915: $200mo Background Agents, CLI Tooling and “Max Mode”

AI coding agents are getting wild. Scott and Wes break down the latest tools that run in the background, write code across multiple steps, and charge you $200 a month to do it. From CLI-based primitives to full-on copilots, this episode covers the next wave of dev tools and what it takes to use them effectively. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 03:13 Background Agents. 04:26 Appropriate tasks for background agents. 12:46 CLI tooling. 14:17 Claude Code Pricing. 18:20 Approaches to get the most from these tools. 19:56 PRD Documents. Atlasian What’s a PRD Document. 20:50 Claude Taskmaster. Langflow. 25:29 Sick Picks & Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks Scott: RingConn. Wes: Dell Projector Shameless Plugs Scott: Syntax on YouTube. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we had an episode for you on background agents, long-running AI tasks, some of these coding tools that are significantly more expensive and significantly more like autonomous, being able to run it on your own. Some of that are fine two models. We're talking about like the OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, the new cursor background agents. They just released a new $200 a month plan. And like, I feel like we're on like the cusp of like another wave of these tools and another wave of what they can do and how we're actually using them, which is hilarious, because if you go back to the episode of us at the end

• 0:41Wes Bos?

  of last year, one of my predictions was, I feel like the AI is gonna get like, like, I feel like we're not gonna see any major improvements this year, you know, we're just gonna get significantly or a little bit better here and there. But man, this stuff is really exciting. And I've dove into all the different tools. We're gonna talk about how they work and how you might want to use them. And are they really that much better? And is it really worth spending 10 times the amount that you're spending on like a co-pilot subscription or something like that?

• 1:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, one thing I think we did get right was that the AIs themselves might not go through some extreme evolution, but the way in which we use them will evolve. And I think already through June here, we're seeing so many different new, totally different new approaches to interaction with them. And I was actually just got back from JS Nation and React Summit in Amsterdam, where I was emceeing both days. And I had a lot of conversations with people about the interfaces in which we interface with AI. And that was like such a huge topic

• 1:55Scott Tolinski?

  of conversation, more so than like, will the models get better? Will this get better? That whatever. It's more or less like, How are we interfacing with these things? And I found there to be a massive amount of thought provoking ideas and discussion there.

• 2:11Wes Bos?

  Cause I, at the very start, I was looking at all these like CLI tools, like OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, those are probably the two big ones where instead of using like an editor, like a cursor or VS Code, you're simply just typing into the terminal. And I was like, are you really, is that really a better interface? Just typing into a terminal, you don't get the full UI and, and all the diffs and all of that stuff. And granted, there are like connections you can use in it. But like the amount of people that said, you're thinking about it wrong, Wes. You're thinking about it like that you're just sitting there and looking at what it does. And, and these are much more of a set it and forget it and let this thing go off and run.

• 2:55Wes Bos?

  So that's what we're going to talk about today is this sort of new wave of, of everything.

• 3:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I'm, I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts on, on some of these things. Cause I, I did use Claude Code for a bit and uh, yeah, I, I don't know if I got it. So I'm interested in getting it a little bit better.

• 3:13Wes Bos?

  So I've kind of broken this down into two major sections, both which are, are kind of related to each other. The first one being this idea of, of background agents and the second one being CLI tools, which can be used as, as just part of your, your existing tooling. So first one, background agents, they're becoming very popular. They, the idea with them is that you, you give them a task, right? We have, we have agents already. You give it a task, you type in the box and then it goes ahead and, and does the work that you want. And then you look at it and say, accept or reject, or you type back and forth to it. And sometimes you'll go back and forth with, with several prompts.

• 3:56Wes Bos?

  The idea with background agents is you can, it can do a lot more. These things are going to have significantly increased in power. They're going to run for a lot longer. They are going to run concurrently, meaning that many people are simply just setting up, okay, today I have to do three or four tasks. Let me set off three or four background agents and they're all going to run concurrently or they're all going to run in parallel as I go ahead and, and do something else.

• 4:26Scott Tolinski?

  Can you give me a type of task that, which would be appropriate for?

