Lately I’m enjoying starting orbs for random ideas. Here I asked amp to whip up an audio editor based on beat grid and rudimentary DJ mixer that takes me back to my Traktor Days so I could see how edits of a song would feel to mix. Medium with Opus 5.5 is all I need.

Amp time capsule: screencast production Last week @thorstenball recorded a screencast of what it’s like working day to day in Amp. Then, Amp helped me edit the screencast, with a custom editor served in an orb portal, while an agent on my Mac helped source the original recordings from the Screen Studio project, and re-implement its custom macOS cursor recording format. Highlights: - Reconstructing an 8.4 GB, 2,976-file Screen Studio project from a Google Drive multipart download; Amp verified every segment against the three HLS playlists and extracted the original desktop, webcam, and mic tracks. - Custom screencast editor in an orb, served through a portal: three synced 60 fps tracks, JKL shuttle, split/trim/ripple, layouts (full, PiP, side-by-side), chapter markers, autosave, and browser-side H.264 export. - Spawned a subthread to audit the marketing site and design an interactive player format, so one edit exports both a directed MP4 and a two-stream bundle plus manifest that lets viewers switch layouts and jump to features interactively. - Screen Studio Cursors: The mac thread found the 222,749 raw mouse events, worked out the logical-point coordinate system and menu-bar crop, wrote the spec, and the orb thread implemented projection through every layout, with the cursor following cuts exactly. - Local Mac and an orb together: the Mac thread read the 8 GB project and sent a 3.6 MB fixture up; the orb sent a git patch down and a Mac runner rendered the 27-minute 2610×1080 60 fps master (1.2 GB), then losslessly embedded chapters.

Building small apps is so addictive, when you can fire off ideas without agents consuming your machine. In 30 mins I had a deployed utility to trim, crop, and add a background to videos—something I used to have to resort to Adobe After Effects for.

In a meta production note, I created some jellyware to help with Raising an Agent production. We produce widescreen and square artwork for each episode, taking stills from the videos. I used to use a Figma template and copy and paste screenshots from QuickTime. Today I orbed up a purpose-built app that lets me scan the video, add stills, and configure both templates quicker than fussing around in Figma.

yesterday I shipped a new device emulation mode to amp portals, supporting emulating preferences like reduced animation, system theme, high contrast, and different viewport sizes it was a totally idle idea i orbed up while working on my main tasks, iterated and validated without having to juggle anything on my local machine. so many ideas like this are now more shippable than ever, with less friction than ever