[HN Gopher] Microsoft Amplifier
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Microsoft Amplifier
Author : JDEW
Score : 194 points
Date : 2025-10-11 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post like this to this site. It's against the
| guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
| because we're trying for something else here.
| ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote:
| My apologies, won't happen again
| hansmayer wrote:
| >"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 wrote:
| README files in the "ai_context" directory provide the ultimate
| AI Slop reading experience..
| qsort wrote:
| Yeah, 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 wrote:
| "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.
| npalli wrote:
| Contributors
|
| claude Claude
|
| Interesting given Microsoft's history with OpenAI
| wiether wrote:
| History in AI is rewritten on a daily basis
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/09/microsoft-to-lessen-relian...
| mark212 wrote:
| more 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 wrote:
| aka Winamp
| bgwalter wrote:
| Can 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Their own employees have to be surveilled and coerced to use
| their own dog food:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540174
| jug wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Based 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 wrote:
| This 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.
| hansmayer wrote:
| More creative? I've just seen my premium subscription "AI"
| struggling to find a trivial issue of a missing import in a
| very small / toy project. Maybe these tools are getting all
| sorts of scores on all sorts of benchmarks, I dont doubt it,
| but why are there no significant real-world results after
| more than 3 years of hype? It reminds of that situation when
| the geniuses at Google offered the job to the guy who created
| Homebrew and then rejected him after he supposedly did not do
| well on one of those algorithmic tasks (inverting a binary
| tree? - not sure if I remember correctly). There are also all
| sorts of people scoring super high on various IQ tests, but
| what counts, with humans as with the supposed AI is the real
| world results. Benchmarks without results do not mean
| anything.
| vachina wrote:
| It is as creative as it's training material.
|
| You think it is creative because you lack the knowledge of
| what it has learnt.
| jsheard wrote:
| > I'll always be skeptical about using AI to amplify AI.
|
| This project was in part written by Claude, so for better or
| worse I think we're at least 3 levels deep here (AI-written
| code which directs an AI to direct other AIs to write code).
| Balinares wrote:
| I think I'm more optimistic about this than brute-forcing model
| training with ever larger datasets, myself. Here's why.
|
| Most models I've benchmarked, even the expensive proprietary
| models, tend to lose coherence when the context grows beyond a
| certain size. The thing is, they typically do not need the
| entire context to perform whatever step of the process is
| currently going on.
|
| And there appears to be a lot of experimentation going on along
| the line of having subagents in charge of curating the long
| term view of the context to feed more focused work items to
| other subagents, and I find that genuinely intriguing.
|
| My hope is that this approach will eventually become refined
| enough that we'll get dependable capability out of cheap open
| weight models. That might come in darn handy, depending on the
| blast radius of the bubble burst.
| tcdent wrote:
| > 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?
| chews wrote:
| Billions in investment into OpenAI and this is a wrapper for
| Claude API usage. This is very much a microsoft product.
| rco8786 wrote:
| A lot of snark in these comments. Has anyone actually tried it
| yet?
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Exactly. I don't understand the cynicism in the comments and
| they literally are just trying to make the technology more
| accessible
| nozzlegear wrote:
| That's a very altruistic outlook on Microsoft's intent with
| getting everyone to use and depend on AI.
| vachina wrote:
| Microsoft is on a roll, on a roll at repackaging open
| source efforts and branding them, and then saying they
| made it.
| otterley wrote:
| Isn'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.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I have two hypotheses:
|
| 1. It affects the fundamental ego of these engineers that a
| computer can do what they thought only they could do and what
| they thought made them better than the rest of the population.
| They might not realize this of course.
|
| 2. AI and all these AI systems are intelligence multipliers,
| with a zero around IQ 100. Zero multiplied by zero is zero, and
| negative multiplier just leads to garbage. So the people who
| say "I used AI and its garbage" should really think hard about
| what it says about them. I thought I was crazy to think of this
| hypothesis but someone else also mentioned the exact statement
| and I didnt think I was just being especially mean anymore.
