Tab, Tab, Dead

Summary

Amp is discontinuing its Tab completion feature by the end of January 2026. The company argues that the development paradigm has fundamentally shifted: AI agents, not humans, now generate most production code.

Key Points

• "Amp writes 90% of what we ship" — The team's own workflow proves the shift. Manual code writing has become a minor part of their development process.
• The original premise is broken. Tab completion assumed humans write most code with AI assistance. That assumption no longer holds.
• The real bottleneck changed. Speed of code output matters less than speed of code review and deployment. Developers now spend more time validating what agents produce than typing.
• Strategic pivot to post-agentic tools. Amp recommends alternatives (Cursor, Copilot, Zed) for users who still need inline completion, while the company focuses on agent-first development.

The Paradigm Shift

flowchart LR
    subgraph Old["Old Model"]
        H1[Human writes code] --> A1[AI assists via autocomplete]
    end
    subgraph New["New Model"]
        A2[AI agent writes code] --> H2[Human reviews & deploys]
    end
    Old -.->|"paradigm shift"| New

Connections

• ai-codes-better-than-me-now-what — Lee Robinson describes the same shift: AI agents have surpassed his coding ability, and the bottleneck moved from writing code to building great products
• front-end-engineering-is-dead-long-live-front-end-composability — Another "X is dead" argument about AI transforming how developers work, shifting focus from hand-coding to designing composable systems