tmux + Terminal Maxxing with Ben Vinegar

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we have the former general manager of Syntax and the cofounder of Modem, which is an AI project manager and a non annoying terminal guy. Too oftentimes, we have terminal folks who are just, why don't you do it this way? Ben has a really awesome setup, and we're gonna be diving into all of the ways that he is using his terminal for running agents, all of the cool things that he is doing. And, man, I'm so excited to catch up with Ben, but I'm also excited to dive into some of his projects because just watching his most recent talk, man, it solved a lot of the problems I'm personally having. So we're gonna dive all into all of that and more. My name is Scott Tolinski, and with me JS always is Wes. But most importantly,

welcome, Ben. Hey, guys.

It's good to be back. Wes. This is your second time on Syntax?

Or It's a third time. It's a third time. Yeah. Going back a while. Yeah. But the last one was an emergency fill in, so it's nice to be, you know, properly invited.

Sometimes Wes need emergency fill ins, and and you're you're just the guy for that. So Yeah. Yeah. Lots to say. And Ben had a talk at the AI Engineer conference a couple weeks ago, and I just watched the video, and I thought it was super interesting, his, like, rig of, like, how he's doing agent decoding, how it's done remotely, SSH ing into boxes and doing it on a box versus locally.

Tmux, I've been like a I I would say it's fair that I'm a Tmux hater.

Aaron hater. May maybe changed. You know? Never never really understood, all of the hype around it, but Ben's usage of it, pretty good. So I I think, like, let's let's dive into that, man. Like, talk to Ben.

Not understander.

Yes. Yes. So I'm I'm curious.

Okay. So I don't know. The background is look. I'm a Mac enjoyer. Okay? Mhmm. I like IDEs.

I have used Cursor primarily, but even before that, Versus Node, like, probably a lot of people.

Look, even gave the JetBrains stack like a pretty good go there for a while. So like, that's like, I like debuggers. I like all those tools and everything.

And look, when we're building Node, I think it's worth mentioning that Modem is like a, we started like a year ago, and it's AI product management product. It could be project too. That's okay. Oh, product. Did I say project? Yeah. But like, you know, the lines blur between them, so it's okay.

Really quickly, product management, you know, helping you do the non coding tasks.

I could talk about this later, but, you know, synthesizing feedback from customers, making sure your ticket backlog makes sense, following up with users when you land some stuff. I'll cut it off there. We started about a year ago, and we actually decided that we would code gen the product, like the project from the very beginning. It was kind of like, look, the whole thesis of Node is AI coding is a 100% gonna be totally real, and if you believe that, then it's gonna go down, like, the time to deliver code is just gonna keep dropping, and then, like, the other parts of your job are gonna be boring and slow. So can we work on that? And that's kind of where Modem came from. And if we're gonna build it, if we believed in that future, we had to, like, build it that way from the beginning.

So I'd say it's like 99% Node gen, but like tasteful curated code gen, like everything is code reviewed.

We go back and forth with the agents a lot. We do edit the code. Man, I was having this problem, which was, I feel like it's a problem that you're seeing a lot of lately, which JS, I don't have a setup where I've I have, like, a there's no Jira backlog or or linear backlog Wes agents are just spinning up all day.

Yeah. Have you guys tried that? No. No. I don't

I I think that's the craziest thing that people have, like, agents just constantly picking things up and churning. Like, if I if I were to let a rip on my, like, GitHub issues for all of my projects, I'd I'd be done in a couple days,

and it would not be very good. Yeah. It would not be very good. Right. Yeah. I like, I've experimented

with it.

Even Node, because it had like, it ingests data and, like, conversation data and says, like, hey, these are, like, product features that people are interested in. I've experimented with just having, like, Node spin up agents to build stuff.

I don't know. I don't think we're there yet, guys. So Yeah.

I was just thinking, well, like, how can I get more done? And I started thinking about all the ways that I was being kind of like, I don't know, not getting as much productivity as I wanted. And one of the most basic ones, frankly, is that the machine has to be on all the time.

You know? And I I feel like you're seeing this online with people joking about cracked laptops, or I feel like I even just saw a video of someone with, like, a harness walking down the street with their laptop like like this.

Oh, I was just telling Wes moments ago, I I installed it.

It's an app called oh, man. What is this thing called? It's called Caffeinate. Keep keeping you awake, which is like a free version of Caffeinate, which, yeah, it it means you can shut your your lid of your laptop and have your agents still keep running. Even if I had them still running,

I don't know. I don't have, like, a permanent Internet. Like, maybe you can solve this entirely. I do have a friend who's, like, walking around with a massive battery in his backpack, for example, and, like, a permanent Internet connection. So people are doing it this way. Oh my god. Yeah. You know, like, I'd start a job in the middle of the night. Like, I would I don't know. You ever done this? Like, I'd I'd queue, you know, like, I'd I'd write, like, a plan, and then, like, maybe, like, midnight, I'd be like, go. You know? Mhmm. Oh, I got a Wes. And then I come back in the morning and find out, well, one, maybe it got blocked on a tool approval call because I wasn't running dangerous mode. And even Yeah. Even though I thought I'd approved every single tool, like, nope, it tried to run one thing that I didn't approve, And so it stopped twenty minutes in or it turned off or whatever. So look, I just started running running my agents, you know, by shelling into machines leased or whatever, like, you know, get a get a droplet or get a VPS from Hertzner Digital Ocean. I've done a lot of that. And I also just have, like, a pretty beefy machine that I keep, connected in my basement with, now three gig fiber, which is pretty sweet. That's awesome. The connectivity one is another one. Like, if you're on the plane, if you're on the train, you're trying to work with agents and you barely got an Internet connection Yeah. As long as you can shell into a machine that has great Internet, like, you can you can go all day. So, anyways, that's the that's the preamble. I'll I'll pause there because I've been talking here. You know? Yeah. I I find that really interesting because I've been finding, like, my I got the MacBook m Node,

just m one Max, whatever, like, the the the best one you could buy when when I got it. And I've been noticing recently, it's, like, it's starting to slow down. And a lot of that is just because I'm running several agents at once. There's background processes. You Node? You're running a lot more software.

Things are starting to get laggy. And I often think, like, like, maybe I should just be running all of this stuff Scott on my machine. Right? You can run it when you're not there. You can run it when like, the the whole IBM thin client, like, are we are we back to that? We we could be. I'll also add I was hitting the the machine, like, limits too.

Like, look. You get two agents that are trying to hit, like, your test suite at the same time depending on depending on the test suite. Like a lot of our test suite hits the database, so they're pretty heavy. I've had problems with like max, you know, I have to optimize the number of connections you're opening, for example, on the test Scott. But I get up to I get I get up to max CPU pretty fast.

Yeah. Even on an m five. I don't know if you guys are there on that. Not yet. Not yet. But they I've been waiting for the next ones to come out. Wait yeah. Waiting for the next one. But, also, it's just, like, there's so many process that gets started and not stopped and just kinda sit around and hang out and take up space and all this stuff?

