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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

Can folks who have compared Amp with other agents share their experience? Some of my colleagues swear this is the best agent out there.

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As someone who switches between most CLIs to compare, Amp is still on top, costs more, but has the best results. The librarian and oracle make it leagues ahead of the competition.

I don't understand how people use these tools without a subscription. Unless you are using it very infrequently paying per token gets costly very fast.

Work pays for it. I don't work for stingy companies that don't provide the tools required to do the job. (our team spends > $1000/m EACH on Amp alone)

Could you please share a little on why it's noticeably better than Claude Code on a sub (or 5? I mean, sometimes you can brute force a solution with agents)?

I think it’s great but also pricey. Amp like Claude Code feels like a product used by the people that build it and oddly enough that does not seem to be the case for most coding agents out there.

https://www.askmodu.com/rankings independently aggregates traffic from a variety of agents and amp consistently has the highest success rate for small and large tasks

That aligns with my annecdata :)

Thanks for the link.

But my first thought looking at this is that the numbers are probably skewed due to distribution of user skill levels, and what types of users choose which tool.

My hypothesis is that Amp is chosen by people who are VERY highly skilled in agentic development. Meaning these are the people most likely to provide solid context, good prompts, etc. That means these same people would likely get the best results from ANY coding agent. This also tracks with Amp being so expensive -- users or companies are more likely to pay a premium if they can get the most from the tool.

Claude Code on the other hand is used by (I assume) a way larger population. So the percentage of low-skill users is likely to be much higher. Those users may still get value from the tool, but their success rate will be lower by some factor with ANY coding agent. And this issue (if my hypothesis is correct) is likely 10x as true for GitHub Copilot.

Therefore I don't know how much we should read into stats like the total PR merge success percentage, because it's hard to tell the degree of noise caused by this user skill distribution imbalance.

Still interesting to see the numbers though!

To be honest, I've gave it a try a couple of times, but it's so expensive I'm having a hard time even being able to judge it fairly. The first time I spent just $5, second $10 and the third time $20, but they all went by so fast I'm worried even if I find it great, it's way too expensive, and having a number tick up/down makes me nervous or something. And I'm the type of person who has ChatGPT Pro so I'm not exactly stingy with paying for things I find useful, but there is a limit somewhere and I guess for me Amp is that.

It sounds like you're being temporarily stingy due to having ChatGPT Pro. Might be good to get rid of it if you think the grass might be greener outside of Codex.

No, ChatGPT Pro was an example that I'm not stingy to pay for things I find useful. I'm also paying for Gemini, Claude and other types of software to do my job, not even just coding. But even if I do, I still find Amp too expensive to be able to use for anything useful.

I run every single coding prompt through Codex, Claude Code, Qwen and Gemini, compare which one gives me the best and go ahead with using that one. Maybe I go with Codex 60% of the times, Claude 20% and Qwen/Gemini the remaining 20%, not often at all either of them get enough right. I've tried integrating Amp into my workflow too, but as mentioned, too expensive. I do think the grass is currently the greenest with Codex, still.

It depends on your perspective. From a startup perspective, this makes you a less interesting potential customer, to which one might attach the term stingy. From a perspective of willingness to invest in your own productivity it doesn't sound stingy, though.

It was really good in early stages (this past summer). But that was before Claude Code and Codex took off big time. I would say the biggest downside of Amp is that it’s expensive. Like running Opus the whole time expensive. But they don’t have their own model so what are you really paying for? Prompts? Not so sure. Amp is for people who are not smart enough to roll their own agents. So in that case, they shouldn’t be using agentic workflow.

Amp blew me away and was my primary workhorse. Much better than anything out there for a time.

But then I switched to GLM 4.6 using Claude CLI tool and that was good enough and significantly cheaper/faster.

Then Opus 4.5 came out with better pricing and might as well just use that directly. Still working great.

With Amp I was spending $5 here and there every day. Great, but pricey.

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