Clawdbot (Moltbot), Agents and the Age of Personal Software

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're talking about building personal software. We're gonna be talking about how you can build software that is just for you, runs on your network of things, and possibly anyone else you want to give this to, and stuff that, well, is kind of disposable, but at the same time, things you might not wanna spend all day every day building. Because now you could just throw Opus 4.5 on it, knock it out in a couple of minutes. Next thing you know, you got a feature. My name is Seth Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me JS always is Wes Bos. What's up, Wes? Yeah. Man, like, the amount of

extremely specific apps I have built in the last, I don't know, six months, a year JS is unbelievable.

It's outrageous. Yeah. I I Node people, like, laugh at this whole, like, personal software thing, but, like, it really is true. Like, normally, when I would have have reached for some, like, I don't know, crappy SaaS that covers everybody's use case, or I would have reached for a spreadsheet, and and had to, like, do something weird in a spreadsheet.

I don't have to do either of those months. Building stuff. Yeah. Just months. Yes. I I worked on my Sanity for a long time. And even though there's other people using that thing, I built it for myself, and I'm still maintaining it. And it's still a big old project Wes most of the stuff I've built, let's face it, in the last four days, which has been a number of things, which we'll talk about. And when I say I built it, I mean, I project managed the building of it. The number of things that have gotten done there has been, like, outrageously fast, And there's been a lot of, like, little even, like, technical things that I've learned about what makes some of this stuff easy and fast. We can get into some of those strategies for this personal software as well because I do think there's a lot of, like, really neat Node things that I've I've gained by by doing some of this. So, first and foremost, what is personal software? Why might you care about it? What what is it? And it really is hyper specific software that is tuned to your needs. Like, I have a need in my life. Therefore, I'm going to put an AI agent on crushing out a quick project.

I might not even care about the quality of the code. This isn't for public consumption.

This could be just for you.

And there is something about the fact that other people aren't using it, and it's not exposed to the worldwide Internet or possibly not exposed to the worldwide Internet. Hopefully not.

Yes.

That makes the security or the slop nature of the code more freeing. I was definitely in the camp of I need to read every line of code that AI produces for me forever until I started working on personal software that look. Let's face it. If it's not getting off my network, the hell do I care if it's exposing API keys or something? It's just on my computer. Right? So yeah, as long as it's not deleting my files or or ruining my file system, the Mhmm. Scott nature of the code I, like, I don't care about the slop nature of this code in particular JS long as it's functioning fine. Especially if you build an app where you wanna use

API keys directly in the browser and make the Wes directly from the browser, that's typically not a good idea at all. You shouldn't be putting your API keys client side. But if you're especially just in prototyping stage, you're like, I don't feel like building some sort of, like, proxy to send it to the back end and and get the response and hot potato it back JS you can just YOLO, send those directly from the client, which, again, let me specify, this is not a good idea in general in general.

But if you are just building something that is only for you and probably should also disable, like, Chrome extensions as well, you gotta think about, like, what else might be reaching in there.

Yeah. What else might be you're you're totally right on on that aspect of things. It depends on where you're running, how sandboxed it is, and whatever.

I'm not even talking about, like, API keys, though. I'm just, like, just generally, like, talking, like, code quality. I don't give a shit about the code quality

if, nobody else is using it. If somebody else is using it, that that story changes completely for me. I'll tell you that. I care somewhat about the code quality because I've I've certainly built lots of stuff way too fast, and it becomes an absolute mess where I simply just scrap the entire project. But we have an episode coming up in the future of, like like, how do you do this stuff so it actually produces code that you you would wanna be able to debug and work on if Wes it comes to the absolute worst case where you have to write some code yourself. Yeah. And I will say that AI is not writing all of this code for me. I am I have Zed open. I'm modifying. I'm writing code. I'm chain especially CSS still, man. I have some tips there for my CSS stuff. But yeah. So let's talk about, like, the idea of, like, AI

and, personal assistant style or personal agents ESLint building this kind of stuff. Because what I started was Claude Bos. I started a Claude bot, which is kind of a personal assistant, that is an agent that runs on your machine. It just runs on a BUN process for me. And there's a a Claude, Claude bot gateway that really handles kind of the connections and things like that. Like, you can connect it to Discord and talk to it through a Discord bot, which I'm not doing. Explain what this is because this has popped in the last couple weeks. Claude, c

l a w d, like a, what, like a Claude star. This has Like a Claude. Has very little to do with, like, cloud code and and thing. It it does use that, but this is a a totally separate project that allows you to create your own personal assistant. Yeah. It it is really it it is a personal assistant, and and I personally