• 4:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah, so an example might be on one thing that I gave it, I said add a related episode embeddings feature, meaning that like I want it to go off and create an entire feature for the syntax website where it takes every single episode, all the transcript, it does embeddings, and then it will save those to the database, it will create an API endpoint for those embeddings, it will be able to find, use those embeddings to find related episodes to each other, as well as create a whole bunch of Svelte components that we could pop like in the syntax website, say like, if you like this episode, here are three more that are similar to this. And then we could also have like a 2D graph that would sort of group them together. And then theoretically, we could use that for

• 5:16Wes Bos?

  tagging the episodes as well. So that's, that's a fairly significant feature, which may take an AI agent like, I don't know, 30 minutes, an hour to go off and do. So what you can do is you can give it a, we'll talk about this, like requirements document or tasks document, and it can go off and run that. And then you can go to another one, which is like, we simply just have like lots of like little one-off issues on GitHub that are, I don't know, maybe half an hour, 45 minutes worth of work. And we are beta testing the Slack integration right now, where you can simply just set it at a GitHub

• 5:54Wes Bos?

  issue, and it will go off and, and fix those things for you. So background agents, they're a little bit different than just regular agents in that they, they will run for a larger amount of time. And simply by, by using background agents, and I've also been testing the like max mode in Cursor as well, it seems to simply just like check its work and just kind of keep recursively going back over itself until absolutely everything has been done. And it's, it's pretty, pretty impressive. Like another example was I needed to migrate, we switched the RSS feed for the syntax podcast. We moved from Libsyn to Megaphone.

• 6:39Wes Bos?

  And, and part of that was we have 912 markdown files that have MP3 URLs in them. And I needed to take the old RSS feed, line up the gooweed, the guaranteed unique identifiers. I needed to line that up with the new RSS feed. And then I needed to find the related episode markdown file, parse the front matter of that, switch out the MP3 URL and then push it to GitHub, right? And that's like seven or eight steps. And the thing ran for, for like 20 minutes and it did an absolute perfect job of, of getting them all in for me. Maybe not a perfect job. I had to step in two or three times and clarify what it was.

• 7:23Wes Bos?

  But if I had been a little bit more upfront and a little more clear with how it worked, and there was a lot of like, kind of messy data. Some of the URLs didn't follow the same patterns as others. And it did like a really nice job where I could simply set it off. I went and went and worked on something else. And then I came back to it and it had done 20, 25 minutes worth of work in the background. And it's, it's quite amazing. If you're willing to spend the money on these, like the $20 a month plan is not gonna do as good of a job as some of these pay as you go or more expensive plans.

• 8:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And hopefully maybe this is something your work could be covering. So possibly being able to use something like this episode to convince your boss that this might be worth your time. That's interesting. So is it in this particular case, are there, there are several different agents, processes handling different things and coordinating with each other? Is that what's happening?

• 8:23Wes Bos?

  So the idea with, the idea with a background agent is you set off one background agent, do this task, but you can have multiple of those running at the same time.

• 8:34Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 8:35Wes Bos?

  So it's not like an agent is going to spawn off multiple agents on its own. Yeah, you would just set it off. The one thing about the cursor integration is that it has to run in their, their cursor cloud. And it's essentially just running an entire VS Code instance in the cursor cloud. And then you can go in at any time and

• 8:58Wes Bos?

  And see how it's going. So basically you can like tap into the the whole VS code UI.

• 9:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Wes Bos?

  At any time, which is kind of interesting because some people said I would just set this off at work. And then I maybe check in on it on the bus ride home. And then by the time I got home, or you can like just like set things off. Without having to be at your computer, which is is kind of an interesting one, which is. Being able to code from your phone or code mobily.

• 9:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Do you feel like this is something you can trust to go off and do a bunch of stuff?

• 9:33Wes Bos?

  Um. Yes and no. Um, like it run, you have to like run it in like. In in like a sandbox, right?

• 9:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Wes Bos?

