Welcome to Sanity. Hey. We got a show on remote coding agents and and what are your options there. So what we're talking about is that you, of course, are probably have used an agent where you're sitting in your editor or sitting in your terminal, and you type in the Bos, and you wait for it to come back and and whatnot. And then sometimes you run into the situation where you go, oh, I wish I could have these things run when I'm going home, or I wish I could have these things running in parallel on a different machine, or I wish that I did my laptop. I did this the other day where I had an agent running, and then I go, oh, I gotta bring my kid to something. So I tethered my phone, and I kept the laptop open in the passenger seat with my phone tethered to it. And I was like, this would be way easier if I had remote You would need agent setup.

Are the same person. I did that same thing on the way to dance. I had the laptop o like like, creaked, not like open, but it creaked you open.

Out. Yeah. Just so that it could finish whatever long running task it was. And I personally have moved so much off of this machine that when I have to wait for something on this machine, I get really annoyed with it. Yes.

So we're we're back to thin client days, which is, if you don't know what that is, when computing in in mainframes were a thing, it was the big idea that, like, you have a server somewhere running your heavy compute and then then your actual, like, terminal or your your laptop is just like a a window into the stuff happening somewhere else. So there's a lot happening in the space right now. There's a lot of different solutions. There's a lot of DIY solutions. And, of of course, a lot of these big AI players are are trying to, move you to their own solution for this as well. So we're gonna go through all of that. My name is Wes Bos. This is Scott. What's up, Scott?

You ready for this? Yeah. I'm ready for this, man. I'm ready. I'm ready to talk about this stuff. I'm ready for the comments to tell us they don't want to hear about AI. That's what I'm ready for.

Scott, the comments really bug Scott. I'm sorry.

Everyone, be a little nicer to Scott. You can tear into me, though. I'd I I find them to be either hilarious or, little nugget of truth in there, and I appreciate that.

They do bother me. Why does why I don't know why they I've been on YouTube, since 2012, and I've had more rude comments Scott my way than, many people in this world, and they still bother me for some reason Wes I feel it bothers me when I feel misrepresented.

That's what bothers me. I hate it when people are like, oh, you've gotten the marching orders to talk more about AI or something like that. Bro, this is just what we're interested in. You know? So much of the Yeah. The mean stuff is just, like, out to lunch or Yeah. If they don't understand the full picture because they've gotten, that happens a lot with, like, a short form content clips. Like, why not just use x, y, and z? And it's like, believe me, I understand the stuff really Wes. And Yeah.

There's more to it, and I can't get this all across. And I can't I don't I don't

get upset about people criticizing me if I'm wrong. I'm I'm happy about that.

But, yes, let's get into it.

Remote agents.

So why would you want to run an agent remotely? As we've already mentioned, if it's something's running on your your machine, you're getting it's stuck on that machine. It's a process that's running on that machine. When something's running on a remote, location, it could be long running, could be something that you can access anytime, You can access it from anywhere.

You can access it from your phone, from your laptop, from this or that. That gives you a lot of flexibility and a lot of freedom to just have this thing existing.

Right? Yeah. And a lot of being tethered. Like, a Scott of people touting the the benefits of remote agents is that, like, I can I can do something when I'm sitting on the couch at night, or I'm standing in in line at whatever, or I'm driving my Yarn, and I I don't feel like looking at the Node, and I would like to start off an agent? You know? Like, there's probably a little bit of work life balance stuff that needs to happen there. But the idea that you can keep stuff going when you're not necessarily just sitting at your Wes, when an idea strikes you, when a bug comes up, Wes, like some of my best ideas for, like, stuff that features that I should add to a code Bos happen when I'm simply just chilling.

You know? And and it's nice to like, you can make a GitHub issue from your phone or whatever, but you can also just, like, kick off the work on that thing. And then next time you're at a desk or whatever, you can come sit down and you can take a look at at what has been done, especially with some of these longer running agents. Some of these agents are starting to Scott necessarily get slower. There but they they can do a lot more. The the cursor cloud agents can now use a browser.

So it'll it'll pop open a browser. It'll visit the thing.

It'll click on things. It'll check things. And and that's a really cool feature, but it's also really slow. If you don't necessarily care about how long these things takes because you're not gonna be working on this project for the next ten hours, then then they can take their time and and check all the pages and do all your integration tests for you. Yeah. Yeah. I personally really liked this flow. I know

it can feel a little scary to get into some of this stuff. But in in practice, I don't I don't know about you, but, like, yeah, I kinda I kinda liking this, utility

just in general. Yeah. Me too. So, like, I'll I'll give you another example. On my personal website, westboss.com, I have a page for all of my tips, and and and that is just a collection of usually, what I'll do is I'll I'll put together a little video, and I'll post it on on Twitter, on Blue Sky, on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube shorts, sometimes on Reddit. You know? Like, I post them all over the Wes. And what I do on my website is a is a is a single place where I can bring links to all of those things in as well as as supply code and examples and links to other things that are related to the video. So if somebody's asking me, hey. What was that thing you were talking about? X y z. I have one spot where I can kinda send people to. And I have, like I found that process of adding it to my website very annoying to a point where, like, I I usually just batch them, and every couple months, I'll go through and try to add them all to there. But recently, I made, like, a a skill that will I can set an agent on it, and then I I gave it tools to search all of the different social media platforms for that specific video.