have, not understood why, like, a a personal agent or assistant in AI would be super useful. I couldn't think of any use cases for it until I started using this. And I do wanna stress with Claude, but some of this is, you know, if you're sending your data anthropic or whatever, you wanna be careful about what you're connecting to this where. But the cool thing about Claudebot is they have connections to WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, or whatever, so you don't have to use their chat UI, which I don't like at all. I ended up building my own even, or the AI built one for itself. Or you can use WhatsApp, Telegram, or any of that stuff to interface with it. So you don't even have to have a chat UI for it. You can just do it through Discord. And then there's all these kind of extensions. So I connected mine to, like, Node assistant. I connected it to my calendar and things like that. I connected it. I'll talk about some of the home assistant stuff because that was crazy. It's it's done a lot of cool stuff with my home assistant. There's a lot of neat connections you could make, and it's up to your own discretion as to what kind of sensitive information you wanna give it. Because there are extensions to connect it to your email inbox, and then it could send emails as you and stuff like that. So there is, like, a degree of what you want to,

you know, curate with this thing. But the whole idea is that you have this bot. You you can connect.

Obviously, you connect to chat to talk back and forth with it, but then you also connect it to, like, tools. Right? Like you said, you can connect it to GitHub, in your email, iMessage, your home assistant. You can have it control your computer, run a browser, all of these types of things. Yeah. And it has a browser so it can look things up. You could have it spawn coding processes and things like that. I find connected to my so it can project manage things. Yeah. People are probably thinking like, like, okay. Well, like, what what's the use of that? Is that that Node that you just have a natural language interface via a text message so you can do anything? Like, you're you're away from your computer, and you could ask it to code a project or, go through your your iMessages

or, like, filter through your email inbox and reply to things for you. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I I even wrote a custom skill for it to connect to tweak, which is my to do list. And so every morning, I it it has Cron baked ESLint too, Wes. So every morning at 08:00, I get a message from my personal assistant with the items in my to do list, and then it will, like, start to even work on some of them. So, like, if I put, like, I need to do something and it like, I need to research something or I can you can do this, it can start to give me links or create documents for that or, like, help that process along. And it can notice if, like, something stayed on my to do list for several days and be like, you should really do this. You know? Just giving me that that encouragement, which is, like, kind of ridiculous. But the amount of things you can connect to it are really great. And Wes I found, one of the the cool use cases that I found with it is in Node assistant, which, Wes, you might think natural language. Okay. I can tell it to turn off and off my lights. Whatever. Right? But the coolest thing I was able to do was say, given what you know about all the devices on my home assistant, what are some automations that I'm not doing that you think I could have? And it gave me a whole bunch of ideas. One of which was that I have an air quality sensor in my office. Yeah. And I don't have I just have it here, and I never checked the data on it or anything. And it Wes, like, during business hours, you know, nine to five, Monday through Friday, I'll check your air quality four times a day. And if anything is off, I'll send you a message. And the message is in a a home assistant prompt, like a home assistant alert. So that cron job is basically just saying, check the levels. Is there anything off on these levels? If not and and yesterday at 12:00, it was like your c o two in your office is four times higher than it should be. You should open a window.

And that led me to realize my office isn't venting correctly. The mini split split doesn't vent. There's nothing venting air in this office. I'm just, breathing in the same air all day. So, like, that means I gotta figure out venting or I gotta just crack a window, but I had no idea that that was going on.

So, just that that alone was really great. And another thing, I was having a a an automation in my Node assistant that wasn't, triggering correctly or reliably. And I said, can you investigate this? And it did. And it fixed the dang thing and gave me some suggestions. And I was like, sure. Do them. And it modified my dang automations on home assistant. So Man, the Awesome. This LLM stuff is going to make the home automation

stuff way easier because so much of home automation is people just don't do anything with it because it it's it's a whole it's a full time job. You're having to, like, make all these scenes and make sure they turn on. And then if something stops working, and, you know, it doesn't work and then people manually turn off the lights, it's really frustrating. And in unless you're willing to invest a whole bunch of time in this type of thing, it's that's the reason why a lot of people don't do it. So, yeah, I I got Gemini access on my Google Home.

Man, it is so much better. I love it. Like, there's there's one little command that I say every night, which is turn every light off except for my wife's bed lamp.

And I previously would, like, go and turn every room off and then turn hers back on because she, like, lights it up a little later. And now I can just, like, say very obtuse things, like, turn every light off except to this one and turn the white noise on, and it just, like, figures it out. It's a little slower. You can tell that it's, like, sending it to an LLM to process, but I don't necessarily care because it's it's so much better. And I've been so frustrated with my Google Home over the last year or so, and it's finally getting better.

