Sourcegraph's coding agent Amp is rolling out a ground-up rewrite of its CLI, codenamed Neo. The big change: the agent now manages its own context window — automatically compressing summaries when it hits 90% capacity and spinning up a new window. This ditches the old Handoff mechanism that required you to do it manually. Local agent threads can be controlled in real-time from the web interface at ampcode.com: send messages, queue tasks, cancel them.
Amp is also launching a Plugin API. Plugins can listen to tool calls and agent lifecycle events, register custom tools and commands, pop up UI interactions, and even call AI for classification. The permission system has been overhauled, too: the default is now no pop-up confirmations — the old --dangerously-allow-all flag is now the default behavior. The official reasoning: frontier models now write one-off scripts and chain shell commands, so static checks for rm -rf don't cut it anymore. Teams that need granular permission control can build their own policies via the Plugin API.
Performance numbers: in a test with a thread of about 5,000 messages, average CPU usage dropped from 84.1% to 17.4%, and idle memory fell from 1,814MB to 540MB. Message queuing is now on by default: messages sent while the agent is busy are automatically queued instead of interrupting the current task.
Along with Handoff, Amp has also removed file change rollback, skill management commands, custom themes, and manual bash invocation. The official line: these features were tied to a 2025-era usage pattern where models needed more babysitting. Now that model capabilities have improved, they're no longer necessary.