And then I also gave it Tolinski to a Git repo where I keep the code examples.

And, basically, it's just doing the, like, grunt work of collecting all the links, collecting the, like, caption for each one, collecting the code for that one, and then and then also taking some additional like, I might write two or three sentences that I want to go along with that. And and I've I just kinda put that all into a single skill. And now I can simply just, like, say, hey, agent.

Go and add this tip to my website, and it will go and do all of that process for me. And and that's really nice that I can just do that from my phone, or I can do it on a remote agent, and it can just kinda go off and and do all that for you. Yeah. I I love that.

It we often talk about or people would say, you know, what if if AI could do the stuff I don't want to do, not the stuff that I want to do, then that then that would be, like, useful. And this is definitely where I I I find a lot of utility in Wes. Again, it's like the grunt work, the stuff that is just, like, monotonous, the the things that I don't wanna spend any time doing, not the, interesting, fulfilling parts of my my life and career.

I I use this type of stuff for for doing research.

I mentioned before that I use my OpenClaw setup to generate a podcast for me using text to speech where I'll research a topic and then generate that to a podcast.

And that's like that's like something I can just say, hey. I'm interested in this. Go off and do it. Right? And and that's just the only reason I I choose to have it be in the podcast format is just that's the way I like to to learn things so I could be For the record, Scott is talking about it, like, literally generating an audio thing. It's Scott, like, researching episodes Node syntax. It's not researching for syntax. It's researching things that I want to learn in life, and then it creates it to a private RSS feed. So it's not public I'm not pushing the slop out to other people. But what it's essentially doing is it's distilling blog posts or distilling, repos or techniques and then putting it into language that makes my brain easier to comprehend it, and then it speaks it to me. That it's just like it's using text to speech, but also summarizing kind of in that way. And the only reason it's in a podcast format is because it's just, nice from my phone for Troy to exist that way. Yeah. Man, I have it helping us do travel planning and stuff right now. I have a little travel planning interface and stuff for it Wes I can have it go off and research things.

And, you know, obviously, all this stuff requires validation and verification, with AI.

But, yeah, just a Vercel. Go go back and listen to our episode on OpenClaw where we go pretty deep on some of the things that I I use these things for. And and this episode won't be about OpenClaw specifically, but, most of the time Wes I'm using remote agents, I am using them via OpenClaw just because Mhmm. That's what I have set up. Awesome. So we're gonna talk mostly about, like like, coding remote agents. But, like like, Scott says, and even with my stuff, it's like this stuff will very slowly or or very quickly move into stuff that is past coding as well because you realize, ah, yes.

This is nice for writing code and and submitting pull requests and whatnot, fixing bugs, but it's also the there are some areas, like like Scott said, travel planning that it can be useful for. Alright. So the way we're gonna break this down is they're gonna talk about when they will actually run.

We're gonna talk about different environments and access to things that they need, where they they run. So, like, are you hosting a server? Are you using some sort of service? Are you running them on your laptop, an extra older laptop that you have plugged in in your office? Are you using, like, cloud code, open code? Are you using cursor agents? Are you using some self hosted thing? There's a lot of different options there. So first of all, when they run. So, of course, they can run when you prompt it. Right? That's that's the very simple example. But, also, I ESLint, interesting space where they run is when when something happens, when an email comes in, when a web hook is hit.

One big one that we're we're running on the mad CSS website right now is we're using Sentry. So when a new error is detected in Sentry, we have it automatically. I don't need Scott, I don't even know if you know this or not, but I automatically click this. Yeah. In just How are you doing this? I just went into the Sentry dashboard and hooked up my cursor API key.

Mhmm. And and what happens is that when a new error is logged in Sentry, it then takes that error and all of the metadata around it and then paste it into a cursor prompt for you, and it runs a cursor cloud agent.