Yeah. So I don't know. Look. I just committed. I I may have had a weird setup anyways. Like, I really enjoy Node and Py and even just clod code.

I would do this thing with cursor where I'd actually just open up, like, a window, like, a dedicated terminal for, like, claud code or open code, but I would just use cursor for like tab complete and like navigating diffs and editing code.

So I felt like you're halfway there, like you're using, you know, once you realize that you're just using the terminal agent quite a lot and like, well, how much do I need this IDE? And so that turned into like, you know, as a norm as a norm core, like Mac user, what if I just shell in to my machine and I just do all the work there? You lose a bunch of things. I don't want to say that it like is awesome,

but I've learned a bunch of things along the way. So, like like, tell us about that. Because, like, I've I've SSH into boxes before, and, like, what I find is that it it's a little bit limited, because, like, you don't have all the stuff that you have installed on your machine, and, certainly, you can get all of that set up. So, like, is that what you're doing? You're just getting, like, a a box with everything installed that you Node, or you just kinda let the the agent install everything? So that's kinda like my first question. And the second one is, like, doesn't the terminal suck as a UI? I like, I use it every single day, but, like, limited, isn't it?

Well, let me Scott. I'll I'll give the setup. The setup that I use is Tailscale, you know, SSH into into the machine. I think you guys have talked about Tailscale here. Maybe even a dedicated video, if I remember correctly. Yep. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I use I love Tailscale. I I use it,

for every system. I have even my my wife set up on Tailscale to connect to our services.

Yeah. Still watching the syntax content? Still following along?

Right on. Was there a Tailscale episode, or did I hallucinate this whole thing? Maybe I'll No. It was a video. It's a dedicated video. Yeah. Okay. Alright. We've we've talked about it quite a bit. I've been using CloudFlare Tunnels. Scott's been using Tailscale. So we've we've mentioned it on several podcasts. I made I made a video all about my setup, which is similar to yours, but missing several key things that I'm excited to dive into.

And then after that, it's tmux, and tmux is a window multiplexer.

There's other ones of these that are more modern, like Xellij. Xellij is a popular one. I played around with that. But I'll I'll explain why tmux maybe a little bit more later because there's some real advantages to it. TMUX is a window manager for the terminal. So that gives you a couple of things. Like one, you can actually create windows, like panes. You can split the terminal just as you could split Ghosty or iTerm or even Chrome. You can split like a inside a Chrome tab. You can split that Node. And if you played around with that. So same thing you can get on Tmux. And then you can have like, well, I can have my Node agent on the left so I can have Node or Py or Claude there on the left. And then on the right, I'll usually just have maybe just like a raw terminal and I'll go into an editor, I'll look at a diff tool.

And that's usually most of how I work. If I need to look at a server, I can also get to that via Tailscale or often I'll just like build something and push it to a branch and let, I use Vercel a Scott, like using Vercel preview branches do the work for me of like making, you know, if you have reasonable confidence in the agent today to build something somewhat correctly, you know, then you can then I can go and take a look at the preview branch and poke around with it if we're talking like a web project, for example. I'm building a lot of terminal stuff, so I just use that on the terminal.

How is TMux different than splitting your ghosty term? Like, if because I I use, like, split panes in my term all the time. But, like, what what makes TMUX panes different than that?

Two major reasons.

One JS that you can detach and reattach to your Team Accession from anywhere, whether that's Ghosty or iTerm or another computer, you know, in a different room. And I think that's really great because you end up, you kind of build a little workspace, you know? So I'll usually have five windows with different projects that I can kind of tab between, and there's commands that you learn for doing this. And each of those windows has like split panes, and sometimes I split them a little bit differently depending on what I'm trying to achieve.

And you can just, you know, so if you disconnect, you can reconnect and you get that all back.

Whereas I think if you split all the let's say you do a whole bunch of windows in Ghosty and you split them or whatever. If you disconnect, you've actually got to reconnect every single one of those.

If that makes sense. Like, they're all dedicated. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, you're that's just multiple SSH connections. Right? Yeah. That's that's no way to live.

That's how I live currently. That's that's why I'm I'm so interested in this. Yes.

Look. I think if you just want, like, the UX, I think Zellij, zed e l l I j, is almost like an easier one to use. I've I've played around with it. I, some people in this office here that use it. But the second reason why TMux is this and Scott Xellied.

TMX has a CLI interface that's pretty cool. It allows you to inspect active sessions and to send keys and to manipulate them.

So from one session, you can be like, hey, go read the logs in t mux pane one.

Okay? And now your coding agent just has to run a bunch of CLI commands, which looks something like t mux space capture pane one.

T mux space, you know, send keys one. It can inspect the sessions. It can figure out which pane you're even talking about pretty effectively. So I'm talking about using any coding agent, you know, open code plus like a, like, you know, probably like a Sanity or, you know, even like a Kimmy. Like, you actually don't need a super smart model to do this. I find like even Kimmy k two five will do this totally effectively.

So that's valuable for a bunch of things.

One, I don't know Tmux, man.

Like, I I didn't learn these keys. So, like, the first thing I did, and this was a total experiment, was give me a tour of Tmux to a coding agent. You're in a TMUX session. Give me a tour. And it just started opening up panes and windows and being like, go check this out. I opened up this. I opened up that. And I'm like, wow. Okay. So you don't even need to learn the commands if you just want to get started with this. You just got to start TMUX and you tell your agent they'll probably even figure it out that it's in one and you can ask it what you want. Like, I want this in this pane on the right. I want this. I want you to split the pane this way. You can just use natural language, and you can get the environment that you want without being, like, an expert.

Mhmm. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Wes. So it's AI. You can talk you can control the term directly from your your local agents. Yeah. That that seems very useful to me. Okay. I couldn't get it to work with Zelig.

This is one of the things where TMX is like I don't know. It's old. Right? It's kinda old. Yeah.

But all that stuff gets baked into the models if it's old enough and popular enough.

So they're really good at navigating it.

So that's just for like getting you started. Right? Or like, I still use it. Cause, like, I don't know all the commands. I've gotten better at it. Like, eventually, you decide to learn the hot keys.

But I still reach for the agent to help me out.

But I think more meaningful is thinking of TMX as a superpower where your agent can just go and read these other panes.

So I'm running a server in pane two.

Okay. I'll go debug that by just reading that pane, and it can even scroll up and down. Like, it has, like, the buffer and everything. So it could scroll up and down. It can read the log output and go, oh, here you go. I've got the answer.

Does that make it sense? Yeah. Yeah. That sounds yeah. Yeah. So I've gotten to the point where I even run Tmux on my local Mac for this reason.

Yeah. Because you can't do it with Ghosty, and you can't do it with iTerm.