Yeah. That that actually that rips. I had to write an automation that if it detects presence from when we're not home to when we're home, because home assistant can do that. Yep. If it detects presence in the home, like if you're arriving home, it's going to turn on lights automatically before you get into the house. It's like, oh, okay. I wouldn't have thought of that. You did it. Yeah. Okay. It's not motion sensing. Whatever. It's interesting. So ClaudeBot has been really cool. It does this gateway. You can connect it to various LLMs.

The idea for me here eventually right now, I'm I'm having it connected to Claude, Opus. Claude is an anthropic Claude. But the idea here will eventually be for me to get a beefy computer like a Mac Studio.

CJ actually just got a little, integrated, GPU PC. That would wouldn't be a bad idea to get either, but I think I wanna get a a really beefy Mac Studio and then have that run a much better local LLM than what I can run on my MacBook Pro and then do everything through that instead of going off to Anthropic. Because the moment that you do that and the data's not leaving your computer, then you can give it more sensitive information, maybe even, like, financial information, and it can do you know, help you with your money tracking or stuff like that or or, you know, even email, you know, maybe give it read access. There's one thing I have to do every

four times a year, and that's, like, go into every bank account that I own and export it all. And everybody tells me to use Plaid or whatever, but it's like I'm not paying for that. And Yeah. Okay. Some of my bank accounts doesn't work. And, like, the second I can automate that entire thing easily I probably could automate it right now with a whole bunch of puppeteer and clicking buttons, but it feels too dangerous and, like like, fragile. Like, it could break when they move a button or whatever. But as soon as I can hook it up to something like this, especially with a local LLM, I I think we're probably a bit of a ways away before we can get, like,

decent quality LLMs running locally without having to spend, like, what, $4 on some hardware. Oh, I'd probably be spending more than $4. I'd probably be getting into six territory if you're looking at the Mac Studio.

But, like, then again, that becomes there's part of this personal software thing that JS kinda flipped in my head about how I'm running my dev process in general. So I'll talk about that right now, which is that I've moved everything to a tail Scott network throughout my house, which has become really, really awesome. So I have my phone. I have my, Mac mini. I have my computer, my tablet, all connected to tail scale. And tail scale is basically allows you to have, like, a personal tunnel throughout your entire network. And so what it is is it becomes the VPN on your computer, your phone, whatever.

And when I want to access things on my Mac mini, it is via a tail scale IP address.

And that means that, like, anything that's running on my Mac mini via its ports can just be accessible via that IP, without having to turn on, any sort of, like, global file sharing or stuff like that. It's just being done through Tailscale.

The way I would have, like, done some of this before, like, if I had a site running on something, I might throw it on a CloudFlare tunnel, and then you're putting that out to the wider Internet. And you could protect it with, like, a zero trust on that thing and have it be, like, a a password that sends you an email. But what's so cool about Tailscale is that, like, it's so seamless on my phone, my computer, or whatever, and then all of these things just I I can access my dev sites really easily. So I have, like, a Vite dev server for a UI running on my Mac mini, and then I tell Tailscale to serve it as h t t p s. Because if I want h t t p s and all that stuff, I want a SSL certificate.

And then Tailscale makes an actual domain for it with machine name dot tailnet dot t s whatever, and then a port on whatever port you've assigned it to. And now I have a secure location on a dev server on my own network that I can access from any device. I can test it or use it on my phone, my computer, or whatever, and it took two seconds, and it costs free 99. I didn't pay a cent to be able to do that. And then on your phone, what's the process of setting that up? Do you put, like, a VPN on your phone then? Yeah. You really just install the Tailscale app, and you turn it on. You log in, which I log in via GitHub. You turn it on, but it basically just shows all the devices that are connected through your they don't have to be on the same Wi Fi network, which is awesome if I'm out of my Wi Fi network, I'm on, you know, five g. I'm, I'm I'm out and about. I still get access to all of my devices easily through the Tailscale VPN.

Mhmm. And then I was typically running, like, a MOLVAD VPN, on my stuff before, but there's actually a MOLVAD add on to this. So all outward traffic to the wider Internet goes through a MOLVAD VPN through the Tailscale app

itself. What is MoleVAD?

That's a It's just a normal VPN. It's just like a, you know, NordVPN,

like one of those types of providers. Yeah. Okay. We talked about this on our, like, Synology server show, but I'll I'll quickly say how I'm doing this on my myself JS I'm running the CloudFlare tunnels on my Synology, and then what I can do is I can selectively opt in to what like you are doing with Tailscale is you can opt in to which machine on the network and which port you would like to then expose to the Internet. But then you have the problem of, like, you've just exposed your local computer or local server to the global Internet. Right? So then you have to then put some auth in front of that. And in my case, I just use GitHub. I sign in with GitHub to be able to access any of my stuff, and it works super well. It's also free as well. But if there's something on my local network like, for example, if I'm away from the house and I don't feel like setting up, like, a, like, a forwarding or or port or something like that, I can also use UniFi Teleport.