  If it, that's also the nice thing about the cursor code is that it runs in the cloud. So it's not running on your computer. So it's not necessarily going to run and like nuke your entire machine or something like that because yeah, should you trust it? Maybe, but will something bad happen eventually? Probably.

• 10:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Wes Bos?

  But but even with like mine, it would create backups of the files before it went ahead and changed them. But it didn't do them for everyone. It just did like two or three, checked its work and said, okay, that's working. Then it deleted those and then did it to the rest of them, which is exactly how how I would approach it as well, you know, do two or three, create a backup.

• 10:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Wes Bos?

  And then if it's working, go ahead.

• 10:28Scott Tolinski?

  Wild.

• 10:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah. So cursor background agents, they just released a $200 a month plan, which just goes to show that like. These things are using quite a bit of compute power. OpenAI has. Their own codecs, which is both a CLI and there's like a UI as part of ChatGPT. Devin is probably was one of the first on the scene. Again, it's it's kind of funny how much we laughed about these things. Six months ago and now we're starting to see them. Oh, it's actually actually half decent. I've not personally tried Devin. But it's the same idea. Copilot workspaces are where like it's got, you have tried this yourself, right? You you went in and gave it a whole task and it just went off in the background and did it.

• 11:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And I found at the time, I mean, it was like. Super early access and I wasn't super impressed with the Copilot workspaces, but I was impressed with the workflow itself. So I would only assume it's gotten much better by now. I would love to give it another another rip because I did really enjoy the workflow. If only it had succeeded at the time. So but again, that was that was like, what a year ago. That was very early.

• 11:42Wes Bos?

  Mm hmm. The one like UI I didn't like is when we were using background agents as part of the like Slack. What I didn't like about it was that like it went off and did all of its work and then it came back. And I had to like give feedback to it and I much, I much prefer the whole IDE. You can see all of the steps that it's taken. You can see all the diffs and then you can, you can either change something yourself or simply just give it another chat. And the Slack integration, you can give it sort of a follow up, but I don't know. I think I still prefer that type of thing.

• 12:20Scott Tolinski?

  I certainly don't mind watching over an agent doing work and then like confirming it as it goes. Or yeah, I don't mind that because it does feel much more like a more controlled workflow than sending a Slack message.

• 12:37Wes Bos?

  Totally. Other ones, there's Klein, Amp Code, there's a whole bunch of similar ones in the space of the like sort of background agents. And then the second category I have here is CLI tooling. So Claude Code is probably the biggest one in the space right now. And then there's OpenAI Codex CLI. And then DAX is working on another one, it looks like called Open Code, which is kind of cool. You'll be able to just like run it and I'm assuming put your own models behind it. So these are just straight up CLI tools, which can, you can integrate it into your editor.

• 13:17Wes Bos?

  But the the benefit to simply being a CLI tool is there's no dependency on your IDE or any sort of integration. So theoretically. You can think of it as just being able to npm install something. Of course, you can use it via the CLI, but it also is simply just an API, which could be part of something else. So you would imagine you have an integration with GitHub issues. You have integration with your Jira or your... What's the one everybody loves so much because it's local first?

• 13:51Scott Tolinski?

  Linear.

• 13:51Wes Bos?

  Linear, yeah, linear integration. And the idea, I think, with these type of integrations, you simply just assign it to an agent. And then that will then go off, do its work. And you can build stuff on top of these as well. You can bake your own software and being able to like layer in, adding MCP servers to this type of stuff. You can build some pretty powerful software with these as primitives.

• 14:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, it all sounds wild. And have you spent some time with Claude Code?

• 14:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, I went into it. And let me tell you, I went as pay as you go, which is not the way to go. It's so stressful. Every single keystroke I made, I was so concerned about it costing too much because like it adds up pretty quickly. So like example, I went into a very simple demo that had maybe seven or eight files. I think it was a simple React application. And I just asked it, what does this repo do? Nine cents, nine cents out the door. You know, like that's not, obviously not a lot of money. But if every single time that you hit enter, you're paying 10 cents out the door.

• 15:04Wes Bos?

  And then another prompt I gave was add a new example called iPhone.html with some CSS to replicate an iPhone layout. That went ahead and spent eight cents, which again, not a ton, but...

