Execute Mode

Use -x or --execute to start the CLI in execute mode. In this mode, it sends the message provided to -x to the agent, waits until the agent ends its turn, prints its final message, and exits. Use -ox instead to run the same prompt in an orb on Amp’s servers rather than on your machine; see Spawning Orbs.

Run a prompt locally:

$ amp -x "what files in this folder are markdown files? Print only the filenames."
README.md
AGENTS.md

You can also pipe input when using -x:

$ echo "what package manager is used here?" | amp -x
cargo

Interactive CLI threads remember whether the last thread used Fast mode. Execute mode and other noninteractive thread creation default to Standard mode each time. Pass --fast to enable Fast mode for one invocation. It is an alias for --features fast and works with -x and piped input.

Execute mode is automatically turned on when you redirect stdout:

$ echo "what is 2+2?" | amp > response.txt

When you pipe input and provide a prompt with -x, the agent can see both:

$ cat ~/.vimrc | amp -x "which colorscheme is used?"
The colorscheme used is **gruvbox** with dark background and hard contrast.

```vim
set background=dark
let g:gruvbox_contrast_dark = "hard"
colorscheme gruvbox
```

You can use the --mcp-config flag with -x commands to specify an MCP server without changing your settings file:

$ amp --mcp-config '{"everything": {"command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-everything"]}}' -x "What tools are available to you?"

If your plugins rely on the agent.start and agent.end lifecycle events, use the --plugin-ready-timeout flag to make execute mode wait for plugins to become ready before running the turn. Without it, the turn can start before plugins finish loading, and those events are skipped. The bare flag waits up to 10 seconds. Pass a number of seconds for a different limit. The maximum is 300, and 0 disables the wait. The turn starts as soon as plugins are ready.

$ amp -x "summarize this repo" --plugin-ready-timeout
$ amp -x "summarize this repo" --plugin-ready-timeout 30

Spawning Orbs

Use -ox instead of -x to run the prompt in an orb on Amp’s servers. The CLI prints the new thread’s URL and exits while the agent keeps working:

$ amp -ox "Investigate why the latest CI run on main failed"
https://ampcode.com/threads/T-…

See Spawning Orbs for choosing the project and orb size, continuing an existing orb thread, and streaming output from an orb.

Non-Interactive Environments

For non-interactive environments, such as scripts and CI/CD pipelines, set your access token in an environment variable:

export AMP_API_KEY=your-access-token-here

Use an access token from Settings, which starts with sgamp_. The CLI rejects the short-lived session token that amp login stores, because it expires within an hour and cannot be refreshed from an environment variable.