Amp 2026.05.06

Amp 2026.05.06 was released on May 6, 2026.

Summary

Amp, Rebuilt Today we're starting to roll out the new Amp. Not all of it, not yet. But the first piece: a rebuilt Amp CLI. Codename: Neo. In The Coding Agent is Dead we wrote about where this is go...

Release Notes

Amp, Rebuilt Today we're starting to roll out the new Amp. Not all of it, not yet. But the first piece: a rebuilt Amp CLI. Codename: Neo. In The Coding Agent is Dead we wrote about where this is going: agents with longer leashes, less handholding, and many more places to run. Not just one agent in one terminal. Agents prompted from anywhere, running everywhere. That's the new Amp we're building. But the terminal still matters and will matter. There will be moments where you want the agent right next to you. So we rebuilt the CLI first. It is still Amp in your terminal. But it's running on a completely new architecture: remote-controllable, compaction-first, plugin-powered, and much faster. Built for what's coming. Let's walk through it. Remote Control When you start a thread in the new Amp CLI, you can now remote control it from ampcode.com. You'll not only get live updates but you can also send messages, queue and dequeue them, or cancel what the agent is currently doing: The architecture that enables this is the reason we rewrote Amp. And remote control is just the start. Update (2026-2026-05-27): You can now require passkey authentication to use remote control. No More Manual Context Management A core principle behind the rebuild: build for what the frontier models can do now, in 2026, and what they will be able to do in the future. Do not build for what once was. Today's leading frontier models are great at handling compaction. So Amp now manages context for you. You don't have to watch context percentages anymore, or decide when to handoff, or extract information from a thread in a panic. When the context window fills up, Amp now compacts the thread: it summarizes the current context, starts a fresh window with that summary, and keeps going. Compaction now runs automatically when the context window is 90% full. It was also the first thing we added to the new architecture. During one migration, we had to shut it off for a day and everyone complained. One beta-user reported: "I love having auto-compaction. NOT missing handoff..." So handoff is out. Compaction is in. Plugins With this release we're officially releasing the Amp Plugin API. Amp plugins can: - Handle events — amp.on(...) for tool calls, tool results, and agent lifecycle events - Add tools — amp.registerTool(...) for custom tools the agent can call - Add commands — amp.registerCommand(...) for command palette actions - Show UI elements — ctx.ui.notify(...), ctx.ui.confirm(...), ctx.ui.input(...), and ctx.ui.select(...) - Ask AI questions — amp.ai.ask(...) for yes/no classification with confidence and reasoning Here, for example, is a plugin that registers a tool called askuserchoice. The agent can use it to present the user with options: Update (September 2026): askuserchoice is now a built-in Amp tool available to everyone, so you no longer need this plugin. If you added one like it, tell Amp: "Remove the ask-user-choice plugin; Amp now has a built-in askuserchoice tool." The example below still shows how plugin tools and UI work. // .amp/plugins/ask-user-choice.ts import type { PluginAPI } from '@ampcode/plugin' export default function (amp: PluginAPI) { amp.registerTool({ name: 'askuserchoice', description: 'Present the user with a multiple choice question when there are several possible approaches and you need them to pick one. Use when you have 2-5 concrete options to choose from.', inputSchema: { type: 'object', properties: { question: { type: 'string', description: 'The question to ask the user' }, options: { type: 'array', items: { type: 'string' }, description: 'The options to choose from (2-5 items)', }, }, required: ['question', 'options'], }, async execute(input, ctx) { const question = input.question as string const options = input.options as string[] const optionsList = options.map((opt, i) => ${i + 1}. ${opt}).join('\n') const answer = await ctx.ui.input({ title: question, helpText: ${optionsList}\n\nType the number of your choice, submitButtonText: 'Select', }) if (!answer) return 'User dismissed the question without choosing.' const index = parseInt(answer.trim(), 10) - 1 if (index >= 0 && index < options.length) { return User selected option ${index + 1}: ${options[index]} } return User responded with: ${answer} }, }) } That's it: a single file in .amp/plugins and Amp gets a new tool. It looks like this: The Amp Plugin API documentation has more examples, including a full permissions plugin. Queuing & Steering Queuing messages is now the default. When you send a message while the agent is busy, it'll get added to the queue instead of stopping and interrupting the agent. This, too, we think fits the models of today and tomorrow better. They work for longer and need fewer mid-flight yanks. If you want to fast-track a queued message, you can steer. Steering lets you send a queued message as soon as possible, not just when the agent becomes idle. The next time a tool result is sent up to the agent, for example. Use ↑ to select a queued message, then steer it with ⏎: You can also hit Esc Esc to interrupt the agent and send immediately. Permissions Amp will no longer ask for permission before running tools. What was once the --dangerously-allow-all flag is now the default behavior for users who have not configured permissions. The old permissions system still exists. It's now a built-in plugin. If your existing Amp settings already opt into permissions — through amp.permissions, amp.dangerouslyAllowAll: false, or amp.guardedFiles.allowlist — Amp loads that plugin and works as before. (When the plugin is active, it applies in both amp and amp --execute.) Why change the default? A year ago tool calls were simpler to check: inspect the name, inspect the arguments, do string-based matching, allow or deny. Now, frontier models w...

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