Yeah. Because, like, the the options you have here are, like, you you need multiple terminal windows. Right? So you're either having the agent spin up child processes, which you cannot see, or you're opening multiple tabs and you're kinda copy pasting from from one to another. And and both of those experiences kinda suck. Right? So it it's nice to if you have to run multiple terminals to use something like TMux, where you can use it, like, that's in my opinion, that's the best AI experience JS where the AI can use it, and you can use it in in the same, the same way. Like, that's why I think the WebMCP stuff is gonna be so good JS that, like, the way that you use it and the way that the agent uses is the same thing.

And and you don't have to have these separate processes, which is like, oh, now I'm doing agent stuff. I'm gonna do it this different way than how I would normally do it.

Mhmm. Yeah. And it's open source, and it works everywhere. So that's you know, you take those properties.

You hit on something there, which maybe this matches for you. But, like, if you use Claude, you know, and it spins up sub agents, you can't you can see that the sub agent JS, like it's really reduced to just like a little like sub agent is working, right? Or you can go and maybe go manually go and inspect it. I think they've got like commands, but you could also just run sub agents or other agents or whatever, just be like use Tmux. And you're right. They they'll just spin up windows or they can spin up windows that you don't see, but they're there in the background that they can then like, you could go see them if you want. Yeah. And I find that pretty useful. I know that there are some extensions for Py, the coding agent, which use sub agents like, explicitly through TMUX so that you can see very clearly what they're all doing.

So my my question here and maybe you'll get into this, but, like, the solution to this stuff is just running this terminal thing. Like like, you know what also is is really good at this JS a GUI, and, like, links and buttons and things you can click and and and, like, URLs that you can you can surf to to see different agents. Like, why try to, like, recreate this whole environment in the terminal?

Okay. So, yes, I I am trying to recreate the environment in the terminal.

And that that was a once you start working this way and you're like, man, TMX is good. Agents are good this way. Yeah. I'm digging it.

But now I still have, like, well, where JS my editor gonna be? And how do I run the servers? And all this like, there's still some missing stuff. Right? And look, I'm not like a hardcore Linux user. That's the whole point. So if someone is, like, gonna get really mad at me in the comments, like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I've gotten this wrong.

But, like, I didn't even know until the last year that you could use your mouse over the terminal.

I really did not.

Maybe just because I had no need. It never crossed my mind that I would ever have to do that. But it does. It works pretty good. It works over SSH.

So not just I think people have seen a lot more to apps, right? Like cloud code is the ultimate version of that. It's clear that it uses, the mouse, but it also works over SSH too.

Because it's just like, SSH will, like, pass key Node back and forth that sort of represent where the mouse position is. It works pretty well. So you can get, you can get GUIs over the terminal.

OpenTUI is a library that is what under the, it's what's under the hood of OpenCode.

Yeah.

So if you've used OpenCode and you know that it's got these kinda like user interface mechanisms that you like, you can have like sticky components, right? You can have sidebars, you can have, sticky footers, pop ups, hosts, modals, like all of that stuff is actually very achievable.

And OpenTUI, you can write you can write OpenTUI apps in a variety of ways. I think React and Solid.

So for me JS a Wes developer, I was like, oh, I can just write the things that I understand.

And I get these, like, I get these, UI components on the terminal, but it's all the stuff that I remember about like, you know, on click handlers and, and stuff like that. Does that make sense? Like render, render Wes. So one, I think you're seeing a wave of like new apps that use the terminal because this technology exists. That's cool. So a lot of things that I didn't think were possible a year, year or two years ago, and maybe they always were. Right. It just took me, took me to look. You can, you can scroll, you can use their mouse, you can do so much of this stuff. And I use some tools. I could talk about them. Like, there's a text editor I use called Fresh.

Could be like Fresh Scott s h. Maybe you guys could find it. Get fresh. Dev. Fresh is somebody trying to build something closer to Versus Node in the terminal.

So, you know, like, look, I use Vim a little bit just because, like, I'm I'm sure similar to you all, like, eventually you Scott connect to servers. You have to use it. It works everywhere. Yeah. But I'm not, you know, do I really want to edit all my code that way? Not really. So Fresh has, you know, mouse support and it has, key bindings that feel more at home.

It's also got like, what do you call it? Like a command palette that opens up very like Versus Node like you can open up, I think you can open up a terminal in there, like a sub terminal, and you could select with your mouse and delete text. You could go and navigate the menu.

Yeah. But you could do all that with a web, a web UI of, what I'm trying to understand here is that Node web has, like, a remote web UI

that you got all that. And I'm trying to understand it for myself as well is that, like, I find myself gravitating towards just using the terminal for cloud code even though, like, the OpenCode desktop app or the cloud desktop app, these things are significantly better interfaces.

Why do I keep going back to the terminal? Like, why why are we trying to recreate, GUIs in the terminal, which is, like, obviously a way worse UI, but we'd like to enjoy it more?

What's wrong with us? Alright. So, look, this is a very good comment, which is many of these tools allow you to just connect to a remote machine, and then you can get some of the benefits that way, right, in terms of being always on.

Why don't I do that? That's a good question. One, I've experimented with it and I guess this is like they're better now. I want to put a big asterisk. They're better now. But I think when I went back in time, when I started down this four or five months ago, I just I don't Node. I didn't like the experience.

The second thing is, man, I use all the coding agents still. I still run Claude. I still run Node.

And, and not being locked down, like, I think that once you, if you use Node that way or use Cursor that way, you're really committed to using that tool. Like, you go to the effort of setting it up, and you're not really gonna let it go. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah. No. I I totally feel that, especially, like you said, you're changing tools all the time, and, like, Anthropic pulls the plug on using, your cloud code in in open Node. And now what do you gotta do? Now you gotta either change the tools that you wanna use. If you wanna continue to use your cloud code max or you're you're gonna have to change the subscription, who you're paying, how much you're paying. Yeah. Totally.

I look. I still use actually cursor with the shell extension so that I can navigate the files on the file system. So I still use that occasionally. Like, if I'm really deep into a problem, I will actually use some of those capabilities.

So I don't wanna say that they're not good or useful or whatever, but I do like the I guess I like the the portability and the flexibility of just having it this way. A good example JS, have you have you guys played with the Hermes agent? Bro.

Currently, fifteen minutes before starting this call, I I ran the Hermes setup, like, fifteen minutes before this. So, I have not, but I am I have, like, maybe 10 or 12 tabs of stuff open to read after this call. So I'm curious. I'm Hermes curious.

Well, I look. I I've only spent a couple hours with that, but I would say it's like, I didn't have to change anything for my setup. Right? I just I shelled it in my box.

I installed Hermes, and I ran it, and I didn't have to go and figure out whatever remote magic stuff I Scott do.

Right? I'm not saying, you Node, by the way, one thing we didn't get into is one of the reasons I make the code work on the Bos. And, I've also experimented with running VMs on the Mac as well. Could talk about that using a tool called Lima.