And then cursor cloud agent has your code Bos. It has access to all of the error information from our Sentry, and then it it it will look at it and see if it can figure out how to actually solve this type of thing. Right? And it will also have Century will give it a whole a whole prompt as well from, their SEER product as well. And and then, like, if it can find it, you can set it up to to submit a pull request and automatically do that. So, like, it's I I had a joke the other day on Twitter, which is like, try Claude, which is essentially like, try this Node, and if not, you catch it and just Mhmm. That you just send that info to the AI. And that that's essentially the setup that we have right now JS if there were new errors that were to happen, I get logged in Sanity, and they automatically it can get fixed, which is a wild world.

It's a wild world. Self healing software, really Yes. Is what that is. That's really neat.

Also, like you said, speaking of Century, Century also has the ability to Sanity like, monitor agents too. So you can have AI monitoring via Century. So if you are running a lot of agents and you wanna make sure that they're being effective, you wanna trace and debug what they're actually doing, their tool calls and all that kind of stuff, man, you can use Sentry for that. So, like, they always are innovating this product, which is one thing I really love about Sentry. Head on over to century.io/syntax.

Sign up using the coupon code tasty treat, all lower case, all one warp, if you wanna get two months for free. But, man, there's so much cool stuff in here, and I really need to get in on this

agent monitoring stuff. I I think this looks really super neat. The LLM call account or the the tokens used is really interesting as well because Yeah. Right? Some of the stuff is like, was that worth it? You know? It's worth it. I spent $11 to fix the typo on the website. Was that worth it? Color too red. Yeah. Exactly.

Well, now now you can you can see the token usage, right, and put a dollar sign to to that type of stuff and say, yeah. It it was usage.

So that's kinda like when they run. You know? It can be triggered. You can be done via a prompt. Let's talk about where they actually run because there's so many different spots that you can run it. At the end of the day, you need either a computer or a server running somewhere that can can sit there and let this agent sort of churn away, send API calls back and forth to the LLMs, take a look at your code, you know, all of that type of stuff. So this could be a machine that lives at your house. I know a lot of people have taken a Mac mini. I personally have a I'm pointing to the ground right now. I have an old MacBook that I have set up to never go to sleep.

Yeah. And it's it's just hardwired into it. I'll probably throw it into my server rack at some point, and and that is allows me just to have something running constantly. You have a Mac mini. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny that became so trendy. I bought this Mac mini, like, what, two years ago or something because

my NAS exists, but the NAS hard hardware is, like, garbage for a lot of stuff. Like, I wanted to do video transcoding and stuff that the NAS couldn't handle. So it's like, oh, I'm gonna get a Mac mini. I'm gonna run my software on the Mac mini in containers and then just use the NAS as actual drives instead. And I've been doing that for a little while, and then now I run a lot of dev processes off of that machine. It's not powerful enough because I'm running a Minecraft server for a bunch of kids. I'm running OpenClaw in there, and I am running a bunch of dev process. So when I can upgrade this, I will be getting a Mac Studio to throw in here. And I'm also gonna get a new laptop at some point in here because this thing is starting to chug. And I gotta just say, I'll probably just end up tossing, this this bad boy on there as well just as a long running machine, considering this thing has, like, 64 gigs of RAM, and that that has, like, eight gigs of RAM, the Mac mini does. So, yeah, the Mac mini is is not powerful at all, but it doesn't need to be for what it's doing. Yeah. Just running API calls back and forth. I I found the same thing as well. I have a Synology, and I'm running, I don't know, probably six or seven different Docker containers on there.

And there was a couple that I needed to to kill because I started to run out of resources on the Synology.

And that's why when I'm starting to do this, like, remote agent stuff, I was like, alright. I'm gonna throw this stuff on, like, a on a MacBook Pro older MacBook Pro. But you don't need, like, an an older MacBook Pro. It's simply a Linux box or something like that. It can you can just go to, like, one of these computer wholesalers.

Raspberry Pi, maybe. Like, I I know people are doing it, but you'd you'd I guess it depends on what you are doing, but you probably want a little bit of more of a oomph behind it. A lot of people are also just, like, simply just going and buying, like, a five, ten, fifteen dollar a month, VPS.

It'll it's just a a Linux box instead of having it live at your home. Like, you might not have very good stable Internet or power, and you you want that running on, like, a server farm somewhere. So you can do that as well.

Yeah. I will say, something that people don't consider often, refurbished. I bought my Mac mini as refurbished Mac mini.

You can buy I I don't know. I Node Mac mini might be constrained right Node.

Yeah. Constrained right now in terms of, like, what's available. But when I bought mine, it was refurbished, so it was considerably cheaper. So, just something to to keep in mind.

You don't gotta you don't gotta shell out big cash for it. That's for sure. True. You can go buy some, like, Dell,

like, some Dell, like, box that you know, you go to these computer stores in, like, a plaza, and they have, like, a stack of them, like, 80 high, a 10 Bos something like that. That'll that'll work warp well. Micro Center. If you got a Micro Center near you, just pop on over to Micro Center. CJ just bought a little little machine with, like, an integrated,

memory and stuff on there. It rips.