• 15:19Wes Bos?

  Imagine it going off and it went back and forth three or four times. But then imagine going on like an actual real mega code base.

• 15:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Wes Bos?

  And simply it understanding how is this code base work? Which files do I need to include? What are your, what does your database model look like? How are, how do I run all of these things? I just ran a linter. Now let me take the linter and the TypeScript output and let me send that back. You're, you're going back and forth. I think like some of my examples with background agents were, I don't know, back and forth 100, 150 times, which can, can really add up. So pay as you go stresses me out. I'd much rather just pay the, the single amount and then be able to just blast it. And, and I was surprised at how many people were willing to pay to, I, I haven't shelled

• 16:11Wes Bos?

  out the 200 bucks, but we're part of the Sentry Cursor and David Kramer was just like, let her rip. Like, you know, like this stuff is, this is, this is game changing stuff, I personally. So he's like, let me know if you need more, more credit or whatever, just like go nuts with it. So it, I, I am still impressed by how many people are willing to pay this much money, which I, I think I understand. What do you think? 200 bucks, is that too much?

• 16:40Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, it depends on who's footing the bill.

• 16:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:45Scott Tolinski?

  It is, it really, if it's coming out of my post, if it's coming out of my paycheck pocket, then I would say maybe too much. But if it's coming out of like, like if I still was a business owner and it was a business expense and as part of operating my business, then that's a different conversation for me.

• 17:04Wes Bos?

  If you're paying, like, I guess you have to see like the actual quality output of this to see, is it worth it?

• 17:13Scott Tolinski?

  You know, and you have to see some kind of return.

• 17:15Wes Bos?

  I, I think we're, we are, we are past it being a cool demo, but not quite at the like, holy crap, this thing is, is amazing, you know? Like it still does bad things and still you have to babysit it. But I'm, I'm curious if somebody were like, let's say you're paying three or four devs, would you pay an extra thousand bucks a month?

• 17:39Wes Bos?

  Probably, I don't know. It's hard to say.

• 17:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and that's, that's hard. That's a hard conversation anyways.

• 17:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Scott Tolinski?

  Because sometimes you'd rather employ people for a number of reasons beyond just the effectiveness of it.

• 17:52Wes Bos?

  I'm not talking about replacing them, but I'm like, would you give them this $200 a month tool?

• 17:58Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I see what you're saying, yes.

• 18:00Wes Bos?

  Corporate probably would, because the amount that these companies spend just for you to be able to zoom each other, it's quite a bit.

• 18:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, it is. That is always mystifying to me when you get into corporate accounts on anything, just how expensive it all is.

• 18:17Wes Bos?

  Pay by head is the, is the real moneymaker on these things.

• 18:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 18:21Wes Bos?

  Let's talk about approaches. So what I've learned with doing these background agents is you can't simply just YOLO, type in the box, make this thing. You need a very good planning document for it to follow, because it does its best when it's able to have very clear inputs, very clear defined tasks to do, very clear outcomes and success. And, and also I found that a lot of them will start to log their work as they are doing markdown. So what was happening with the, the migration of the RSS feed is that it would, it would loop over and it would log, okay, out of 100 and, out of the 912 episodes,

• 19:06Wes Bos?

  115 didn't work. Let me now evaluate those and see if there's anything that I can, oh, I see, these ones had a different URL structure. Let me update the regx so that it would match a little bit better. And it put all of that in a markdown document, then reran it, and then, and then put it the updated, okay, now out of those 80 more were successful. Now let's look at the, the last 20 that we, we need to do. So it's putting it all into a markdown document. So what I found is for it to be able to sort of tear off a task and work on that specific task and then and then work on the next thing, I think you get much better

• 19:48Wes Bos?

  outcomes than rather just saying, implement this feature. And hilariously enough, a really good way to make these documents called PRD, I didn't even know what this was. Product requirement document, which is you can create a really nice structured PRD document by just kind of spitballing all of your ideas of what needs to happen, throw that into ChatGPT or something like that, and then get back a really nice structured document and then give it a once more, once over, clean it up, make sure it does everything you want. Cause the cleaner your input is, yeah, go ahead.