I want to run everything in dangerous mode.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so having a Bos, it's just like only loaded with, like, open source projects and, you know, because I can I can you can even segment your boxes to different scoped projects, for example? Mhmm. You know, you can just go ham. You don't have to worry about anything. I think that's also quite nice.

Like, just the freedom.

So tell tell us more about that because I think that's where a lot of people are at right now JS where everybody's running Claude Dangerously Skip permissions on the root of their MacBook that has access to, like, their entire lives, which would be, like like, awful if if there were to be a, like, a security thing to go down. So, like, what's your process? Do you have, like, an image that has a lot of the stuff installed, or you assume we just have one box and you you SSH in?

I think it's worth like, look, I like experimenting, so I Scott a bunch of things. I have Yeah. A framework desktop in my basement on fiber that's running Omarchy, that I keep up to date. And that I pretty much just use for Node, and then I think it's got, like, Steam games on there.

Yeah. It's connected to a TV. Like that's it. It doesn't, it, there's no, I'm not signed into anything personal.

I guess you could drain my Steam games or something like maybe in the worst case.

Yeah.

Get my Team Fortress skins or something.

But do you not want it to have access to to a lot of your things? Like, that's that's why everyone went nuts over open clause. People was like, I I wanted to have access to my SMS and my my Google Calendar. And I guess that's more, like, personal agent stuff versus, like, development.

Yeah.

I yeah. It is more personal agent stuff. I haven't gone too deep in it. I've we've look. We build an agent.

I've built a full OpenClaw style. Oh, like open source agent that we run as well on a VPS. Yeah. That's exposed over Slack and everybody at Modem can use this. So I built some of that as well.

I just I accept that people get increasingly comfort with like YOLO mode or dangerous mode because 99.99% of the time it's not going to do anything bad. Right? And you can get you get lulled into this false sense of security.

But I've already experienced agents kind of, like, reason to themselves about why they Scott go and do something and seen, seen some bad effects of that. And I just like my position and the position of the company, for example, is we just everything is gated.

We don't just let agents go YOLO. A good example is early early in Node development, we were working with a design partner.

And what they had asked the agent to do was to create an issue for something that they were looking at. They were using GitHub. They wanted to. And so Node is a it's a multiplayer agent. It exists on the web and Slack.

It's not unlike having like an open claw for your team, but it just does like product and project work. Okay.

This is important. It also connects to some of your stuff like GitHub. So we had a customer who, our design partner, early on, who wanted it to open up a ticket for themselves on GitHub.

But because of the context, because of what they were talking about, it decided that what the user wanted was to go and open a public issue on an open source repository. So Node just went, you know, as as you've probably seen people talk about, just Wes and opened like an open source ticket on behalf of this user, which is not what they wanted.

Now, is that going and destroying your computer or like reading your emails or whatever? No.

I think it's just that an agent can it's very possible for an L. L. M. To misconstrue your intent.

Right? Because if you said to an agent, depending on what agent you use, like, you know, go ruin my day and delete a bunch of stuff.

It could do that with an asterisk that Claude will, I think, has some guards. It'll be like, I don't think that you should do that. But, you know, so if you can logic, if you can like reasonably, if the agent can reason itself into a position like it will go and do things that you don't want it to do. I just don't see how that's, like, unavoidable, because to me, it's almost like it's like talking to a human. It's just pause like, what's in your brain and what you want and how you communicate that to the LLM on the other side, like, something can be lost in translation and has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the LLM or whatever. Does it make sense? Frequently. I would say it almost it often does, especially for me because I make assumptions. Right? Like and, like, why would you possibly have thought to do it that way? And then you go back and you read your prompt, and you're like,

oh, I you know, I there's so much innate things that I think that it it knows when it's really, like it's doing what you told it to do. And if you didn't give it clear enough instructions, yeah,

very easily get off track. So I don't know. I I think I'm more sensitive than most, and maybe, like, we're also running a business. We hit to, like I think that the bar for us has to be higher. Yeah. Yeah. I don't wanna write one of these tweets about about torching my email. That seems bad. Seems bad for business.

Yeah.

So to me, I just prefer to put everything in a position where it's, like, not even possible. Does that make sense? Yeah. Totally.

I don't know. Cautionary tales, you Node? So maybe that's

yeah. How about you guys? You, you YOLO mode on the on the Mac? Dude, I was gonna say, have you considered that having one of those blog posts would actually be, you know, all all all news is, good news? All all publicity is good publicity? You Node? You could get your name out there. Oh. We fucked up our whole or we deleted our whole database.

And now, everybody knows your company name.

I think that it depends on what you're doing. Like, for us, we ingest, like, sort of product conversations that could be happening on Discord, public GitHub issues, it could be support tickets. I think that we want to demonstrate a high bar towards privacy and security.

Right? And I just don't think that it serves us well-to-do that. Node, you could still be right, Scott. You could still be totally right. Like, even though I wanna conduct myself that way, maybe the right move is to just, like, drop the database.

Do you think we'll get to a spot where the models will be able to figure out what is okay to run and and what is not okay to run? Because, like, everyone's everyone's just dangerously YOLO mode right now, and we hear every now and then, we hear these these stories and whatever. And, like, the the only the alternative is, like, do something like you're doing, which is, like, set up a Bos. But, like, eventually, you're gonna give it access to something that it needs, and it, like, you could like, at some point, you need to give it access to a database, and that might be a prod database. And and, therefore, it should be able to to drop the entire thing. Right? So you you sorta just slowly add in more access to this thing, which makes it a little bit more unsafe. It doesn't access to your your whole computer, but it does still have to have access to your GitHub and maybe your email and maybe your your actual database. So that that's a problem that could happen there.

But the other option is just, like, you have to sit there and approve, approve, approve every single, like, l s dash l. And there's there's gotta be something in between where the agent would be, like, no. Like, oh, yes. I can run a listing of files, but I shouldn't be able to nuke 18 gigs from from a database. And I'm curious if you think we'll ever get to that spot.

Man, that's a good question.

I feel like it's it let's say the eight let's say the Node harnesses or the LLMs have more of these, like, protections in place.

The thing JS, how does it know when you want to do something destructive? That could be valid too.

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

And a good ex I do wanna mention this.

I'm I'm using Linux on the desktop, and I'm using this stuff. I use the agent to like, I could not use Linux without coding agents. I'm sorry. I need a coding agent to be like, why is the resolution half? I have no idea.

So oh, same. Yeah. Same. Okay. Why the heck can't I, use SMB? Okay. You don't have it installed. Okay. Let me yeah.

I do. If you heard, I use Steam.

The little sidetrack here, but I think this is fun because I use Steam.

I use this framework desktop on Linux as like a gaming machine hooked up to a TV. And Okay. Yeah. It works because of all the work that Steam has done with, this, like, compatibility layer, Proton, for, like, the Steam Deck. Mhmm. I had one for six months, didn't use it. But it works on Linux desktop.