Oh, it's great. So that's like like a like a self hosting route. If you don't want to go the self hosting route, there are lots of, obviously, good paid options as well. Cursor has this thing called the cloud agents, which you you can kick them off from your, like, cursor desktop, and you can say run-in the cloud.

And then they also have this new thing called, like, long running agents, which you must kick off from cursor.com.

And they will run I don't know. You can set, like, five, ten until done, like, hours to to have these things run, and they will just run as as long as they they need to. So that's kind of cool because you can just, like, kick off stuff. You give it access to your your git repo.

And then when you're in a cloud agent, they they essentially give you a little Ubuntu box.

They give you a terminal, and then they also it's it's running like a VNC, so it also has a browser built into it, which is really nifty.

And if you go into, like, the if you go to cursor.com and log in, you can, like, literally use the browser if you want. I installed cloud code on my cursor box just to see Yes. Yeah. If it would work.

It does. It it it worked just fine, which JS, like, it's not some, like like, pnpm down environment. There's tons of memory in it. I I checked it. It's, like, 18 gigs of memory or something. Like, these are pretty beefy boxes that that you're getting there. And then what that will do is it will just run it, of course, in the cloud, but then it also has access to, like, a terminal if it needs to run some terminal commands, and it has access to a full blown, Chrome web browser. So it can it can surf it, take screenshots, get the DOM tree, see if elements are on the page, all of that kinda cool stuff, which is is really neat.

I think the browser is an essential part of this. So Yes.

The one thing, about the cloud agents is that is the, like, the the story of bringing it local.

They're if you're using the long running agents, I I ran into this this weird situation where I I would kick one off on cursor.com, and then it would submit a pull request. And I go, ah, it's not really there. I wanna Mhmm. I wanna work on the code now. So then you have to, like, git pull.

The, like, transition from cursor.com to, like, the cursor editor is not as smooth as I would like it to be, but I imagine that would probably get better. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons why I kinda like

the local flow that I've established because that handoff is is really seamless. I think that, like, that that is a a major, a major pain point for me personally. Like, I don't wanna prompt into Sanity when I can make a a change myself and and just wrap something up. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's that's honestly why I've liked

a lot of these, like, editor. Like, I'm like, I've I've used been using OpenCode, Cloud Node, and Cursor.

But for stuff that, like, I actually care about the code, I find myself going a little bit more towards Cursor simply just because you you have that. I know that you can open everyone's always like, you can open it in an editor. You know? And and I cloud code will has a has a Versus Node extension and all that type of stuff. But

I just run I run the two u two GUIs.

I I run the open code GUI next to my Zed GUI, and I tap back and forth like a,

caveman. Like a madman.

Okay. So let's talk about that. The the next kind of option you have here is just like a CLI on a box. Right? You you SSH into your box, whether that's a Mac Sanity in your office or whether that's, like, a Ubuntu that you've rented from some b p VPS provider.

And then a lot of people are simply just SSH ing into these things and then running the CLI of their choice. Right? Cloud Code, Copilot, Cursor CLI, OpenCode.

There's probably 80 other CLI products out there. Charm. And you simply just use the terminal to just type in what you want, and then you git push whatever, or you have the agent itself do that. And then a lot of people additionally have either created UIs Wes, like, it's like a simple little server that they can instead of having to use the terminal SSH from their phone, it just makes a little website where where you can go into it. Open Node has Open Node web, which you can just type it in, and it spins up a little Vercel, and you get a nice GUI for it. Cloud Node is rolling out this thing called remote control, where you can you can just run slash remote control, and then it will spin up a little server, and then you can use that, from from your phone on, like, the Claude Claude app or something like that. I'm curious what your solution is there, Scott.

Oh, yeah. I I use, Node OpenCodeWeb.

I'm running it on any place that I have dev processes, whether that's my laptop or this, the Mac mini.

Yep. Reason being is if I'm running open code web rather than the open code GUI or the open code two e on here, I just pop to that URL that it serves on my phone, and then I can prompt it no matter what. And so that way, I I have multiple different open code sessions on my phone for for whatever laptop or or machine it's working on. But I have it all connected via Tailscale, and everything has a Tailscale domain or an IP associated with it. So that way that way, I can just access it on my phone even if I'm off network because I'm still on my Tailscale network. So the tail scale piece of it for me is massive. You wanna see how I do that, I have a video on the YouTube channel about how I run that setup, that details exactly what's going on there. But because all of these, systems are all running on the same Tailscale network, they're all running Node Wes, I can access any of the sessions from any of the machines. And then I can also SSH,

to remote access into the code anyways if I wanna edit the code, which I do via Zed. Yeah. So so if you're working in your office and you wanna, like let's say, you wanna fix something on the the Syntax website, your process would like, what's your start to finish process of you're sitting at your laptop, and you want to do a feature on the Syntax website with these these tools?