| Angostura wrote:
| You seem to be assuming that the negative multiplier is on
| the human side of the equation. There's your mistake
| milutinovici wrote:
| Alternative hypothesis is that you work on trivial problems,
| and therefore you get a lot of help from LLMs. Have you
| considered this?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Im definitely not creating the next StuxNet for sure. So
| Ill bow down to whoever is writing the next C compiler I
| suppose.
| hansmayer wrote:
| Nothing to do with ego, but you may want to check your own
| projections, you know how when you speak of the others, you
| mainly speak of yourself (Jung or Freud, not sure). No need
| to be bitter about not having the grind and focus to become
| an engineer yourself, it is after all much harder than say,
| earning an MBA and you should be OK with whatever you turned
| out to be. Not to mention that the tools themselves, were in
| fact built by engineers and not by the "rest of the
| population", like yourself. Now having said that, I am early
| adopter myself, was happy to pay the premium costs for my
| entire company, if the tool was any kind of amplifier. But
| the crap just does not work. Recently the quality is
| degrading so much that we simply reduced it to using it for
| simple consultation - and we only do it because unfortunately
| the search has been ruined. Otherwise most of the folks both
| internally and externally that I know using these tools would
| be happy to just go back to google search and SO.
| Unfortunately that's not an option. Also see if your second
| argument makes any sense at all. Maybe it comes out of a
| lacking math background? Firstly, you don't need two zeroes
| to get a zero out at the end of the multiplication. And
| secondly, if an average engineer is a zero, what are folks
| like you then? But again, it maybe just your own
| projections...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| For some reason youre assuming Im not an engineer which is
| funny and revealing.
|
| I am an engineer and my vibe coded prototype is now in
| production, one of the best applications of its type in the
| industry, and doing really well. So well, I have a pretty
| large team working on it now. This project was and still is
| 95% written by AI. No complaints, never going back. That's
| my experience.
|
| Clearly the eng community is splitting into two categories,
| people who think this is all never going to work and people
| who think otherwise. Time will tell who's right.
|
| To anyone else reading and thinking closer to the second
| side, we're hiring :)
| bgwalter wrote:
| Which company so we can avoid it?
| hansmayer wrote:
| Hey no need to prove yourself to a stranger on the
| Internet. I'll take your word for it, including your
| "pretty large team working on it", which for some reason
| is necessary, although you have "vibe coded 95%" of your
| application. So if you were to be taken by your word, the
| LLMs are fantastic and you can do 95% production-ready on
| your own, just using the LLMs, but for some reason,
| you'll still need a "pretty large team" to work on it
| afterwards. Yeah, that sounds very consistent with your
| main line. Also feel free to share your company and
| product name, so we can avoid it - thanks.
| system2 wrote:
| hansmayer, I think your "debate" skills need some
| improvement.
|
| >"no need to prove yourself to a stranger on the
| Internet"
|
| In this case, the stranger is you, and you say it as if
| he is debating with someone else. This proves you lost
| the debate and are now attacking personally.
|
| People can easily detect these little nuances.
| LtWorf wrote:
| phd in medical engineering doesn't scream "computer
| science expert" to me.
| Keyframe wrote:
| trust me bro vibes
| bgwalter wrote:
| This is like a person who thinks that making a photocopy of
| an Einstein paper makes him Einstein. You know, Einstein
| wasn't that special after all and the photocopier affects his
| fundamental ego.
| hansmayer wrote:
| I think most of us are irritated by the constant A/B Testing
| and underwhelming releases. Lets just have the bubble pop so we
| can solve real problems instead of this.
| fishmicrowaver wrote:
| Hehe suddenly many people will have the real problem of
| paying bills unfortunately
| hansmayer wrote:
| They will, especially when it comes to paying back the VCs
| all the burnt GenAI-dollars
| bee_rider wrote:
| I thought VCs were investors.