I had a game that by all measures is very popular and should have run, but I couldn't figure it out at all. So, you know, Coding Agent, why isn't this game running? And it just started ripping, looking at all the crash logs, you Node, and after five minutes it's like, oh, you Scott run with this command, and that should pave over this compatibility thing. Man, I Googled this for like an hour.

You know? I just could not find anybody with the answer. I was shocked.

I just wanna make a comment that like, coding agents make you doing stuff on Linux way more approachable.

Totally. But at the same time, it's going and messing in, you Node. It's like, oh, let me fix this. I'm just gonna go rip and, like, write these system files and stuff. Yeah. Okay.

And I want it to do that because that's part of what makes, like, that's part of what makes it really powerful. And so I'm I'm connecting this to say, sometimes you want it to be Vercel. Sometimes you want it to arguably be destructive. And how do you know when you want it to do one and when when the other one is right? I don't know.

I don't know. Does that make sense? Yeah. Totally. Totally.

Tell us some more about the tools that you've written here to make it. You've got Hunk and Term Draw, which help you take the, I guess, the ASCII experience and make it a little bit more gooey.

Yeah. So I mentioned, like, Fresh JS, like, a an editor that I think just makes it a little nicer to use on the terminal.

I realized maybe, like, two months ago that I was suffering from AI psychosis.

Oh, yeah.

And I felt like a lot of people were two months ago because maybe like four six Opus four six has come out and we were all having a lot of fun generating lots of stuff.

And I realized that, oh, no, I have not been paying as much attention to the code as I have been. And, specifically, this is not for like modem, but I meant for like all my little open source thingies.

You know, I was just kind of like I was vibing more than I'd ever. And I realized part of it was I just didn't really have a nice way to, like, look at the diffs, frankly, because of this, like, way that I had adopted. Like, you know, I was using the I was using the stock diff program, and then I started using looking at different, diff outputs for Git that connect to the, like, connect to get, like, I don't know if you've played with some of these, but Delta is one of them.

Difftastic is one that's popular. It does like a more like syntax aware diff, which is kind of nice.

These are all like things that you can plug in to, get this pager, you know, diff pager mode today and you can do it on Mac, you can do it on Linux.

And if you do use Git on the terminal, I use Git on it. I like for some reason I never let go of Git on the terminal. So so that's where I started, but I was just never satisfied for a variety of reasons.

One is I just didn't like their syntax highlighting choices.

I also a big one was they're not responsive.

You know, we're so used to responsive layouts on the web.

Yeah.

But terminal programs, not so much.

And, you know, sometimes depending on how you're working, I've got like a really I've got a split pane. I've got a really tiny surface area.

I don't want split diffs. I want them to be stacked. But sometimes I've got like a really wide area and I want them to be split. And I couldn't actually find like a tool that made that really nice.

So, yeah, it just wasn't nice. So I wasn't I wasn't reading the code because it wasn't that nice. And then second of all, I was really interested in some of this new technology that had come out. Open Tuohy mentioned earlier, and then Pierre Diffs, diffs.com.

I'm

sure. We had them on the podcast last week. It hasn't at the time of recording, we had it hasn't even gone live yet. Was that Jacob? Who you got on there? It Wes, other fellow. Yeah. We had Alex and Amadeus on. Okay. Great timing.

So, like, that is a great library and you're seeing it pop up everywhere. Like, anywhere it's a great different rendering library.

I guess this is gonna be on the show, but I understand that they were basically building a GitHub clone. I actually used that product and to use Modem in the early days. I could talk about that if you're curious, but So I was already very familiar with the whole, like their whole approach to diffs, and they put it out as a library and it's meant for like it's Wes tech, right, primarily. But I was curious if you could plug it into OpenTUI. Right? OpenTUI supports React.

Diffs.com has a React output mode. And I was like, man, is it even possible that I could plug these two things together? We're running. We're like, how the hell is he doing this? Yeah. So that's the. And then would it even make sense? Would it even look good? And the answer was yes.

I had to do a lot of optimization.

Like, I've used the agents in like, you know, goal mode or auto research mode to, like, get the frame rate up. And I had people before I released Hunt, people were like, it's a terminal app. Why do you care that like about the frame rate? And the answer is Wes, it does matter. So so that's where Hunt came from. So you can check it out at, you know, I don't know. Show notes, but, github.com/modem-dev/hunk.

Oh, you need a cool domain name for this. Take a page from the Pierre guys. You need to

We have modem. Oh, sorry. We yeah, we have hunk.dev. I I just got it. I just haven't put anything up there.

We have got hunk. What? Oh, .dev. Hunk.dev. That should redirect to my website, honestly.

Oh, yeah. It's a fun name too. I think it's a fun name. It's a fun name for sure. So, anyways, it kinda works. And then after that, like, this came out, like, two months ago. Like, I was using it quite a lot. And I think that this is always, like, a nice thing is, like, when you're using software and you're using it a lot. Right? I know you guys work on stuff to maintain the pod.

Right? Mhmm.

And it just keeps it just gets better. So, you know, like the diffs look Node, and I put in some themes. Like, it just looks nice, I think, relative to most of the solutions on the terminal.

And it has mouse support, it has a sidebar with a file picker, and that's gone through, like, a bunch of iterations.

It's got some other interesting features. Probably the most notable one is it has a CLI totally ripped off from TMUX, which is that your agent can write and read to it and it can navigate the session for you.

So, it takes like rev ranges. So you can say like hunk diff main, like you can diff main, you can diff, you know, main at five. You can do like you can do a diff on a branch or you can actually just ask the agent to drive it just like you could TMX.

And it can leave annotations.

So it's a more not only is it, I think, like a kind of like a really nice diff viewer, it's also got this kind of agent integration via the CLI, which I think is kind of neat. So check it out. Hunk.dev. We'll have that live by the time Hell, yeah. Goes out.

I can't believe you did hunk.dev when hunk.rodeo was available.

I Huck rodeo.

Hunk.

Let's get that to you. Need Node Yeah.

It's under $20. We'll get it.

What does a .rodeo domain cost? A $116

for the first year. No thanks.

No thanks.

Yeah. Also, you know, questionable content when you Google Google this thing.

Wes.

Look. I don't know. I was making this, and I was sharing it, but not, like, going too hard. I was using it a Scott. But it's actually it hunks seem to get a lot of attention lately. And I guess at this point, like I've even forgotten why it's why it's good, but people seem to think that it's good.

I don't know. I think part of it is the look, I, I really actually like GitHub pull Wes reviews. So it's taking like a lot of that UI. If you're familiar with GitHub, you know, code review, you know, you want to leave a comment back to your agent. You want to, navigate between different files. It's got a different it's got a similar kind of like file navigator.

So that's what's going on there. And for me personally, it has helped me review more of the code that's happening

on this remote box over SSH. You got me googling right now. Can I install Omarji on my I've got, like, a a 2009 Mac Pro right now?

