Amp Neo reports scaling issues as remote Mac-mini beta reaches airplane Wi-Fi users

• Amp paused broader Neo access after hitting scaling problems in what sqs's rollout update and AmpCode's incident post both described as a new architecture.
• The rollback path is explicit: sqs's bug notice, AmpCode's incident post, and sqs's later reply all point beta users to amp --take-me-back for the pre-Neo CLI.
• Early users still showed Neo's core trick working, with RayFernando1337's in-flight demo running a job on a home Mac mini and streaming it through the web UI, then RayFernando1337's first-impressions thread saying it stayed responsive over airplane Wi-Fi.
• RayFernando1337's thread also framed Neo as a lower-overhead agent UX: no model picking, no slash commands, no skill-file setup, just a prompt and a remote machine.

sqs's rollout update says the wider rollout was paused, but RayFernando1337's in-flight demo still showed work streaming from a Mac mini at home to the web. AmpCode's incident thread makes the infrastructure story plain, first calling the issue a scaling problem, then briefly marking it resolved, then walking that back. The interesting bit is that the beta exposed a coding-agent setup where the compute stayed on the user's own machine while the control surface stayed reachable from a phone or laptop in transit.

Amp started publicly flagging trouble on May 7, when AmpCode said the company was seeing scaling issues with its new architecture. Thirty minutes later AmpCode's follow-up claimed the incident was resolved with more machines online, then AmpCode's next update said it was not fully resolved after all.

By May 8 and May 9, sqs's bug notice and sqs's later post had shifted from incident updates to rollout policy: Neo was no longer opening to more people, but individual users could still be manually let in if they wanted to test through instability.

The clearest user demo came from RayFernando1337's in-flight demo, which showed a run kicked off against a Mac mini at home and streamed through the web while he was on a flight. In RayFernando1337's follow-up, he said the loop still felt realtime over slow airplane Wi-Fi on an SFO to Hawaii route.

That thread surfaces three concrete product behaviors:

• Remote execution on a user-controlled machine, not only in a vendor-hosted environment, per the demo post.
• A web control plane that can be driven from mobile, per the follow-up thread and RayFernando1337's baggage-claim reply.
• An abstraction layer that hides model choice, context-window management, thinking settings, planning, and handoff decisions, according to RayFernando1337's first impressions.

The most concrete operational detail in the whole beta is the escape hatch: amp --take-me-back. sqs's bug notice said it switches users back to the unaffected non-beta CLI, AmpCode's incident post repeated the same command during the outage, and sqs's rollout update kept using it even while selectively admitting more testers.

That makes Neo's current state unusually legible for a beta. The company is treating the old Amp as the stable path, Neo as the new architecture under load, and capacity as the gating factor for who gets to touch it right now.

Most of the feature novelty here is in the control surface, not just the agent loop. RayFernando1337's UI post called the web interface clean, while sqs's airplane Wi-Fi trip report suggests the team was actively testing the same remote-use pattern themselves.

The beta evidence points to Neo as a hybrid setup: local or self-hosted execution on a personal machine, plus a web front end that keeps the session reachable from elsewhere. That is a different pitch from coding agents that run entirely inside the local IDE or entirely inside the vendor cloud.