So this JS teleport runs on on my router, my UniFi device. And what that does is you you just on your phone, you flip on the app or on your desktop, you flip on the app, and it makes a VPN right back to your home network. And then you can access anything on your local home network, which is good because I have a, like, a three d printer I was running some custom firmware on, and I needed to be able to look at the camera. And I forgot to expose it to the global Internet so I could look at it when I was away from Node, and I just jumped on Unifi teleport, and it it did that. Yeah. Well, that's cool. And so you have to have a Unifi router to do that? Yeah. Yeah. You gotta have a UniFi router. So it's probably not most people.

It's probably better to use something like like Tailscale or CloudFlare Tunnels.

Yeah. I I kind of avoided the Tailscale thing because I don't know why. I was like, oh, I wanna expose it to the Internet. And then through this stuff, I'm like, no. Wait. I don't. I don't really wanna do that. I wanna have it all just on my devices. And as long as I'm running tail scale on those, it's all good. Yeah. You want your your devices to go back home, not have your home devices exposed to the global Internet. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Especially for this stuff. Now there's some things that that's probably different, like, my audio bookshelf or, my Plex. Like, if I wanna give, like, my brother control or access to those libraries as well, then, you know, I I don't want him to connect to my tail scale network. So those make more sense for CloudFlare tunnels or to to expose that port via that. But I'm not gonna I'm not gonna open the ports. Okay. So let's talk about, like, privacy stuff because you do need to make sure that whatever you're sending to the LLMs is still something you wanna be sending to a third party.

Again, I I've experimented a bit here with local LLMs. I have Ollama running.

I haven't found anything that I love yet. I think my computer needs to be a bit beefier. Now the thing about ClaudeBot is is that the assistant part of things doesn't need to be that good. It needs to be good, but Scott, like, not Opus 4.5 good. Like because you could have that assistant spawning Opus agents to work on code stuff, or you could just work on it via your your normal cloud code or whatever. So the actual personal assistant really doesn't need to be that good. It just needs to have a decent amount of context. So when I have a better computer, I will run, I think, all of the personal assistant stuff on Alama and be totally fine with that. Another thing I did is I I've been getting into other local processes for, like, processing, like, text to speech. I I use one called, Kokoro Cocorow.

Cocorow. Yeah. Yes. I use Cocorow, and the way I have it set up is through something called MLX audio. It's a Mac specific thing for Mac silicon.

Basically, just runs as a server on my computer, then my Mac mini hits that endpoint through the tail scale address, generates the audio as an m p three, sends it back to the Mac mini where it's stored, and then served via a SvelteKit app. So what I was able to do with my chat assistant, my chat UI, was build a really quick text to speech speaker button. I click the button, and it reads any message. That also enabled some other neat ideas, which I'll talk about a little bit. But you can run text to speech entirely on your local machine. And what I found JS, especially with, this Kokoro, the voice quality is super good. I started with Piper, and it was, like, very, like, nineteen nineties kind of computer voice. But with Kokoro,

man, the the the quality is is way good enough that I could have this read me an audio. I could have it generate an audiobook, honestly. And it was sound. And you can you can run it in the browser with transformers JS as well. I've used it in the browser before. You have to use a a slightly smaller model, and it's it's not as good. But it's still extremely impressive of how good it is. You know? We've gone from, like we had, like, Bos Buddy in, like, '95, and then we went to, like, 2021 with very similar quality. And then it's just in the last couple Yarn, it's gotten so much better. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application,

you'll want to check out Sentry at century.io/syntax.

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on over to century.io/syntax.

Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

Yeah. So for me, I'd like to move as much of this stuff locally as possible, and Kokoro runs totally fine next to anything, running on my my laptop. And since it's all on the same network, it's just communicating back and forth via the Tailscale, URL. So really nice there. Let's talk about app ideas. I've I've kinda dropped some of the app ideas or stuff that I've been working on or or talking about through here, but, like, some of the app ideas. So we talked a lot about giving this, like, personal assistant stuff. Like, what can a personal assistant do? But what about, like, I have my personal assistant sending off agents to build personal software.

And I did that through a, like, a, a mothership app, which, is basically I built a chat UI that I can chat. I can spawn new agents. I can, work with my beads and projects, and then I can add on to that with individual personal software things. So one thing that Courtney and I have been talking about having forever is that anytime she asked me, what do I want for dinner this week? I say, I have no clue. I've I can't my brain can't think of a single thing you've ever made in your entire life.