• 20:27Scott Tolinski?

  No, to be, to be clear to the audience, a PRD document, not an AI specific thing.

• 20:32Wes Bos?

  No, that's, that's a software engineering thing.

• 20:35Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 20:36Wes Bos?

  Where you, you define what it is you actually want and how things will be approached and what technology you're going to be using. And by putting as much of those things in upfront, you're going to get better out the other end. Alongside this, I've been seeing a couple of people on, on Twitter talk about this, which is Taskmaster AI. So this is built, I believe this is built on top of Claude code and MCP servers. And the idea is, is that you can give it a PRD document and then it will generate all of the tasks and be able to figure out which tasks can be done concurrently and which tasks rely on another task to be, be done first.

• 21:20Wes Bos?

  And then it will just kind of go off and do that all for you. So I haven't tried it myself, but it's, it's, this is a really good example of now that we have these lower level primitives like Claude code and MCP servers, we're starting to see some really cool tools that people are now building on top of that.

• 21:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I know. I, I've recently gotten some interesting tasks done with MCP via, what's it, Godot, the gaming engine with Godot MCP. And like, there is something really magical about being able to interface with.

• 22:01Scott Tolinski?

  A UI like that via cursor or any of these things because the tasks are no longer than divvied off into like what can code write. It's like you can think more broadly about the tasks that you need to do. And yeah, it's a it's a whole new world of stuff. That's for sure.

• 22:20Wes Bos?

  Yeah. You know, one thing that I'm surprised about with all this MCP stuff is where's if this and that in this whole space, you know, if this and that was killing it in the whole connect anything to anything. And then they rode like the whole like, like automation phase and then all of the like smart home stuff, they rode that whole thing. Where are they with the MCP stuff that they're like, it feels like they're prime for being able to make MCP servers for for absolutely anything, you know?

• 22:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do have a tool for you. That is if the if this than that like that we can talk about in our AI tools episode that we're going to be recording. So

• 23:02Wes Bos?

  At least drop it, drop the name of it for anyone who's gonna get mad right now. And then we'll talk about a bit more.

• 23:09Scott Tolinski?

  How about next Monday? How about they have to leave a kind of I'm not going to do that. You don't you do you hate that on Instagram where people are like, leave a comment of this to find out what I'm talking about. And then everybody's like, actually does it. Everybody goes in the comments and plays into their hands. That way it's like

• 23:25Wes Bos?

  Just most brain dead people. Comment. I saw one this morning. I got a Tik Tok of some guy was like, power of sale real estate right now is it's really hard to find. I was like, it's not hard to find it. They're literally all on Realtor.ca. They're all on on this like system. You just have to search the word power sale. He's probably has a script where he's he searches for power of sale POS and a couple others. And then he emails the them all the time. He's like, I I'm I have a whole collection. I'm really good at finding them. And you really need to understand how to navigate these. I was like, and all the people below are like typing the word so they get it in their DM.

• 24:10Scott Tolinski?

  Dude, there are some really awful social media like trends right now. That being one of them and another one, people just like blatantly saying something that is like incredibly and obviously antagonistic and false, just so everybody like Ragebait. I mean Ragebait's been around forever, but it feels like it's so much worse now.

• 24:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that drives me nuts. And even further, when like somebody you thought you trusted sends you that thing like, "You got God, you got God."

• 24:42Scott Tolinski?

  You got God, yeah, for sure.

• 24:43Wes Bos?

  That's very clearly fake or very clearly bait.

• 24:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, okay, by the, just so I'm not falling into that, the tool is Lang, Langflow from DataStax. This thing's really cool, so we'll talk about this in another episode, but give that a check. I'll have the link in the show notes.

• 25:01Wes Bos?

  Cool.

• 25:02Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not, I'm not doing that, that's for sure. All right, cool. Well, this was, this has been awesome, Wes. I haven't spent a ton of time with background agents just yet. I'm still like in the.

• 25:14Wes Bos?

