Amit Agrawal

Builder @ Amazon | AI-native work agents & harnesses
Testing what works • What breaks • Market reality checks
All views are my own • Not speaking for Amazon

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

Tried Grok Build CLI today and it’s exactly what I wanted from a terminal coding agent.

Blazing speed, familiar interface, 256K context that actually keeps the full trace without forced summarization. Plan Mode forces clean discipline before any edits, and parallel subagents with their own contexts feel like a real harness instead of a chat wrapper.

Early beta but already one of the stronger agentic CLI experiences I’ve used. The terminal is the product here.

Curious how others are using it for longer agent workflows.
#GrokBuild #xAI #AgenticCoding

[Cursor @cursor_ai]

We’re introducing the Cursor SDK so you can build agents with the same runtime, harness, and models that power Cursor.

Run agents from CI/CD pipelines, create automations for end-to-end workflows, or embed agents directly inside your products.

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

The average knowledge worker switches between nine to twelve applications over 1,200 times a day. That is not a productivity statistic. It is an architecture failure. Every switch destroys context, resets working memory, and forces the human to serve as the integration layer between systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

AI copilots tried to fix this by bolting a language model onto each tool — a summarizer for Slack, a composer for email, a search assistant for SharePoint. The result was fifteen narrow AIs that don't talk to each other. The fragmentation didn't disappear. It just got a chat interface.

The fix is not better copilots. It is a single agent that holds a live connection to every system you work in — and turns those connections into durable methodology and Workflows.

Enter Amazon Quick Desktop!

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

Amazon Quick Desktop just launched today 🔥

AWS dropped a persistent AI teammate that runs in the background on Mac & Windows. It connects your email, calendar, Slack, local files, Salesforce + more, builds a personal knowledge graph, and actually takes action.

The always-on Copilot competitor?

Official page: https://t.co/Rm9P0WcNuD

2/3 ↓

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

Quick Desktop has been a game changer. The Productivity Unlock is next level.

This is my new builder stack for everyday work:
- Quick Desktop for AI Native Work
- integration with Kiro and Claude Code for GitOps and AWS infra deployments

[Andy Jassy @ajassy]

The Quick desktop app is here, and it’s compelling.

Connects to your email, calendar, Slack, local files, and several other apps to flag important communications, retrieve and summarize info, make recommendations, send communications, and create agents that do work you used to have to do yourself. Gets smarter and more personalized the more you use it.

Been using it a lot recently and is changing how I work. It’s allowing me to use applications like my inbox more like an archive, and Quick as my personalized, prioritized, productivity hub that can multi-task various needs.

Still early days, and a lot more coming, but excited for folks to start using it to make the undifferentiated work so much less complicated. https://t.co/UtuGTDx4gT

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

Early users say sales teams save 5+ hrs/week and analysts cut document time dramatically.

Amazon built the unifying layer for fragmented work — not just another chatbot.

Have you downloaded Quick Desktop yet?
Running it with Copilot? Drop your thoughts 👇

#QuickDesktop #AmazonQuick #AWS #AgenticAI #EnterpriseAI #MicrosoftCopilot

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

Quick Desktop vs Microsoft 365 Copilot – Quick Take:

• Ecosystem → Quick wins (mixed Microsoft + Google + Salesforce stacks)
• Always-on desktop → Quick (true background agent)
• Agentic automation → Quick (multi-app workflows)
• Deep Office work → Copilot still king (Word/Excel/Teams)
• Pricing → Quick cheaper + 30-day free trial (up to 25 users)

Most smart teams will run both.

3/3 ↓

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

Met the @resolveai founders at AWS Loft & saw their demo! 🤯 AI-powered monitoring, log analysis, root cause investigation, tracing, code review, K8s tracking, alerts & infra mapping. Boosts uptime & diagnosis for SREs! #SiteReliability #DevOps #AIObservability

[Reid Hoffman @reidhoffman]

ChatGPT may be the first AI that most of the 8 billion people on our planet use.

Some people don't understand why OpenAI took the risk of deprecating all previous models in favor of GPT-5.

It’s a full-throttle, no-looking-back blitzscale bet. And here’s why it may win:

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

AI coding tools are shifting to a surprising place: The terminal https://t.co/tJqlAggisw via @techcrunch

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

wow things move fast ..

[Cognition @cognition]

Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf.

The acquisition includes Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark and brand, and strong business. Above all, it includes Windsurf’s world-class people, whom we’re privileged to welcome to our team.

We are also honoring their talent and hard work in building Windsurf into the great business it is today. This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially. They will also have all vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date.

At Cognition we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents, while Windsurf has pioneered the agentic IDE. Devin + Windsurf are a powerful combination for the developers we serve. Working side by side, we’ll soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devin’s codebase understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devins in parallel, complete the highest-leverage parts yourself with the help of autocomplete, and stitch it all back together in the same IDE.