So the Syntax site specifically is still running on this machine. It's like the newer stuff I'm I'm working on, I do put on there. I because I have so many things that I've like, the database stuff. I don't wanna transfer it all over to the Mac mini. So if it's something that I had been working prior on my laptop, it's still on my laptop for now. But I use I open it up in Zed. I got my Zed here. And then another monitor, I have OpenCodeWeb running. In OpenCodeWeb, the it's a GUI, and the way that works is that it doesn't need to run for each individual project. You're not running, like, eight instances of OpenCodeWeb if you have all these different setups. Right? Not like the two e version where you run OpenCode on a directory, and then you have to have a bunch of them running at once. The Yeah. The OpenCodeWeb is basically just a a a GUI where you can add as many projects as you want regardless of where they're living. And so I just have them loaded up in that sidebar there, and I can just click on it if I want to interact with it via open code.

Mhmm. That's it, though. Yeah. That that's great. And we'll talk about environments in just a second as well because, like, that's that's half the battle JS, like, getting your your environment set up with all your databases and API keys, all of that stuff. Right? It's my least favorite thing. Yeah. Be a bit of a pain. Yeah.

Next one we have here is the entire editor on a box.

And, honestly, I think that this might be where I wanna move with a lot of this stuff as well.

I don't think that there's a great solution here just yet, but running everything. So, like, the last project I did, I used I I have Node my laptop. I had that the second laptop, and then I use a SSH plug in to remote into it. Right? So Mhmm. On Versus Code, it's called Versus Code remote SSH. Cursor has one called cursor remote SSH.

And, essentially, you're still using your editor on your computer, but the the processes and all of the code, much like Scott's setup, is running on that remote thing, and and any terminals you spin up and whatnot are all running on that remote machine as well.

GitHub Codespaces, to kinda take this one one step further and same with, like, this there's, there's a something called Node server, which allows you to literally run Versus Node on the machine, and then you can just visit it in the browser, which, honestly, I think, like, that's, like, where I'm going with this type of stuff. Because, like, I wanna just type in a URL and have my entire development environment,

I think. I think. There are there's there's a lot of benefits to that.

Especially as our laptops are aging here, it takes some of that processing power off the laptop.

You that helps your battery last longer.

There are some negatives if you're on, like, a bad Wi Fi area and stuff like that. See. I don't find latency to be a huge problem in my current setup. But, again, I I I guess I you know, working on an airplane might be a a bit of a different situation.

You Node? We'll see when I start to take this set up a bit more on the road as I I go here.

But I really do like this setup, And and it has the added benefit of being able to test everything on your phone, especially if your your everything is running on another machine, and you can access it on your Tailscale network if that's what you're choosing to use. I can then use my debt. Not that you couldn't do this without this, but I I'm able to really Sanity, with a domain and a port, just easily just use it on my phone and try it out. And it's like the dev site, and I can type in. I can see. I can get that live reloading right in my phone and everything like that. It's it's just a really nice way to work.

I would I would say I I did this as well. I use Cloudflare's, Cloudflare Tunnels with their, what is it called, their access product, which is similar to Tailscale, but probably way harder to set up. And I would say if you're going to do any of this, get that stuff set up right away. Because as soon as you start, like, connecting to IP addresses and IP address changes, that stuff is such a pain in the butt to to get working first. So, like, just get it out of the way. Get a nice domain for whatever it is you're working on. And then that way, it doesn't matter if you're on your local network or not, and you can just go ahead and use it.

Also, standardized ports, like, per project. The way I do it is I have e each project that I have, I set the ports to be that project's name in Leadspeak.

Then I'm always gonna remember what the port is on any given project. I'm not like, oh, is it five one seven three or five one seven four or five one seven five or or any of that stuff. I I've been standardizing

on the lead speak for the name of title of the project. That drives me nuts, especially, like, these AI agents will spin up like, a local agent will be 3000. Oh. And then it's like, oh. That. Something's running. You know, I'll do 3001. It's like, yeah. You started it on 3000. And then, like, I got to the point yesterday where it's on Port 3007.

And I was like, okay. You've you've got seven feet processes running, and you can't keep track of them all.

Oh my god. I'm I'm at a point where I think I need to just, like, do a strict port. I I always do unique ports for most of my existing projects because I hate it when my, like, browser history is, like, suggesting things that don't exist for that project because you've used that port or if you've got, like, like, local, cookies or if you've got, like, a service worker that's been registered to that. That's all a pain in the butt.

Yeah. I know. It's a it's a massive it gets tough, folks.