If it's Intel, you can. It it does not do well with the m processors. There's, like, a a forecast. Because I looked into this because I was running it on my old system 76 laptop, and I'm like, I would like this so much better on a real machine on a real machine.

And, I don't I don't have one of those pain medias. I've been running like, I have an old MacBook, Intel MacBook, and I had my OpenClaw running on it. And I the other day, I haven't I haven't messaged my poor little OpenClaw in probably three months. And I just messaged it the other day, and it's still running.

Like, it's laying on the ground three months later. Like, that's that's amazing.

But I I do like that workflow. So you got me you got the gears turned in here. Anyway, that's just a bit of a side. That let's hear about your, your other package that you've you're working on. So that's one. And this is in pursuit of a, you know, my pure portability

ID pseudo ID terminal setup. The other one is term draw.

I started experimenting, experimenting with writing ASCII to agents quite a bit. Maybe because I, I started as a very young person on bulletin boards before I had the internet. Like I had a dial up modem.

You know, I'm not that old, but like, just imagine like a 13 year old, you know, connected to computers that he should not be, in the nineties.

Like the Internet existed, but you could connect to like a local bulletin board. And so to me, I really have this like headspace of ASCII and antsy, character drawing.

So ignoring the terminal, like if I was using Cursor or Conductor or these other tools that I've tried.

Have you ever had this experience with an agent where you're like, alright, you built this web thing, but like I look, can you take that button, can you put it to the left? You ever done that? And then and then it's like, oh, you mean over here? And it like puts it in a in another location you're not happy with, and then you're like, Node.

No. Like, can you drop it a little bit? And then maybe you'll share a picture. Like, maybe maybe you'll take a screenshot, and you'll, like, draw an arrow about, like, what you want. Have you done that?

I I I thought this was kinda interesting because you said in your talk, you said, like like, why give it an image when all it does is it converts it to text Mhmm. Wes you can you can just give it a thing? And I thought, like, I actually like I find screenshots work almost better in some cases than, like, hooking it up to, like, a Chrome DevTools MCP.

Oh, they totally do. Which is amazing. But, like like, the I guess, Unreal, that visualness is better than the actual raw data of how something works. So is that true for diagrams as well, even if they're done in ASCII?

My experience has been so I guess I started experimenting with this Wes I would just draw it, type it out. I would just, like, literally type out ASCII little diagrams and be like, look, I want the button here. And I found that to be pretty successful. And this is going back, you know, to December. So I was already down this path. And then at some point I'm like, why am I typing this out? I can just draw it. So Term Draw is like a a terminal illustrator.

Okay. You can draw shapes, you can draw boxes, you can put text.

You can, you can write text. It's got now elbow connectors. I think I just added. You can have, when you're drawing boxes, you can use different borders. You can put like a dashed border to indicate something's temporary.

And I say it's an illustrator because these are actually like objects that exist on the on the pane or like on the drawing surface. So once you draw a box, you can move it around. It's got baked in grouping.

So if you wanna if you if you draw like a window and you want to do like, Hey, I want a two column layout, you can resize things and they stay in, they stay in place. So it has some context about, oh, I'm a box inside of another box. So if you want to drag things around. So it's got some kind of like nice things you can, you can grab the corners and resize stuff.

And even the text is like movable. So I don't know this basically, so I could just like diagram out things that I want, without having to explain it. Like I can open up term draw. I can draw what I want and be like, go and do this, you know, in, in twenty seconds versus having to type out, you know, well, I want a website with two columns and I want on the left side, I want this right. Instead, you can just really draw it out. And my experience has been that the agent totally reads this quite well. I've done a bunch of experiments.

Opus four seven, really good at really good at ASCII diagrams. If you want to play at this, I feel like it really leveled up something else. I do. I had noticed that too. Yeah. I like it when I'm doing, like, a grill session, and it's giving me ASCII diagrams.

This or that. This or that. Yeah.

I I I experiment with having, I've been experimenting also with having the agent, like, draw ASCII diagrams in hunk annotated comments, which I think is fun.

So, you know, leave a comment, but it's like I'm going to write like a sort of layman diagram to help you understand what you're looking at, that I wouldn't necessarily want to commit to the code, but I'll put it here as an annotation for you as you're reviewing it.

So, anyways, that's term draw. It helps if you're I'll say it also helps if you're if you're doing terminal apps. If you're building terminal apps, it's pretty useful to draw terminal terminal constructs.

That's wild. It's just like a whole GUI. But in the the format it saves in is like a dot t d dot JSON file. What JS in that file? Is it literally just the the ASCII as text, or is it, like, more structured?

Oh, that's like so normally, it just outputs to standard out, but somebody added added that JS, like, well, I wanna save it and come back. Oh, I see. This is another topic, but I'm having a struggle understanding whether, like, feature requests are real or not.

Okay? Which JS, like, another like so these these products have gotten, like, some minor notoriety, and now I guess I'm stuck in the world of, like, people are opening up pull requests and issues and understanding Yeah. If what people want is real or not is becoming hard. That's just a side topic.

And it's is it because, like, you don't know if these are real people, or do you think it's just somebody that says, like, this should be this is possible because I can type my any thought I have into a box Yeah. And and code it up? Yeah. Man, so many. Like, I somebody on hunk,

for example, I'm like, man, how is this person opening up so many pull Wes? And why are they so on point? And then I realized that it's like they're generating a PR for every single issue automatically that somebody opens.

Oh. And then I'm like, you know, I thought you were just a user who was really into this. And I go and look at their profile, and they've got, like, you know, 10,000 commits all from the last few months. And they've contributed to, like, a 160 different repositories. And I'm like, Node. You know? Who's who's paying for that? I know. Yeah.

I don't know.

Is it is it people that have these like, often, I find it's it's people that have, like, a startup in the space and are trying to prove that their thing is the best, and then they're just spamming everyone.

Is that what it is, do you think? In this case, like, you know, I don't wanna name names. I think someone could easily find this, but it didn't seem that way. It actually just seemed like they were taking a lot of pleasure in contributing to open source, as far as I could tell.

Maybe they work for Amazon, and they're trying to get their token count up, and they need to burn them on something. Or maybe they are building something behind the scenes, and maybe they're not ready to reveal it yet. But, you know, here's one. What is my merge accept rate? Right? You you can actually get some you can get some data on this. Yeah. Interesting.

Crazy. So, anyways, yeah, the the format is just if you wanna save it and come back. I don't know how how often people are doing that, but the person who requested it, when I didn't merge, they came back and said, hey. I really warp it. I've been waiting for this, and that's a good indicator for me that maybe they're real.

Can I ask what your your flow is for things that must be visual? Like, obviously, we can make diffs and and diagrams and everything in the terminal, but, eventually, you need to view a video, view a photo.

And I know that there's, like, some terminals that can display images. But, like like, what happens if you just wanna, like, look at a PNG image? And, like, what what is your process for that?