  You've been more of a foreground guy right now.

• 25:17Scott Tolinski?

  Been more of a foreground guy.

• 25:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Scott Tolinski?

  But I know I've gotten into Claude Code a little bit, but that's, that's about it. I'm gonna try some of these background tasks in Cursor today and get busy with some of that stuff. Do you want to head into sick picks and shameless plug stuff? You want a sick pick?

• 25:34Wes Bos?

  I got a sick pick for you, one sec.

• 25:35Scott Tolinski?

  Me too, as he dips below his desk.

• 25:41Wes Bos?

  It's not like I was gonna come up in a costume. I was just unplugging something.

• 25:45Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:47Wes Bos?

  All right, so a little projector.

• 25:50Scott Tolinski?

  I love projectors.

• 25:51Wes Bos?

  This is my sick pick for a 12-year-old projector that's actually really good.

• 25:57Scott Tolinski?

  12-year-old projector.

• 25:59Wes Bos?

  We have, at our cottage, we have a projector because we don't have room for a TV, but we have like this huge wall that we can project on. And I've had like a BenQ whatever projector I bought like right before the pandemic. And unfortunately, it is starting to die and it's not the bulb. It's like the chip inside and it's not worth fixing. So I was like, all right, I need to find a new one. And I know you have like a really nice laser one, you can play outside and whatever. And I was like, hmm, I kind of want one of those, but I also don't want to spend. Any money?

• 26:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Wes Bos?

  So I was like, I gotta find like another cheapie on Marketplace and whatnot. And I've been looking for a while and I found this one, which is a Dell M2 10X. And it's, I don't know, it's like 10 years old or whatever. And I found it and these were really big in like corporate world. So there's lots of them on the market right now and it's bright as hell. 2000 Ansi lumens, which is bright enough to have like in like daytime, be able to project, not outside.

• 27:05Scott Tolinski?

  Inside, yeah.

• 27:06Wes Bos?

  Inside during daytime. And it's got HDMI inputs, it has audio in and out. And it's just like, I got it for 50 bucks and

• 27:15Scott Tolinski?

  50 bucks?

• 27:16Wes Bos?

  50 bucks and like, man, if you want like a good, I initially bought a like $200 one on Amazon. And I was like, I plugged it in, I was like, this thing sucks. And it said it was like, like 8,000 lumens or something like that. And then I very quickly realized that projectors on Amazon are mostly a scam. Unless it's from a reputable company. I guess you can say anything on Amazon is mostly a scam. So I returned it because I was like, this thing sucks. It's garbage. And I went and found like a, like a proper little corporate one. So if, and look how nice and small this is. If you want a nice little projector, go on Marketplace and search for like Dell projector.

• 27:59Wes Bos?

  And they have mercury bulbs that say last like 16,000 hours, something like that. It has, this one has 200 hours on it. So I'm like 1% of the way through its actual life. And so I'm really excited about this thing to be able to bring it back to the cottage and watch some shows on it.

• 28:15Scott Tolinski?

  Nice. Yeah, I do really like my laser projector. It looks like you can get it on eBay for like 300 bucks now. Cause they stopped selling this model specifically.

• 28:27Wes Bos?

  Not bad at all.

• 28:27Scott Tolinski?

  They stopped, yeah, they stopped selling it. So, um, but you can find them pre-owned. It's It's, you can't watch it super during daytime, which is a bummer. Sometimes I wanna like, put on a football game or something outside.

• 28:39Wes Bos?

  Oh yeah.

• 28:40Scott Tolinski?

  But I gotta say, man, it's projector season over here at the Tolinski household. And we're watching, what are we watching? Love Island? We're watching, uh, Top Chef? We're watching all of the shows out there, uh, in the back, just projecting on the wall. And it is just like, man, there's something so lovely, especially in Colorado, because there's no mosquitoes, it's dry climate, you're just sitting out there and being like, ah. Mm-hmm.

• 29:07Wes Bos?

  You guys have a fire pit back there, don't you?

• 29:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we got a fire pit and, uh.

• 29:11Wes Bos?

  And what do you do for speakers?