Yeah. So

yeah. Similar to Cursor's cloud agents, Cloud Code also has this concept of cloud agents Wes you can just, like, log in to the website. You can log in to the Cloud Code app. You can use the desktop app.

And if it has access to your your Git repos, you can you can kick stuff off and and sort of let it rip. It doesn't have browser access, which is one of the things that Cursor has over it at the moment.

But other than that, as far as I can tell, they are relatively similar.

Yeah. Open Node? Did you see this? That Open Node is launching some sort of, like, orchestrator, for if you're running, like, local code on your computer or sorry. Open code on your computer, and you're also running on a remote Vercel, and then you also have it in, like, a work tree, and another one is in container. They're gonna have, like, a single interface for managing all of these things, which seems really nice.

No. I didn't see it. It's so funny. You said, have you seen this? And I'm thinking, how could I have missed this? And it's like, it came out yesterday at 4PM.

So psycho. Yeah. Yeah. No wonder I've missed this. Interesting. Came out, and it's all it's built by James Long. He Yeah. Used to work for Stripe for the longest time, and he's a huge local first guy. And he says a lot of the, like, CRDT stuff that he he used in previous projects is gonna be working on here. So

kinda interesting. I'm I'm excited to to try it out. It's not out yet. So He mentions actual budget. Actual budget was one of the very first projects that got me interested in local first stuff Wes. Oh.

Really interesting project. And, yeah. So he he's been involved in this stuff in the right

capacities for a long time here, and, he's definitely somebody that I I pay attention to for sure. DIY agents. So I I we asked on Twitter, like, what are people using. Right? And a lot of people are saying, like, cloud cloud on a box. I SSH into it, open code web.

Mhmm. But a lot of people said I'd I just use a DIY agent. So, Py, we had the creator of Py on here as well. This is a, basically, an agent that you can just let let her rip and and sort of make your own cloud code based on that. And that is what OpenClaw is is built upon as well. And a lot of people say, I simply just use OpenClaw, and it has access to my my cloud Node, and it can just run stuff for me.

Yeah. Mine does not have access to my cloud code or anything like that, but I I do I use my OpenClaw way less for coding than I do for personal assistant style tasks because I just like my flow of working in OpenCode. I agree. The chat interface

of OpenClaw for doing coding projects is awful.

Oh, I don't even use their chat interface at all. It was it's No. I I went I I ended up building my own chat interface for it as well, but it's just not that's not the interface for for building this type of stuff. No. It's not not great. I much prefer to use, like, like, a purpose built, agent orchestrator for that.

Yeah. Same. Other interfaces

mentioning these these are not just like like, we we, of course, talked about, like, you have an editor interface, you have a web interface, you have, like, an iPhone app app interface, but there's there's other interfaces for this thing as well. Right? You can mention in a pull Wes. It's very popular for a lot of these things. You can mention it in Slack.

You can have things that are sort of, like, listening to your conversations. You put it in a in a chat room. I know modem.dev is is working on that as Wes, where it will simply just, like, listen to what's going on in your GitHub issues or your Slack chat or whatever. And then instead of you telling it to do something, it will just oh, I Node people are talking about this. Maybe I'll I'll I'll start working on that. I can get down with with the listening thing, like having it listen to conversations

in GitHub, Slack chat. Like, I could get down with that.

But I you will never catch me using Slack as my interface for coding. And I don't even wanna be in Slack, in general, let alone telling it to do PRs and stuff like that. You didn't miss me with that one. Yeah. No thanks.

Next one is Warp Oz. I haven't used Warp Oz beyond us just looking at their really nice landing page. I do use Warp full time, though, as my shell. I've moved back to Warp, ever since we had that conversation.

But Oz is the orchestration platform for cloud agents. It's been a parallel cloud coding agents. It seems neat. There's just so many competing things for my time and energy right now that I haven't picked this up.

That's the thing is that there's so much cool stuff out there that, like, there's only so much. That's it's probably the hardest thing for a lot of these companies. It's simply just getting people to try it. You know? You gotta connect your GitHub. You gotta get the app. And, like, breaking people's flow is is really tricky.

But this is kind of the the way that they're going with this type of thing, which is is kinda interesting. I I'm kinda frustrated that a lot of the stuff clutters the terminal that I know and love. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that this is kind of a an interesting move as well. And there there's several other bazillion other people working on different orchestration platforms as well.

I'm gonna say, I think I'm out on cloud

for this for me.

Like, which is, like, some existing service, like, CursorCloud, cloud code cloud.

You're gonna you're running it all yourself?