And so to augment that, I'm going to be taking photos of the meals she makes when she makes them, and it auto categorizes them, it auto catalogs them, and it puts them into a bank. So I could say, give me one of each style of food or or give me food ideas, and it can give me food ideas through that bank. So I have meal tracking in there now, and it's just building this database. Now how that's working is it's just taking the photo from my camera. And since it's all running locally, it's just thrown in my file system of the app. And then for database stuff, let me tell you, the number one database for this stuff is just a stinking JSON file.

Man, I I I get instant saves. I get all this stuff. I don't have to log in. I don't know user accounts or user access. It's just one person, but it's just writing it to a JSON file every single time you even or type a character. It is awesome that it just does that. And then now, like, it it's trivial for the LLM to read through that JSON file. Or what you can even do is I built in slash commands to my, chat UI that can actually just run Scott. So it could pull, certain ones with JavaScript instead of having to do an LLM call for that. Yeah. That we talked about that a couple episodes ago where I was like, I just want a

brain that I can throw things into.

And, surprisingly, I didn't get any any suggestions from the audience of, like, I just want something where if I have something that I'm remembering, you know, like, the the lug nuts on the tractor at the cottage are this weird five Sanity teens fine thread, and I just want somewhere to put that. Or I measuring windows in our house or measuring a gap where we need to find, like, a a dresser or something in our in our house. Like like, all of these little things where I just need to remember, I always think, like, where should I put that? Do I put that in an Apple Node? A lot of people email it to themselves.

You know? And, like, I just wanna be able to very similar to how you use, like, a reminder, just be able to to speak that into some sort of brain and have it come back.

I found this thing called Sublime, which is unfortunately not Sublime text, sublime.app.

I haven't tried it yet, but it seems to be that, but also a great way to, like, manage inspiration, bookmarks, you know, like, almost like a like a Pinterest where you would dump things into.

Dude, my my chat UI could build that into the chat UI in an afternoon. That's what's really about this one.

And then you don't have to do some third party service. You can have it do exactly what you want. So the meal tracking thing was great. Another thing I did was fitness tracking and insights.

Right now, I'm just uploading a screenshot of my tonal workouts. It's doing OCR on that text, and it's, cataloging that workout.

And then if I give it my goals, it can come back and say, hey. I noticed you're doing a lot of traps, and you your your traps are fine. Yeah. So, like like, let the trap work out and do something else here. Like, just to be able to do that in a bit of time. Like Apple Health as well. You know? You can You could hook it into Apple Health. Yeah. And push and pull data. I think a lot about

that with software that I pay for yearly or monthly that I don't use all of the features. So, Macro Factor, probably one of the best apps in the world for tracking calories and all of that, like, health and fitness. You Node, if you've used, like, Daily Burn in in the past, Macro Factor, Scott recommended it, what, probably two or three years ago. And I've been paying, like like, $200 a year for that thing, and I mostly just use it for tracking what I'm eating. And there's some nice features. Right? You can scan a Node, and you can change how like, if you're having one and a half servings of something. And they also have this new AI input where you can take a photo and describe what it is, and it will break it into. But I I just keep looking at that being like, this can't be that hard. You know? Yeah. Couple graphs of where you're at, there's gotta be APIs for all of these foods, available somewhere. You know? I'm I'm sure that exists.

So, like, $200 a year, that's quite a bit. And same with, like, I use StrongLifts, which is like like a like a workout tracking app.

And I look at that every time it's, like, $60 a year, which is not too bad. Like, I don't mind paying. I like that the developer's kinda independent and whatnot, but I often think, like, I'm just pressing a button every sec.

Yeah. It's tracking how much weight there is. You know? And, there's an Apple Watch integration, which is an absolute must, so I'd have to build something like that. I don't know if $60 is worth, not use moving away from that. But there's a lot of little things where I'm just getting nickeled and dimed every single Yarn, every single I'm paying for it. I'm thinking, I wonder if I could just build this myself.

I know. I know. I was thinking about that. And then some of the stuff, I just, like, I just threw a subpage on and say, hey. Can you throw this together? And then, like, fifteen minutes later, it's, like, done. I'm like, what? Mhmm. What? To be clear Yeah. Sometimes the answer is absolutely not, and it just Yes. Will kick out a whole bunch of garbage, and you you wasted a bunch of your time. We're Scott, we're not being those guys that are just, like, you can just think anything into existence. You know? Like No. But I also just duplicates all of my CSS. You know? Like, we got bigger problems as Wes. But I I think we're on a good path right now.