• 29:13Scott Tolinski?

  I have, I bought like boat, they're not boat speakers, but they're like outdoor patio speakers. And there, there's, uh, just one powered and I basically just, I'm running an extension cord out there anyways. Like whenever we set, we have our setup, I just plug in the one speaker and they just stay out there all, all year long. Because they're, they're waterproof, even though that waterproofing was just like a piece of foam inside the thing. But like that, I had, I, I ended up like sealing them up pretty heavy and stuff like that to get them to actually, uh, be able to withstand the elements. But yeah, I just leave them out all year. I leave them out there in the snow even. And then, uh, yeah, so, um, it's nice. They're Bluetooth, connect the projector to the Bluetooth,

• 29:55Scott Tolinski?

  put a little Google Home in that projector and then, uh, or it's a Chromecast, it's an older Chromecast and bingo, bango. Ready to go. You got, you got speakers behind the, the patio furniture?

• 30:07Wes Bos?

  Google, you can connect a Chromecast to Bluetooth speakers?

• 30:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Wes Bos?

  Oh, maybe you just solved my problem. Cause I'm thinking like, we have, I've got speakers run, but it's not a great run and the like robot vacuum always sucks the cord up and I'm so sick of it. And I'm thinking like, hmm. What could I do without having to run cables everywhere?

• 30:30Scott Tolinski?

  Bluetooth. Bluetooth outdoor speaker is great. Connected. It'll all work super well. Big, big fan of that setup. And it was sort of like third year running it maybe now and it's just like so, so lovely. One next thing I need to do is 3D print a little like riser for the projector so that way it's always perfectly aligned. Cause right now I have some like plastic shims that I'm like shim underneath the projector and I gotta like set it up each time. So I'm going to build a little box for that thing.

• 30:59Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's a great idea.

• 31:00Scott Tolinski?

  Maybe put a cover on it to make it rainproof. Sometimes we're out there in the rain and we want to watch, we want to watch our stuff in the rain. Yeah. I'm going to sick pick. I got a, a smart ring. Which, you know what? People are always talking about wearing the Apple watch to sleep and stuff like that. I just cannot do that.

• 31:20Wes Bos?

  No, I do it every night.

• 31:21Scott Tolinski?

  And bulky. Yeah, man, I like, I like sometimes like lay on my wrist and stuff. I just can't do it.

• 31:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah, sometimes I wake up with like no feeling in my arms.

• 31:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Well, the, the big thing about the smart rings to me has always been the subscription fees and stuff like that. I cannot justify another subscription. So Courtney did a bunch of research because she wanted to track her sleep and she got a Ringcon Gen 2. And I had never heard of Ringcon before she did that research on it. She got this one specifically because it does tracking of sleep apnea and stuff. And I've had it now for, I got it right before I left for Amsterdam and it's just been lovely. It's been lovely to track sleep. It does a really good job. The battery lasts for like 11 days.

• 32:08Wes Bos?

  Oh, man.

• 32:09Scott Tolinski?

  It charges and everything like that. And it, you know, it's calculating all your stress and all those things. And for me, I've been very stressed out. So like being able to look at that and be like, oh, I need to like really get it together right now has been very nice. But overall, yeah, I, you know, I do say for like, like just general like vitals and whatever tracking, I found this thing to be. Much nicer than having the watch.

• 32:34Wes Bos?

  It's honestly amazing that the tech, like the health tech is getting so accessible in the last however many years, like even my Apple Watch, I like, when I was at the last conference, I like, was like super jet lagged and then we went out drinking and, and then the next morning, it's like, hey, you're probably getting sick and, or like, like something's going on with you, you know, your heart rate was up when you were sleeping and, and like all of your thing. And it's amazing that it, it can predict those things ahead of time. So hopefully you can curb it.

• 33:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for sure. Well, that's sick pick. Shameless plugs, check us out on YouTube, Syntax on YouTube, Syntax, I believe it's at Syntax FM on YouTube, check us out.

• 33:22Wes Bos?

  At Syntax FM. All right. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you later.

• 33:26Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.