I I wanna run myself I wanna run my stuff, like, here. It doesn't I wanna run my stuff at my house. That's it. Yeah. I wanna run it at my house. That's really just it. I I don't feel like I need to run-in things on the cloud. I don't necessarily see the benefit to that, especially with my Tailscale setup. I can access it from anywhere. What's cloud getting me that I'm not getting from running this on my own Tailscale network? No. I think I think if you're, like, apt enough to run it yourself and to set all that stuff up, I don't I don't think there's a major

benefit there.

I think what it's gonna get me is whoever can figure out the transitioning thing the Wes. Meaning that I start something on my laptop, and then I can open it up on my phone, or I can add it in in GitHub, and, like, it's all just works well. And that when it comes to the time where I need to edit the code, I'm not doing any weird pulling locally and and merging in their changes. You know? Totally. Yeah. I just want a I just want a folder that I can open and and continue it on whatever platform that I'm working on.

Yeah. I feel that. That's exactly same for me. Alright. The other thing we wanna talk about here is the environment that which they run-in. Right? Because the the reason why people love to run it on their laptop is because that's where everything is set up for their their dev environment. Right? So I got my stuff. Yeah. That's where your stuff is. That's where it's where you wanna run it. Right? So what what type of access does does an agent need? You need, like, a fully spec'd out terminal. You need, like, a Tolinski box or a Mac or Windows that's running somewhere for it to run.

It needs access to your your GitHub. It needs so that you it can it can branch out. It can make workspaces. It can do pull requests, all of that that type of stuff

for you Yeah. Which is is kinda really nice. Yeah. And depending on what you need, it might need to have access to various local tools. Like, I I do a lot with FFmpeg or or Sharp to resize images. Like, if it's going off and working on media, this thing needs to be able to access those tools, whatever those may be, any kind of CLI, really.

Everybody's coming out with a CLI now too. Like, Century has a CLI that's great that I use all the time for my Century stuff.

Yep. Obsidian has a CLI.

These CLIs are are tools and bins or whatever that the AI needs to have access to. Yeah. I the other day, on the mad CSS website, I had a whole bunch of images which were, like, way too large.

And, normally, what I would do is I would, like, write some script where it would just, like, resize and compress them or, like, maybe maybe install something, like a Vite plug in that would, like, resize them on demand. But I simply just, like, typed in to the box. I was like, hey. Can you resize these to be max 500 pixels wide, max 800 pixels high, and then compress them 80%? And it just did it all for you, which is great. And it had access to all of my, like, local CLI tooling, which you may have to then install and set up on some of these these other environments.

It might need a browser. This this is kind of a big one as well JS, like, if it needs to do things via the browser, whether that is access things that don't have an API, you know, that's how a lot of these bots are are are working right Node, where they're simply just using the browser as if they were a human, whether that's, like, loading it up loading up your web page in the browser and and inspect element and whatnot.

Browser JS a big part of that. And there's there's only so much that you can, like, spoof and replicate via CLI calls. So I think that that's that's a big one. And that's a that's a big, like, thumbs up for running your own, especially a lot of the bot detection Right now, if you're if if you're, like, coming from, like, a data center, if your IP is showing that you're, like, a request is coming from some data center, it's very high that your your request is gonna be blocked because it's it's either somebody running a VPN or it's some script that's running on a digital ocean box somewhere. Right? But if you're if it's coming from, like, the IP address of, like, your home Wes where you're also doing legitimate stuff, you know, your your daily work, there's some points that that are awarded there.

I like that. That's one of the things I like about OpenClaw having that just baked in, is that, like, if my wife is giving it a URL and, like, asking it to research or whatever like that, it's just straight up opening it on the browser, on the computer JS if it was me doing it on the browser on the computer. Yeah. Again, for all those reasons, that makes a lot of sense. Mhmm.

API keys, this is probably the big one.

You need to give it access to your your dot e n v file. Right? Like, whether that's database credentials, whether that's, like, API keys for different services that you need to connect to, deployment. Like, one annoying one that I wanna get set up is that I was prompting cursor, and then it would say, I've finished, and then it would Mhmm. Send the pull Wes, and then my CloudFlare workers would go, oh, a pull Wes. And then it built it, and then and then it would break.

Like, the the deploy would break. And then there was, like, there was no connection from the the logs of Cloudflare back to the agent.

And I know you can do that. I just didn't set it up. But, ideally, what it would do is to say, hey, agent. Check back in four minutes or whenever this thing is is finished building and look at the logs.

Did it did it break? You know? And if so, come back. Take the logs. Stick them back in in your prompt. Try to fix it again. Send a send a a pull request again. It will build, and you just do that cycle forever and ever until it until it actually until the monkeys write Shakespeare. Right? Until the monkeys write Shakespeare.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Web search. I haven't really figured out web search here, Wes. I know that, you can pay for a Brave web search API token.

Yeah.

