1023: Mosh, Caddy & Tailscale: A Remote Dev Deep Dive

Running your dev process off your main machine doesn’t have to mean the cloud. Scott and Wes break down how to host projects on a box you can reach from any device, close your laptop mid-build, and keep long-running processes alive. They cover Scott’s stack (Mosh, Caddy, Tailscale, Zed, and terminal AI agents like Claude Code), the annoyances of mobile TUIs, and whether it beats staying local. Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00:36 Welcome to Syntax! 01:56 Benefits of Remote Development 07:50 Process for Remote Development 09:34 Tech Stack for Remote Development Mosh instead of SSH Caddy for domains and routing Tailscale for local network Zed editor Herdr for terminal sessions Opencode or ClaudeCode for AI via the term Termius for iOS AI 15:09 Tools and Alternatives for Remote Development 21:16 Exploring Workspaces and Terminal Management 30:31 Mobile Terminal Applications and Their Features 32:30 Navigating the Terminal Landscape: Tools and Alter 35:22 Headless Browsers and Authentication Challenges 38:35 Work Trees and Their Use Cases 44:21 Cloud Hosting and Local Development Solutions 45:28 Sick Picks & Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks Scott: Elgato Stream Deck Pedal Wes: Packing Cubes 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?

  Everybody is building tools for agents. Nobody is building actual products.

• 0:04Scott Tolinski?

  And once I got TMX and I was like, oh, I get it that I need these long running sessions. Then Herter for me was kind of like a, oh, this just works.

• 0:12Wes Bos?

  Let me tell you, the amount of times I've had to reboot my computer in the last like six months. Unbelievable. I, I also don't know why I'm still in the terminal.

• 0:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 0:26Wes Bos?

  I hate the terminal, but it's, I can't get out of it.

• 0:37Scott Tolinski?

  Are you going to be running your entire dev process on a remote server somewhere? Well, we're going to be talking all about the flows for that, the tools for that, the pros and cons, and if you should be doing it locally or in the cloud. All of that good stuff today on Syntax. My name is Scott Tolinski and with me as always is Wes Boss. What's up, Wes?

• 0:59Wes Bos?

  Guys, talk about this. I think the whole like remote workflow as well as like not just having a thousand terminal tabs open. There's so many products in this space of how do you get a better UI? Now that it's not like just everything in an IDE, but like you need some sort of nice UI for managing all of your agents and all of your folders and whatnot. And there's a bazillion products and they all slightly overlap each other. So I'm excited to dig in and talk about all these.

• 1:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, me too. I've been running this setup now for quite a bit and I'll talk about my setup. We can talk about some of the, the tools, the flows, why you might even want to do this. And then again, we're going to be getting into one of the, maybe some of the pitfalls. And maybe if you have solutions to these pitfalls, you can leave comments below or tell us how you are using these types of tools. So let's talk about first and foremost, like what this means, why you would do it. And really what it is, is that you'd be running your dev process on a machine that is maybe not your main machine. Or your laptop.

• 2:12Scott Tolinski?

  And this is something that is gonna become more popular. It's already becoming popular. You see memes about people not shutting their laptops. You see software that is written to specifically prevent your computer from going to sleep when you close it. Because we end up having these work processes that are now detached from when we are interacting with it. Like you prompt an agent to do something. You want to be able to close your laptop and have that continue working, right? So, one, you can now close your laptop. Process can be running the whole time while you are not necessarily at your machine. So that's a pro here. Two, better battery life because you're not running 8,000 different things on your laptop at all times.

• 2:58Wes Bos?

  Let me tell you, the amount of times I've had to reboot my computer in the last like six months. Unbelievable. It's just all these little tattered ends installing endless new apps to try. Things are running in the background. I'm ready just to start over, but a lot of it is due to having all these agents running on my computer. And they have just child processes that go rogue.

• 3:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and actually, what's so funny here is that you think Apple isn't paying attention? The latest version of macOS, Wes, the beta, has a new checkbox in settings that is reboot after a power fault. So if like there's a power fault and you're away from your remote machine, it can reboot itself, which it couldn't do before. It could maybe back in the day, but they took it out at some point. So specifically, I would be so annoyed if I was on a trip or something. And even before I ran my dev process on this other computer, I ran my Plex server. And so we'd be like out of the country and trying to access the Plex server and it would be down. You'd be like, oh, come on, you know.

• 4:01Wes Bos?

  That wasn't a thing before. So if you had like a A power fault, then it would just not reboot you to physically press the button.

• 4:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 4:11Wes Bos?

  Unbelievable.

• 4:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, unbelievable indeed. So better battery life, you can close your laptop, actually. Another one is you can access these processes from any machine. And in this case, we'll be talking about using TailScale to do so. But it depends on how you host your stuff. But it really is awesome to be able to throw up your dev process on your phone, your laptop, your iPad, any computer on the network and just like be able to access that stuff for testing or whatever. It's just nice to have. Another thing you get out of this is, in this setup in particular, is HTTPS in dev. Now, that's not necessarily something that is unique to running things remotely. If you were using Caddy or anything like that before.

