Orbs, Explained: Amp's Remote Coding Agents Are More Than Just VMs
Amp's Thorsten Ball explains what orbs are: remote coding agents that run in the cloud, controllable from anywhere, and that can sleep and wake on demand. But orbs are more than just VMs—they feature shareable portals, multiplayer collaboration, scheduled wake-ups, and the ability for agents to spawn other orbs and communicate with each other. This post addresses the naming controversy and showcases the magic users have found in orbs.
Combine all of this and use it for a few minutes and you realize: oh yeah, orbs are more than just VMs, it’s a whole thing.
- fwlr
So this product is a thin wrapper over a remote virtual machine, a new name for remote virtual machines, and an exhortation to not look inside or reason about remote virtual machines?
I feel like up until recently this would been pitched as “the missing UX/DX for cloud compute”, or something. But instead now it’s marketed to this new trend where one should aggressively not understand the tower of abstractions one is standing on. Odd.
- rsyring
They've basically come up with what exe.dev has been doing for awhile now?
Except, exe.dev is more about, you have a VM and can do LLM work on it. Orbs seems to be minimizing the VM machinery more and making it about the "agentic experience."
- hexomancer
I think very soon big LLM providers (OpenAI et. al.) will provide a service like this. With the LLMs becoming faster, the agentic task completion bottleneck will soon move to the tool calls (both execution time and round-trip latency), so it makes sense to have a server host the project very close to the actual LLM doing the inference in order to minimize latency.
- jchook
I’ve used a few of the hosted VM options for this like Coder and really dislike having to do my work in a web browser.
This is why I made ParaSpace (https://paraspace.dev/)
With ParaSpace I can use a real terminal and my normal tooling to develop locally on fast booting isolated containers. I even get to bring my own dotfiles.
- rmsaksida
Reminds me of fly.io's sprites (https://sprites.dev), but with a custom-built layer of UI, harness, and features.