And I just don't know if I'm ready to do that. Let's see how much it costs here. It's $5 per 1,000 requests for search.

Yeah. That's that's a lot. Because if you sure I'm ready to do that. Yeah.

How does OpenCode do web search? Because when I'm using Cursor or Claude and it's like, search the web for 90,000,000 things and and scoop them all up. You know? Yeah. And I'm I'm wondering, though, they must either have agreements with Google agreements. Yeah. Or and, like, that can't be cheap, man.

That cannot be cheap.

But, yeah, web search is is a big one. So what does OpenCode do with with web search? You have to set it up. Right? I've never set up web search, and I almost Node don't ask it to do web search. I'm always giving it URLs.

But that's the question. So you do the you do the web search like a

mobile? The web search. Let's see.

Exa AI Wes search API. What's the pricing on this one?

For a lot of stuff like your MCP servers, we'll cover you. Right? You you got your CloudFlare MCP server. You got your contact 7 server. You Node, that covers a lot of your docs and whatnot.

But a lot of times, it it's like, this is a weird error.

Web search. Oh, here's somebody else that had this this issue and a GitHub issue. Here's how they fixed it. Let me apply that.

See, I do Sanity, SEER, root cause, and then the AI usually can handle it from there. Boom.

Yeah. And I bet that will also get harder as well. You know? Like, if Google wants to, like, clamp down on this and make their Gemini product even better, I wonder if they're gonna be like, right. No more web search for anybody else. That's that's assuming that they are doing that. I wonder what's going on here.

I haven't found a solution to this. Folks, if you have a best solution beyond just using the Brave API and paying $5 for every 1,000 search queries, let us know. I'm very curious about that. Open Node uses ExaAI.

Yes. ExaAI.

$7 for every 1,000 searches.

That's not cheap because it does I don't know. Like, a a single prompt could could do seven, eight, nine, ten prompts or web searches at once.

So you probably blow through that pretty quickly.

Yeah. It does say for free. What is the free because Google's AI tool is saying that you can get up to 1,000 web searches for free with Exa, but that's Google's AI, and we all know that that thing lies like crazy. Oh, is that Exa from Google? No. No. No. I'm just saying I I was googling it.

Run up to 1,000 requests for free each month.

That seems like the answer. 1,000 for free each month with Exa.

And they got a great looking design on this website. So I think I could do a free tier on this bad Bos. And then just if I hit that a thousand, say, alright. Well, never mind.

I think I think what a lot of people are doing is they're just the they spin up a browser in the background, and then they they are consuming the output from that, which is like, goes to show, like, a lot of people are saying, oh, my my website traffic has either tanked because no one's searching for their stuff anymore or has exploded because because of these it's these agents visiting their website.

I would like to just build in something like that for my like, a little search skill that just does that just because. Just you just crawl the web yourself.

Why why are we doing using Google? We could just vibe that in that this app I'll put an agent on that. Yes. Yeah. Throw an agent on it. Why do we even need these tools if we just throw an agent on it? Yeah. Yeah. That's what we need.

Yeah.

Have you tried wealth?

I have not tried wealth, but I understand the concept of you it just you give it a list of things that you want it to do, and it just loops through those things one by one until it's done. Essentially. Yeah. It's a Yeah. It's basically a bash loop, and then it, like, fixes and repairs and tries and lessons learned. It's it's I found it to be garbage, but,

I'm not an expert by any means on it. There are smart people who are saying that it's effective for them, but I I did it a few times, and I was like, I don't need this in in my life here. I like more control, I think, than that JS.

Yeah. Looping over something 20 times until it gets an answer or more. Have you one thing I did the other day is I I was working with the cursor API.

And for some reason, in the cursor API, I was getting the actual system prompts in the API and stuff that they were not showing you in the, like, website.

And, it it was doing things like, what what was it? I forget what it was. But you you could it leaked a little bit of the prompt there, and I thought that was cool. And then I was like, I wonder what other system prompts you can look for. And I found all the prompts in the open code repo as well.

And, their main prompt is simply just, like, keep looping through this list of to dos until there is nothing left, to do. And it it's actually kinda funny reading the prompt, and you realize, like, oh, a major part of this software obviously, there's a lot to it, but a major part of the software is simply just these seven or eight paragraphs of instructing the AI how to do something.

No bugs, please. Yes. No mistakes.

Yeah. Keep going until you, have nothing left to do.

Mhmm. That is remote quoting agents.

Let us know what your setup is. I think a lot of people are just figuring it out right now in in trying to get everything dialed in, but I think it will be a interesting space in the next couple months. So leave a comment down below what your setup is. I'd love to hear it.

Yeah. Let us know what you're using. What's been effective for you? What has not been effective for you? And, yeah, that's all I got. Wes, you got anything else for today? That's it. Peace.