What I Want to Tell You About Orbs ampcode.com
Thorsten Ball opens by refusing to sell Orbs on their feature list, on the grounds that a list of ingredients has never made anyone want a burger. What he describes instead is how ephemeral sandboxed environments changed his own day-to-day work on Amp.
Three changes stand out. He spawns far more agents, because the friction of juggling local checkouts and environments no longer caps how many he can have going. Those agents run longer, eight to thirty minutes on work he would previously have kept local, with real testing attached. And they come back with evidence rather than a diff to audit: screenshots, videos, test matrices, in one case a demo video of a Rust desktop app that had been run headless in a sandbox.
His own summary of the effect is “more agents building more complicated things; agents running for longer and giving better proof that what they did works; a lighter, less sigh-inducing review load; more things shipped, faster.” The proof-of-functionality point is the one I keep coming back to, since review load is the usual bottleneck once agents are producing more than you can read. Same caveat as ever: this is a vendor writing about its own tool. Pave The Road makes the organisational version of the argument.