doing, I apologize again, it's definitely not for everyone at this stage, if ever, so no offense taken.