Thorsten Ball's Amp Adds Configurable Remote 'Orbs' and Ships Opus 4.8-Powered 'Smart' Mode

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Early-July Amp updates let users pick the CPU and memory for the remote 'orbs' that run agents (32GB/16-core orbs bill at $1.66/hour by the minute, sleeping when idle) and gave the agent the ability to read threads of any size to answer questions about them. Its 'smart' mode is now powered by Claude Opus 4.8, which makes tighter changes and checks its own work. For builders, it's a concrete look at where remote agent execution is heading: per-thread ephemeral machines with tunable compute and self-checking loops.