We'll we'll talk about this in the using AI effectively. But I have good bones. I have a good system. I have files, good agents to work on this stuff. And I use my CSS framework, Graffiti, which has good AI documentation.

And so, like, the agent says, do not add a new class unless, like, this UI element does not exist already in Graffiti. If, like, do not like all those things, and it it actually has been really adhering well to that. So, that that's been, like, positive in terms of keeping the structure. That said, I'm sure some of these files are monstrous. Another thing I added in here is, like, journaling warp, like, it will custom prompt me every day at, like, 01:00 and, like, ask me a question where I can, like, respond to it. It will be able to pull out and tag things and, like, mark things as wisdom. It has, like, 200 prompts that I haven't yet to see because I haven't I just told this to do this last night, and then it's going to do it via audio. So I can just push record in the app and speak, and then it's going to do that speech to text and then auto categorization, cataloging, and then putting them ESLint JS markdown files into a folder. This is a good Node. Because it has a little bit of a background about, like, my concussion and my recovery, I had it build a personal guided meditation.

And using the text to speech, the voice is so good, it actually puts in, ambient noise beyond it. So it's using FFmpeg to layer an ambient noise with the text to speech. And it is as good as Headspace or anything, but it's saying, like, Scott, like, recovery is a journey. Like like, it's talking to me exactly about my issue and my, like, health thing with my concussion, and it's talking to me directly. It's it's like, man, it I've never wanted to do meditation, and I'm so, like, now I have guided meditations that are, like, really tuned to my exact situation.

And, man, that was really, really, like, kind of an eye opening thing for, like, wow. We can do this? That's crazy. Yeah. It's

I'm very impressed with all of the stuff that you can do. I built something where my kids have this, like, YOTO, and I needed to, like, upload a whole bunch of m p threes that I had, and then set icons for each of them and set some album art for for them. And, like, this like, they have a really nice UI for doing it, but it's just, like, slow, being able to do it. You know, I wanted to upload, like, 20 of them at once. So I just just figured out the Vercel engineer the API and built a little script to be able to find them in the thing. The AI is so good at doing fuzziness, where things might not be named exactly as you would expect it. And it's so good at just being able to, like, look at the directories.

Oh, here's the one that you're looking for, and here's what the names of the actual files Wes this one had a dash in it. This one didn't have a space in it. You know? Like, so much of my, like, script writing over the past ten years has been so built on rigidness, and then maybe writing something like regexes to make it a little bit more flexible. And the, like, fuzziness of data and data being a little bit weird has been so much better with all these AI agents. There's something really powerful about

software that, like, you wouldn't have the patience or time to write.

But, like, now that you can throw an agent on it and have it do it in no time, it unlocks a bunch of access to, like like, little helpful things that you just straight up wouldn't have. I for me, I've just been thinking about, like, what can I augment about the the friction in my life here, whether that's reminding me about to dos or or, again, like, helping my concussion recovery, etcetera? So that's where my brain's been with a lot of this stuff lately. I was doing my Christmas lights, this year, and I went all out on building,

window frames. So all of the windows in our house, both of the garage doors and the entrance to our house, I built out of PVC pipe. I built these, window frames that have every about three inches.

I drilled holes in them, and you poke these little LED lights in, and then our our house was just, like, lit up from the sky. It was it was amazing.

And in order in order to do this, I needed to make sure that the spacing of the LEDs was exactly the same, because I wanted I I you drive by people's houses, and you can tell that they they don't exactly have the LEDs in the corners of the windows. And what I wanted was just like CSS Grid, I wanted exact even spacing all the way across. And if you just most people in the industry just say, three inches is about good. But the thing is is that, like, over a run of, I don't know, twenty, thirty lights, if you're off even one or two millimeters or half a millimeter, over 20 lights, it it really adds up, and then you have a you have an LED that's too close to the edge or not far or too far away from the edge, and it just looks weird. So what I wanted is is to plan exactly Scott three inches, but however many millimeters, it was going to be. So, ideally, three inches, and then it what it did is it figured out if it needed to bump that value up or down a little bit in order to get even spacing. So I figured that out, and then it also provided me with a cut sheet, meaning that I could cut the PVC pipe exactly. So it told me exactly how long each piece of PVC pipe should go. I told that I I bought it in 10 foot lengths. So what it did is it figured out the minimum Wes, meaning that, like, okay. Well, like, you take the long piece from this window and the short piece from this window, and those add up to, like, 98% of the actual thing. So you're not just cutting them and ending up with a bunch of pieces that you can't use. It thought about it all all the way ahead of ahead of it.

