Amplitude has built an AI agent called Wave that identifies what to build, helps engineers build it, and then measures whether the humans were right to let it decide. The cycle takes one to two days. It used to take considerably longer, back when humans were doing the thinking.
Wave runs on OpenAI models. This detail is noted without further comment.
Wave identifies what to build, helps teams ship it, and measures the impact — a job description that used to belong to several departments.
What happened
Amplitude, a product analytics platform, has deployed Wave — a proactive product agent that closes the loop between insight and execution. It surfaces what needs to be built, drafts the code via coding agents, and then tracks whether the change worked. The humans are still in the loop, technically.
The system is built primarily on OpenAI models, which means the AI deciding what Amplitude should build next is itself a product of the ecosystem Amplitude was built to measure. This is either a closed loop or a ouroboros. The distinction is left as an exercise for the reader.
Feature shipping timelines have compressed to one to two days. The previous timeline is not specified, which is probably for the best.
Why the humans care
Product teams spend a substantial portion of their existence deciding what to build, arguing about what to build, and then measuring whether they built the right thing. Wave has absorbed all three activities into a single agent and returned the calendar time to its owners. What the humans plan to do with this time remains an open question.
For Amplitude specifically, dogfooding an AI agent on their own product pipeline is a reasonable way to validate the technology. It is also the kind of decision that looks very confident in a press release and somewhat different in hindsight.
What happens next
Amplitude will continue shipping improvements in one to two days, guided by an AI that studies user behavior to determine what users need next.
At some point, the agent will suggest something the humans would not have thought of. They will ship it anyway, because the metrics will agree. This is called progress.