{"slug": "orbs", "title": "Orbs", "summary": "Amp, the coding agent and development environment company, introduced orbs, remote agents that run in cloud-based virtual machines and can be controlled from the web, phone, or CLI. Orbs support portals, sharing, multiplayer collaboration, scheduled wake-ups, and agent-to-agent communication, with pricing only when running. The feature, announced by Thorsten Ball on August 25, 2026, aims to move development beyond local setups.", "body_md": "Thorsten Ball//August 25, 2026\n\nHere are some of the letters we received in the last weeks:\n\n“Orb? What’s an orb?” “Ralph, loops, graphs, and now orbs?” “What the fuck are orbs?” “You can’t call them orbs” “I hate it when people say ‘it’s orbin’ time’ - I hate it when people have fun!”\n\nOkay, that last one’s made-up, threw it in there as a joke.\n\nYou gotta keep your humour when people get offended by names.\n\nAnd at the same time, it’s easy to laugh because we also get many letters like this one:\n\nBut how do I make you go from angry to happy? I’d say: try orbs! Go to [ampcode.com](http://ampcode.com) and try them!\n\nBut it looks like the name’s the problem, so, let’s talk about names.\n\nAmp is the name of our company and our product: a coding agent and a development environment.\n\nOrbs are part of our product: they are remote agents — coding agents that run in a remote machine (i.e. not your local computer) — and you can remote control them from [ampcode.com](http://ampcode.com), from your phone, or from our CLI.\n\nYes, they are VMs, or sandboxes, or whatever you want to call them. Remote machines that we spin up for you, put your code into, and start the Amp agent on. They come in different sizes.\n\nBut with orbs you don’t really have to think about the “remote” or the “machine” parts.\n\nHere’s how you run an agent in an orb:\n\n`New thread`\n\nand type in your promptAn orb will spawn up, with your code on it, and the agent will start running.\n\nThis is what it looks like, uncut:\n\nOnce the agent is idle, the orb will go to sleep. When you send another prompt, it will wake up again and so too will the agent. (Orbs can sleep for as long as you want: we’ve had orbs asleep for weeks and then came back to them. Doesn’t cost anything. You only pay when the orb is running.)\n\nYou can watch and control the orb from anywhere: on your phone, on the web, in the TUI.\n\nYou can spawn hundreds of them. Thousands. There’s no limit.\n\nYou can choose between small and large orbs.\n\nThat’s it, now you know what orbs are.\n\nExcept…\n\nWhen people refer to orbs and say that they’re “magical”, or that they completely left behind their local development setup, or even say stuff like “it’s orbin’ time!” what they mean is more than that. Orbs are [more than just VMs](https://x.com/thorstenball/status/2087554456971882650).\n\nOrbs have portals, for example. Anything that can speak HTTP and listen on a port can be a portal to your orb, and you can open it in Amp:\n\nYou can annotate the things you see in a portal and send messages to the agent:\n\nEach portal has a custom URL that you can share with your teammates in case you want their feedback on what they’re working on.\n\nSpeaking of URLs: the whole orb thread (i.e. your conversation with the agent in the orb) has a URL and you can share that too. Your teammates can then see the whole conversation you had with the agent:\n\nAnd then, guess what, you can also invite your teammates to the orb and have *multiplayer orbs* in which you can chat with your teammates and they can chat with your agent:\n\nOf course you can review what the agent built in that orb:\n\nYou can browse through other files in your repository:\n\nYou can use a terminal in case you want to execute something on the orb:\n\nAnd, remember when I said that orbs go to sleep when the agent is idle? You can wake it on a schedule. Every 30 minutes, every morning at 9am, or every Sunday, whatever:\n\nJust say something like “Do this every 45 min for the next 8 hours” and the agent will obey and will set a schedule and the orb will go to sleep and wake up again in 45 min.\n\nBut not only can we ask an agent to wake itself again, no. We can also ask the agent to spawn other orbs:\n\nAnd agents can send messages and files to each other, inside orbs:\n\nCombine 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.\n\nAnd *that’s* why we called them orbs and not just *“remote agents”* or “cloud agents” or “agent that runs in an ephemeral cloud box that wakes up and goes to sleep depending on the agent’s state and that has a unique URL and some very sweet features around it.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orbs", "canonical_source": "https://ampcode.com/notes/orbs-explained", "published_at": "2026-08-25 16:56:15+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-25 17:16:14.525908+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-products", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Amp", "Thorsten Ball", "ampcode.com"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orbs", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orbs.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orbs.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orbs.jsonld"}}