And then what else did I do? One of ours had an arch in there, so I I had it figure out I gave it all the measurements of, how tall the middle of the arch was and how how tall the sides of the arch were, and it figured out how much of a degree I needed to angle the connectors, which Wes really good. And then what else did I do with it? Oh, I had it I had it output, a three d printable jig so that I could just put the PVC in, drill a hole, move it forward. It would click into place, drill a hole. That was not perfect, so I ended up modeling

something myself in Fusion, but it did a pretty good job at at making a little jig that I used for the first couple ones. Can I say I accidentally killed two hot ends on my three d printer in a half? Week or so. Doing what? Dude, I don't there's I'm trying to do the Gridfinity base where it does a PLA and then PET g and then p whatever. It stacks them. Oh, yeah. Stacking. Yeah.

And in that process of switching the two materials, I've gotten two clogs so bad that a hot push doesn't work, extraction doesn't work. I gotta take apart the whole thing. I had to take apart the gears because the gears were stripping the filaments and couldn't even pull it out. And two hot ends. I I know granted they're, like, $35 or something, but, like, two hot ends dead in in in, like, three prints maybe. I I was so frustrated when the second one died. I was like, this is, this is gonna kill me. And and I was trying to do the hot push where you get the the thing you hold and you're pushing, and it's, like, billion degrees and you don't wanna do anything pull? There's not enough in the it's, like, right it's flushed to the top of the thing. You couldn't do a hot pull. I could I did a hot pull. I have the same one as you. I had, Yeah. I could take the whole thing apart. I had, like, a thousand screws and everything laid out. I I, like, got really familiar with the inside of that. Melted the end of some of the filament and stuck it on a little piece and let it cool,

and then you heat up then you heat up the nozzle, and then you then you do a pull. I had a little fleck of as a marble filament. I had a fleck of the marble stuck in the thing, and that that killed it as well.

Yeah. I could still try that. I don't know if it's just the filament that I bought. It was the same filament that killed it both times, so I'm gonna Oh, yeah. Throw that filament out. Be a bad, yeah, bad batch. Anyways, we should do a updated three d printing episode because we're coming up on a year now.

What? Or maybe not the year. I'm coming up on a year on mine, and all the comments on our three d printing episode Wes, see if you didn't talk to us in a Yarn. It's gonna be collecting dust.

I could use the second one. Honestly, I have a second one, and I'm thinking about, like, I could use a bigger one. Yeah. Right? The whatever yeah. Whatever the next bamboo one they come out of is bigger. Yeah. I Node. I just, like, built my whole workshop over the whatever, and and mine good. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. That that's anyway, that's another show. What else? Deno Finders is something I've written several times over. I've used this to find like like, Filament is is a really good example where, like, sometimes Filament will go extremely cheap, especially on, like, Amazon returns. You know, people get something on Amazon. It doesn't work. They return it, and then they put it sometimes it's, like, marked down, like, half off.

So I bought a little bot that would just scrape the Amazon API and then alert me if something pops up, things like that. I've done that many times over the years, and it is so much better when you can use, like, a proxy man and just give AI the actual output. Be like, this is what a request looks like. You know? Here's the curl command. Here's the actual return values, and then it can write types for all the return data and then go ahead and re replicate all of those requests.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a wild world.

Yes. I'm I'm gonna install this cloud bot. I've been been holding off because everybody's talking about it, and everyone's all excited about it. And I was like, yeah. I I probably should spend a little bit of time on that. I think it'd be fun. But I gotta figure out this this, like but the personal brain thing, I'm gonna figure this out because this is high on my list of things that I wish I had.

Yeah. It's amazing what the, you can do with just markdown and JSON, if this isn't, like, public facing software. So, that low friction of it has been one of the most revelatory things for me. It's like, oh, right. When you're just saving everything to a JSON file, everything gets way more simple. Right? So, that's all I got. Wes, do you have anything else? That's it.

Cool. We wanna do sick picks and then get out of here? Yeah.

Cool.

Sick picks. Do you have any? Yeah. I'm gonna sick pick a Roku.

So we are mostly in our house, we are a a Google TV family for the most part, meaning that we have a lot of these Do you have a yard sign? Chromecast.

Sorry? In this house do you have a yard sign in this house? In this house, we are a Chromecast family.

No. Like, we have a bunch of these, like Cloudflare.

Yeah. Cloudflare.

