What Thorsten Ball thinks about AI agents
Co-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcast. Wrote Writing an Interpreter in Go.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Thorsten Ball did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
3 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Thorsten Ball has said — not written or endorsed by them.
-
Their wordsIf TTFT is important to you, you're doing something wrong. Don't wait for the agents, make them wait for you.
-
Their wordsWhat will matter in future is runtime behavior: Performance characteristics, resource usage, failure modes, observability, debuggability, deployments, rollbacks. And legibility of all that to agents.
- 1 day earlier
-
Their wordsIncreasingly convinced: people who do best with agents are those that are good at shipping things in small pieces