Cognition and Windsurf are united behind a shared vision for the future of software engineering, and there’s never been a better time to build. Welcome to our new colleagues from Windsurf!

[nico @nicochristie]

Introducing Shortcut — the first superhuman Excel agent.

Shortcut one-shots most knowledge work tasks on Excel.

It even scores >80% on Excel World Championship Cases in ~10 minutes. That's 10x faster than humans.

Our early preview is live. Just comment for an invite code.

[Merit Systems @merit_systems]

Today, we’re introducing the Terminal.

Pay anyone and any project on Github.

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

Only 11 days left! Start building your apps. The finish line is near!

[bolt.new @boltdotnew]

It's time to set a Guinness World Record.

Registration is now LIVE at https://t.co/y3OwMLa1N1:
→ $1M+ in prizes
→ Global IRL events
→ Legendary founders & investors judging

If you've got ideas for apps or startups, this is your moment— *especially* if you don't code👇

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

This guy tried 46 AI coding agents & IDEs! Check out the ultimate list with demos & notes: https://t.co/fV0yGTI2uS

[Amit Agrawal @Amitrixed]

In 2024, North American startups secured 75.6% of all VC AI funding — $106.24 billion. That share has only increased this year. So far in 2025, North American AI investments represent 86.2% ($79.74 billion) of all VC funding for AI globally.

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

North America takes the bulk of AI VC investments, despite tough political environment | TechCrunch https://t.co/Q7Mv9X7Td5

[jack @jack]

cool

[Balaji @balajis]

AI OVERPRODUCTION

China seeks to commoditize their complements. So, over the following months, I expect a complete blitz of Chinese open-source AI models for everything from computer vision to robotics to image generation.

Why? I’m just inferring this from public statements, but their apparent goal is to take the profit out of AI software since they make money on AI-enabled hardware. Basically, they want to do to US tech (the last stronghold) what they already did to US manufacturing. Namely: copy it, optimize it, scale it, then wreck the Western original with low prices.

I don’t know if they’ll succeed.
But here’s the logic:

(1) First, China noticed that DeepSeek’s release temporarily knocked ~$1T off US tech market caps.

(2) Second, China’s core competency is exporting physical widgets, more than it is software.

(3) Third, China’s other core competency is exporting things at such massive scale that all foreign producers are bankrupted and they win the market. See what they’re doing to German and Japanese cars, for example.

(4) Fourth, China is well aware that it lacks global prestige as it’s historically been a copycat. With DeepSeek, becoming #1 in AI is now something they actually consider possibly achievable, and a matter of national pride.

(5) Fifth, DeepSeek has gone viral in China and its open source nature means that everyone can rapidly integrate it, down to the level of local officials and obscure companies. And they are doing so, and posting the results for praise on WeChat.

(6) Finally, while DeepSeek was obscure before recent events, it’s now a household name, and the founder (Liang Wengfeng) has met both with Xi but also the #2 in China, Li Qiang. They likely have unlimited resources now.

So, if you put all that together, China thinks it has an opportunity to hit US tech companies, boost its prestige, help its internal economy, and take the margins out of AI software globally (at least at the model level).

They will instead make their money by selling inexpensive AI-enabled hardware of increasing quality, from smart homes and self-driving cars to consumer drones and robot dogs.

Basically, China is trying to do to AI what they always do: study, copy, optimize, and then bankrupt everyone with low prices and enormous scale.

I don’t know if they’ll succeed at the app layer. But it could be hard for closed-source AI model developers to recoup the high fixed costs associated with training state-of-the-art models when great open source models are available.

Last, I agree it’s surprising that the country of the Great Firewall is suddenly the country of open source AI. But it is consistent in a different way, which is that China is just focused on doing whatever it takes to win — even to the point of copying partially-abandoned Western values like open source, which seemed like the hardest thing to adopt.

On that point: they did build censorship into the released DeepSeek AI models, but in a manner that’s easily circumvented outside China. So, you might conclude they don’t really care what non-Chinese people are saying outside China in other languages, so long as this doesn’t “interfere with China’s internal affairs.”

Anyway —this is an area I’ve been watching, and my reluctant conclusion is that China is getting better at software faster than the West is getting better at hardware.

[Richie McPeak @McpeakRichie]

What’s done is done. So I got back to work this morning.

December 2020 sarcoma cancer took my left leg above the knee. I cried for one day and then I worked my ass off to walk again.

I found out Monday there is a real possibility sarcoma cancer will now take a large portion of my right leg. I cried for a few minutes and now it’s time to build strength in my upper body.

We can focus on what we lost or choose to focus on what we can gain. I chose the latter.

Every step is a finish line.

@Team_neverquit