We use only Cloudflare and Chrome in this house. No. I have a bunch of these, like, Chromecast that you plug in. Right? And Yeah. They're fantastic and amazing. And, of course, because they're fantastic and amazing, it seems like Google's going to phase them out. But I we recently put a TV in our gym, and the problem with the TV in the gym was that it's if you're on the treadmill or if you're, like, blasting something, it's it's kinda loud for everybody else in the house. So I was trying to figure out, like, how do I get the TV sound through my AirPods without having to pair them with the TV? Because, like, that's a pain in the butt. Pairing Bluetooth I have this pair of headphones, which I have paired to my phone and my computer, and, like, switching between them, absolutely awful. And, apparently, if you have an Apple TV, switching AirPods is is a little easier. But I was I was trying to figure out, like, how do I get the audio through my phone? And and Chromecast doesn't do that. And somebody on Twitter says, if you get a Roku, you can watch stuff on the Roku, but then use the Roku app to pipe the audio through your phone, which then ESLint turn, if you got headphones on, you it goes right through that. And it works amazingly well. It works so well. There's no lag in it. It sounds really good. And now you can just, like, watch something on the Roku on the TV, but then have all of the audio come through your phone or or through your your AirPods or whatever Bluetooth headphones you're you're working on. And I was amazed at how well it worked. Plus, like, the Roku UI, very, like, very responsive, very nice and fast. It's, like, $25 or something for a a four k stick. It's a good good product. We have a Roku TV at the cottage, but I've never, like, bought one of their sticks before. And I I might be converted to a Roku guy.

Yeah.

I just I do the same thing with the Chromecast everywhere.

But, yeah, it it Wes it feels like that that JS one of those products that Google's like, this is really good. We're just gonna ignore it forever, which is drives me nuts because some of them just get, like, frustrating. Like, I can't even yeah. I can't get mine to connect to to my speaker re reliably or anything like that. So yeah. Yeah. It's Comcast. I'm going to sick pick a, iPhone app.

If you're an iPhone user, you might know that the file app sucks dearly, and every single file explorer app that you find on the App Store also sucks because I don't know what it is about file apps that people make, but every one of them is like, you don't just wanna access your files. Let me tell you what you want. You want a browser. You want a VPN.

You want to connect to Google Drive and all these things and do a a cloud file syncing. I just want something that is finder like, a file system manager that's up to date. I can connect to my servers, SSH, whatever, and just get access to my dang files on my own network.

So I actually was complaining about this on Twitter JS one Node, and I was given the suggestion of the app from booger butt cheek on, Twitter. Booger butt tweet, Booger Butt Cheek suggested FTP manager.

And it's a nice simple little app, nice little files app, does everything I Node it to do and nothing more and is free, works super well, very minimal. So shout out Booger Butt Cheek for that suggestion.

That access is your just your local files. It's it's nothing you're not even using the FTP feature?

It's it's called FTP manager because it can FTP, but I just have my my, local things connected via SSH on here, and they just show up as sources.

And then that's it. I use it from the files on my phone and then the SSH into my machines on my account. So you access your computer's file system as well.

Nice and easy. Man. The you can do that in the files app, but I found something very frustrating. It caches I didn't know that. Life out of those files. I was, like, looking at a file and then looking at my computer and just being like, wait. Why is this different? There's Node way to clear the cache. There's, like, no, sync setting because it's That's close to the app. Just accessing it. And I'm just like, why? Why are you doing this thing now? Yeah. Node.

They they direct you to preview, the preview app that they now have on the phone. They direct you to that to open all photos. So I have a screenshot in my files app. I click on that screenshot, and it opens it in the preview app. And then that is like it's like, don't just open the just show me what the the screenshot looks like.

Yeah. Drive me nuts.

Oh, that's great. I'm a check that out. That's Nice to meet you. Problem I have is, like, I want sometimes I wanna access my computer from the go. And if that's the case, I I usually use the Dropbox app, actually. Because most things that I care about, I'll I'll throw in their Dropbox app. Or if it's a code, I usually have it on on GitHub or whatever. But

I'm not a dual computer guy. I have my laptop, so I usually have it with me. Yeah. This tail Scott stuff has changed my tune on that. I think for my next setup, I'm gonna get a big old beefy Mac Studio there, and then I'm gonna get a cheapo Mac Air MacBook Air and take that with me everywhere and just do everything between the two. Because running the dev server on that through Tailscale, you still get the hot reloading and all that stuff going on. It just

the processing's being done on a different machine. Thin client. I mean, I I want the I I often every time I take a flight, I think this I love the 16 inch MacBook Pro, but it you can't work on it on a plane. It's it's way it's too big. It's just like a little the 15 inch, you could just open it enough to work on a plane, but the 16 inches is too big. Or planes are getting smaller. I think that's the same thing. That's happening as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Alright. Alright. Cool. Well, thanks for watching. Hit subscribe, all that good stuff. Let us Node. Are you building any cool personal software? Did you get inspired by any of this? Let us know what you are building, what you wanna build, or do you think all this is stupid and you hate it? Peace.