I don't think it takes care of tone transformation (eg 他是 ni3shi4 -> ni2shi4). Or if it does, my tones are just off. But it's a really cool idea!

Using small threads (see https://ampcode.com/@sqs for some of my public threads).

If you use very long threads and treat it as a long-and-winding conversation, you will get worse results and pay a lot more.

What's super interesting is that Opus is cheaper all-in than Sonnet for many usage patterns.

Here are some early rough numbers from our own internal usage on the Amp team (avg cost $ per thread):

- Sonnet 4.5: $1.83

- Opus 4.5: $1.30 (earlier checkpoint last week was $1.55)

- Gemini 3 Pro: $1.21

Cost per token is not the right way to look at this. A bit more intelligence means mistakes (and wasted tokens) avoided.

Sorry we missed that email! I don’t know what went wrong there, but I just replied and will figure it out. This is definitely not the norm (and Build Crew is a small fraction of our users).

Yeah, I said about coding agents, “it’s obviously the future, but it’s not there yet”. That talk was from the AI Engineer conference in June 2024 (16 months ago). Coding agents have come a long way since then!