|
| Generally when your investment fails you don't get paid
| back, right?
| rs186 wrote:
| The repo is full of big AI words without any metrics/benchmark.
|
| People are correct to question it.
|
| If anything, Microsoft needs to show something meaningful to
| make people believe it's worth trying it out.
| rs186 wrote:
| > This project is a research demonstrator.
|
| I went through the whole README but couldn't find any hint about
| this actually making existing agents more effective/accurate or
| make fewer mistakes.
|
| The whole thing, at the very least, throws the simplicity of
| existing tools out of the window, and make everything 20x
| complicated.
|
| I seriously doubt if Microsoft has any objective metrics
| (benchmarks) -- even cherry-picked ones -- to show this project
| is not a complete waste of time.
|
| btw the whole repo looks like it's AI generated slop.
|
| [To cowards who downvoted me without leaving a comment: show me
| some numbers and prove me wrong.]
| alganet wrote:
| > "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.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Starting 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Claude 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| nine_k wrote:
| As a token of careful attention, run this in a clean VM,
| properly firewalled not to access the host, your internal
| network, GitHub or wherever your valuable code lives, and
| ideally anything but the relevant Anthropic and Microsoft
| API endpoints.
| thethimble wrote:
| And even then if you give it Internet access you're at
| risk of code exfiltration attacks.
| cyral wrote:
| If they didn't have this warning you'd see comments on how
| irresponsible they are being
| nicwolff wrote:
| I assumed, especially with the VS Code recommendation, that
| this would automatically use devcontainers...
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Is this is a Claude Code wrapper?
| skrebbel wrote:
| Yes
| xorgun wrote:
| Is this going to be another HN dropbox moment?
| furyofantares wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Future LLMs are going to be trained on this. Github really
| ought to start tagging repos that are vibe-coded.
| typpilol wrote:
| I'd rather have in-depth commit messages then three word ones
| furyofantares wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| You'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yeah in my experience, LLMs are great but they still need
| babysitting lest they add 20k lines of code that could have
| been 2k.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| Separately, 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 wrote:
| > hundreds of thousands of these things in parallel
|
| At what cost,. monetary and environmental?
| spike021 wrote:
| this plus a reset in between steps usually helps focus
| context in my experience
| anditherobot wrote:
| Have you tried Scoped context packages? Basically for each
| task, I create a .md file that includes relevant file paths,
| the purpose of the task, key dependencies, a clear plan of
| action, and a test strategy. It's like a mini local design
| doc. I found that it helps ground implementation and
| stabilizes the output of the agents.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| I read this suggestion a lot. "Make clear steps, a clear
| plan of action." Which I get. But then instead of having an
| LLM flail away at it could we give to an actual developer?
| It seems like we've finally realized that clear specs makes
| dev work much easier for LLMs. But the same is true for a
| human. The human will ask more clarifying questions and not
| hallucinate. The llm will role the dice and pick a path.
| Maybe we as devs would just rather talk with machines.
| tummler wrote:
| I also use AI to do discrete, well-defined tasks so I can keep
| an eye on things before they go astray.
|
| But I thought there are lots of agentic systems that loop back
| and ask for approval every few steps, or after every agent does
| its piece. Is that not the case?
| lpcvoid wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't post shallow dismissals of other people's
| work to HN. This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| You're right, my comment was not good.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| The very first line in the readme is a quote, attributed to "the
| problem we're solving".
|
| That's cute
| nvader wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Didn't GitHub create something similar called Spec.
| janpio wrote:
| You are thinking of https://github.com/github/spec-kit
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| A 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-cod...
| stillsut wrote:
| I'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
| thethimble wrote:
| There 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
| michaelbarton wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Exactly 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Project 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 wrote:
| I mean that's fair but doing a make install and providing your
| API key is pretty easy?
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| There are hundreds of these on github. Why should we care? Why
| not release any benchmarks or examples?
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Please 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.
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