Well, if you're using Ghosty, which is very popular, it uses Kitty? Kitty. Yeah. Thanks. I'm like, what can I say that won't have, Linux people yell at me? I think this is fun too, which is, like, the protocols have changed.

Kitty JS, terminal protocol, and I think I think it works over SSH and it works with Ghosty. And you can actually just render PNGs and graphics.

Actually, my talk at Engineer Miami, that whole presentation was done on the terminal, even though it has full images. It's done over the terminal over SSH. So not just a local terminal. I even experimented. Technically, you can you can play video over the terminal.

However, it's super inefficient and I wouldn't recommend it. It's really just flashing images quickly.

So, like, yeah. So that's one. So just for talking, just talking images and that's a cool one. Otherwise, I think it's like the standard thing where you expose, you use tail scale, you expose a port, I connect to a server, you know, you could still do that.

Right.

Gets a little more painful.

I try not to do that if I can. I guess another one is just building, you know, using build servers and generating previews, like using Vercel there, like, quite a bit. But that is like Scott money, some compute. Right? And it's, like, it it's, like, slow as well. Like, I I was using the, like, cursor

cursor cloud agents, and they will spin it up. And they have, like, a browser built in to their, like, cloud agents, which I really like because you can just fire something off. You can go on your phone.

And then, like, if it's not possible that way, some people are like, yeah. Just send in a pull Wes. Wait for it to build. But, like, that's kinda slow as well. Like, I feel like there's there's no, like, killer solution there just yet.

And, look, if I was building an electron app or something, this probably wouldn't be a very good environment for that. Right? Or Yeah. Right? So I think it depends on what you're building.

Maybe that that's a a good transition. We got a couple minutes left here JS that you have a podcast, about agentic coding, and then you've you've developed some skills to edit the thing. Like, what's your process for that, and where does that happen?

I get we're plugging. Or the plugging can come at the end or it can come now. So You plug whatever you want. Plug. Yeah.

Data rules. It's called Scott of Agented Coding with me and R. Maronika. Took us probably three episodes before we committed to that Node, and it's just once a month.

And, you know, we're just talking. I think the episodes are, like, ninety minutes now.

Look. I learned so much working with you all on Syntax.

Actually, we so loved working with Randy, super producer Sanity.

And I hear that he's gone pretty deep writing code and stuff too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We're, he's he's he's writing his own replacement as he's he's he's a cracked, clawed engineer now.

Yeah. Now that DaVinci has MCP and all all kinds of O Graph support. Yeah. Yeah. DaVinci MCP, he's like he built, like, a whole, like, a little chat window for it, and he, like Oh my god. And we were, like, fighting over, like, what the best way to do graphics Wes. And, like, we think, like, Randy might have cracked the best programmatic graphics approach.

I think he could run a course right now, and I would attend it.

Yeah.

So we actually work with, look. One of the things I learned is how great it is to work with a with a professional editor. So we hired, an editor editor Sam, who was actually somebody I met. He was a candidate for Randy's job.

Okay. And I just kind of stayed in touch. And, you know, I was like, hey, you want to work on this project? So work with Sam.

But I think for me, like, there's still so much work. You can't just like have an editor. Right. It's one thing that Randy knows he's worked with you all for so long. He knows how you all, you know what you're going for.

In our case, it's a little different.

I need to watch the video. I need to come, like, what do I think is the best, you know, tasteful bits? How do we cut a bunch? Like, obviously Sam can cut a bunch, but we're also trying to do like a really fast turnaround time on this because AI moves so fast. So if we can just accelerate that, like Wes try to do like four days and then Sam gets me a Scott. I gotta go and review it again. I'm very nervous about saying something really stupid guys.

I'm really nervous. So I built a bunch of tools to help me with that.

Actually, it's it's open. So I just open sourced it in case people want to play with it. It's called Pod Guy. I can link to it. What's interesting about it is it's, it's a bunch of extensions and skills. Okay. I think people have seen that. One of those, for example, is it'll download like a whisper model and, like, generate a TypeScript, but the skill file knows how to do it. Another one is like I've, you know, find the boring parts to cut in this two hour episode. It might have a two hour episode that cuts down to ninety minutes. Right. Just make some suggestions.

One that's actually very helpful is by the end of the edit, Sam has inserted all these interstitials all over the place.

And, I just find it easier to be like, okay, Node guy. Just find me where all the interstitials are so that I can time Node those for the YouTube description or whatever. And then it just goes and, like, actually generates a bunch of frames and scans through them to figure out where they are and then, like, generates, you know, goes back to the transcript and generates, like, all these, like, descriptions for me.

So that's just like it does a bunch more.

I think what's a little bit more interesting about it is it's the first time I've used Py.

Py is loaded in the repository.

And when you fire up the project, it's actually like a slimmed down pie where it actually kicks out all of the, like, it shouldn't it doesn't bring in your skills or your extensions from your Node your local development or whatever. It's it almost only exists in this world to serve you and the podcast

editing role. It's like a a dev dependency of the project.

Yes.

And it's almost like an alternative CLI, where instead of you trying to remember, like, all the commands, which I'm never gonna remember, it's very much like, here's the eight things I can do. What do you want me to do? It's not there to write code. It's just there to actually, like almost like it's an agent dedicated to doing this.

I've been finding that as well. It's like I've replaced so much of my, like, script writing and, like, these, like, rigid Npm run whatever.

Mhmm. I've replaced so much of that with simply just, like, bunch of skills and an agent and saying, like, this is kinda what I want. And it's just so much more flexible, and it's it's it's not like a it's not writing code or anything. It's just like an easier way to have a CLI.

Yeah.

I think pie is a really interesting one for this because it's I don't know.

Have you guys had Mario on here? Yeah. Armaments? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Two of them? Yeah. Yeah. I did see it. Package deal. Yep.

Because pie is so stripped down by default.

Right.

It actually works really well for this purpose. If you want to, like, stand it up as your interface to whatever Vercel say, you know, Claude, you could do this with Claude, but Claude has a bunch of other things that it wants to do. And it's nice to have something that's just sort of like bespoke tailored, you know, for for this very specific task. And I guess to be ultra clear here, it's not like I run the coding agent. It's like I literally I run like Npm Node dev and that brings up the coding agent. Yeah. That's great. Alright. Let's let's talk about modem.

So, obviously, you're a company. Tell us we we touched on what it was, but, like, tell tell us what it does. And then, like like, why should we care about something like this versus just having Cloud Code do it? Okay. So modem JS two parts.

One is it's like a product intelligence platform where it integrates into all these places where you and your customers could be having conversations about your product, like support tickets, public community, Discord, Slack connect channels. Okay? Yeah. And those messages go into basically like a a pipeline that's not unlike Sentries. We're very Sentry Pilled.

And, basically just kind of creates like a, you know, we call them topics, but they're kind of similar to Sentry issues. Like, instead of you, instead of getting a list of, like, all your errors that are grouped together, we give you a list of all your all your kind of product topics grouped together. Right? Here's all the places that people are talking about dark mode or you know what? You just launched version 15 of your software and starting, you know, an hour afterwards, you had this big furor of people complaining about this aspect of the product, like, oh, you broke mouse support in version 15. Right? And so all of this is streaming into a platform where it's categorizing it, organizing it, deduplicating it so that you and your product team can just be like, man, what do people think about our software right now? And you just have everything there. And as new, you know, you launch new things or you you introduce bugs, if people are talking about those bugs, it'll wind up into the platform.

Does that kinda make sense?

Yeah. OptumRx.

Sign up for this. OptumRx.

I'm begging you.

Wes and I had a epic rant on the Optum. Like It's my biggest enemy right now on the web. Yes.

OptumRx.

Is this a drug plan?

They yeah. They it's it's, like, subscription based. Your meds get sent to your door instead of having to go to a pharmacy. But, they, like, rewrote their platform, and it's total dog.

It's dog. So often, you're visiting a website, and you're just infuriated about it, or there's, like, a part of a product that you use every single day that you just feel like the people that are working on the product have no idea that you're so frustrated with it. And I often wanna be, like, just I'm gonna get a job there, fix this, and then quit. Like, I just like, I feel like I know better about the problem with this piece of software than anybody at this entire company does, and I wish that I could just get that across somehow. But in in the olden days, you had to get someone to care about about your actual problem. But what if you could just simply take everybody's frustrations and complaints and all of these signals that something is wrong with your product and and, like,

use modem. Right? That is exactly it. You sold it way better than me. Thank Node.

Which JS, you know, like, even that century, like, we had this you obviously have great observability into the performance or the errors. Right. But what do people think about it? I don't, you know, usually you need the CEO to, you know, the CEO basically drives by and sends you a message because he's he's scanning all the channels manually. That's that's one thing that David does. I wanted to Node. I wanted to know what that is like. Or sorry. If I were at OptumRx, I'd want to know that. Right. But often it gets bottlenecked behind people, tools, services, etc. The engineers, the software developers, the people who probably care. I bet there's people over there who care, but they can't even see it. So we're trying to like connect that feedback directly to the like software teams.

So that's like part one. The second part is it's connected with an agent that is not unlike you can call it, you know, Claude or, you know, Linear has an agent where it's like really, it's built on that data and it's a multiplayer agent that you can work with over the web or in your Slack channel in the future Discord. Sorry, in your in your Slack workspace.

That is really just like someone that you can one, you could talk to it to just extract these answers really quickly because it's designed to work with this data really effectively.

So, hey, what does everybody think about our new Rx platform? Give you that answer really quickly.

But it's not designed to just be like a question box thing. It's like it can take action. It can, it has automations. It could go and curate your backlog automatically on your ticket tracker.

It could actually like surface some of these problems directly to your team on Slack.

So the idea here is it's we're trying to get to like a vertical product agent, PM, project manager, product manager. That's honestly, like, working with your team and trying to surface this stuff directly to you, you know, because, like, because we don't want another tool that things get lost in. So Heck, yeah. Yeah. I love that. Now you gotta scan YouTube and, podcast for sentiment about products. This is a thing. We get to dogfood it a lot. Like, a lot of people are using HUNK now and opening and, like, leaving messages on social or opening tickets. And I'm like, oh, man. I actually I really Node, you Node, on top of the fact that we dog for this for modem, I also now need to dog for this for our open source projects. And, like, it's it's it's a lot of work to keep on top of this. So

Yeah.

Man, do you do you ever see something like this being applied to stuff that isn't software? Like, I'm just thinking about, like like, a physical product or even just, like man, like, Lululemon has been getting, like, tons of hate lately of their their designs are not good, their their fabric is pilling, just stuff like that. And I'm curious, like, does Lululemon have some mechanism to figure out what are people saying about

our latest leggings. I think on the conversations I've had is that many companies have something like this. Like, everyone understands that it's a problem they gotta solve.

Yeah. And they and they have this kind of visibility problem. So I I talk to companies all the time, which is like, we built a version of this.

There's one person who maintains it and it's not that good.

So I don't know what the answer is. Like, they might have something like it might matter to them.

Yeah. But whether it's good or or, you know, not good or doesn't exist, like, I think our goal is like, can we just make the best version of that? And then, you know, based on working with customers and design partners, can we just make the best you know, give everyone, like, a great version of that so that they can, respond quickly.

Sick. Well, I love that. And I I can't wait to see this in action more.

And everybody who wants to check it out, it's at modem.dev.

We'll have the link in the show notes for you to check that out.

If I I will say even if this is not a product that you wanna use, go to their website because it's a cute looking website. I love your website. I love your colors. I love your animations.

I love the whole aesthetic.

It looks great. We didn't vibe generate it. I believe that. Yeah. I believe that. I can tell. Yeah.

So that was awesome. Thank you so much, Ben. We've already done quite a bit of plugging. So do you have a sick pick? I know you're familiar with sick picks.

Did you bring one today for us? There's a lot of chatter about taste and, you know, Sunil Pai from Cloudflare and Party Kit has talked about, like, look, if you wanna get taste, just go out, go to museums, go watch movies, just watch a crap ton of movies, listen to music, and I do agree and I believe with that. So I'm gonna pitch a movie.

Okay?

Okay.

And that movie is Nirvana, The Band, The Show, The Movie.

Sick.

Okay. I guess it's an indie film, but I'd had, like, a $2,000,000 budget, so not that indie.

It's a Canadian movie.

These guys used to have a Wes series turned into a TV show on Vercel, and it's basically about two guys who have a fake band called Nirvana.

And whether it's a real band or not, it doesn't matter. But every show, I guess, is like they are just trying to get a they're just trying to get a show at the Rivoli, which is like a concert venue. And it's just like a harebrained scheme.

I have never watched this show before.

Okay.

I have no affinity. I don't like I'm not connected to this at all.

But the movie is really good. It blends like what's real and what's not. If you like, like Nathan Fielder content, you'll probably enjoy this.

And it's also a time loop movie, which it's, you know, I'm really into time loop movies. I won't give too much away.

Did you see Palm Springs? That was good. Yes. Time loop movie. Great movie.

Yeah. I think time loop movies are good. I actually I'm Node on back on time loop. So I actually also just bought a copy of this movie here at two Sick Picks, called Time Crimes.

I got it. I got I I saw it on four k at the, movie at the local bespoke movie store.

And this is a Spanish time loop movie from the late two thousands. Also really good. Go check it out. Time loop movies.

Sick. Sick. Well, thanks so much, Ben. I I the moment I saw your talk, I was like, I cannot wait to dive in. I already have Tmux ripping, and I'm gonna figure it out. So I'm gonna ask the agent.

Yeah. Awesome. That's I'm gonna give it another shot. Appreciate your time, Ben, and, we'll catch you on the next one. Always a pleasure.