• 4:57Scott Tolinski?

  I know, Wes, you've done HTTPS in dev this way for a long time.

• 5:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Scott Tolinski?

  There's a number of great things that comes from being able to run things in a secure context, including browser APIs that only work in a secure context, right?

• 5:12Wes Bos?

  Yes, exactly. The biggest thing that people hit is there's so many browser APIs, like being able to access webcam or microphone. Or I believe on Safari, you can't access local storage.

• 5:25Scott Tolinski?

  And like HTTP-only cookies too in Safari.

• 5:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah, exactly. And those things work on local hosts. Because local hosts, even though there's no like icon and HTTPS, it's still a secure origin. It's considered a secure origin. However, as soon as you want to bring it up on your phone, even if you're on the same network, or as soon as you want to share it to Scott or something like that, I do this a lot with CloudFlare Tunnels, where I have something running on my local machine. I want to be able to have other people play with it. Then you're out of luck. You gotta go, ah, now I gotta figure out how to expose this thing. So it's kind of nice just to do it from the get-go.

• 6:01Scott Tolinski?

  Totally. Yeah, there's a lot of pros here. And like I said, I've been running it this way for a little bit. And it's great. And another thing here, too, is that like, you can access your agents. You can access your AI tools from your mobile devices. You can access them from your tablet. You can access them away from your computer when you shouldn't be working. I'm in the gym and now I gotta prompt my agents because I am addicted to it. That's all possible with this.

• 6:30Wes Bos?

  Well, I'm excited to hear what your thing is because I've had sort of a half arst stack where I've got an old laptop here beside me. And then I also have like a, like a home server, home NAS that's running like Docker, right? And I have five processes running on both of those as well as most of my stuff is still just on my computer. And I'm hitting all of the pain points that you just said. And I have like kind of a, I've got Cloudflare tunnels and whatever, but I'm not happy with any of it. And you've spent a lot more time kind of going into the, what tools you need to get this to like, it's something they actually going to use day in and day out. So I know like we were at a conference and you were doing your slides from Amsterdam.

• 7:13Wes Bos?

  And your slides were living in Denver on your Mac Mini in your, in your house.

• 7:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I trusted my setup enough to load my slides remotely from my Mac Mini. And just like, that was dicey. That was almost as dicey as installing the first developer beta on my machine a couple of days before getting on stage for, how many people were there?

• 7:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Scott Tolinski?

  A lot of people.

• 7:43Wes Bos?

  At least a thousand, yeah.

• 7:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yep. And it all worked. So that means that it was a valid approach. So typically what I'm doing is I'm just creating projects like normally on the Mac Mini, whether that is, I'll tell you in a minute, I use a tool called Mosh, but you're essentially just SSHing into the computer, creating the tools with the CLI's that you know and love. And then I assign a domain to them. So I give each project a unique port. And I basically assign a domain to it. And then I connect remotely to run my AI. I connect remotely to code via Zed and those types of things. So that is the general flow. It feels very similar to working on your local machine. After you get things set up, you're just visiting, you know, actual domains instead

• 8:28Scott Tolinski?

  of just a local host port, whatever. And you could do IP port, whatever. Again, opening Zed and just saying, connect remote. All the files show up. It's like working locally. And if you're using a TUI, whatever for your AI, again, it just feels like exactly the same.

• 8:48Wes Bos?

  And for you, a project is that's a folder, right? Like, that's kind of something I'm thinking about lately is that like, most of my stuff is one project, one folder. But every now and then I have things that are just like global or things that span multiple projects. And I think about like, how would I best link these two things together, rather than just give it a path to where it lives on my machine?

• 9:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I mean, it all just lives in folders for me. Everything is in a sites projects folder.

• 9:20Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Scott Tolinski?

  And then if I do have the AI agent go outside and look at another project, it's usually just doing that, since I'm not running these sandboxed in that kind of way, which is nice.

• 9:34Wes Bos?

  Okay, so let's talk about the actual tech that you use to get this done. What's your stack?

• 9:40Scott Tolinski?

  My stack? Yeah, this is the new stack, folks. This is a, I don't have a fun name for this because these are all kind of consonant letters.

• 9:47Wes Bos?

  You talk about it. I'll come up with a cool name for it.

• 9:49Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, so one, the connection protocol I use is Mosh. I believe it isn't, is it a protocol? I don't know. Either way, I connect to my remote servers with something called Mosh. It is basically a drop in replacement for SSH. The benefit there is that when you Mosh instead of SSH into something, well, what happens? It stays connected. If I close my laptop and reopen it, it reconnects automatically with like no lag time at all. So I don't have to re- SSH in every single time I'm doing anything. And actually, if I have like a long running T-Mux or as I'll talk about a Herder session going, I can close my laptop, open it, and it's going to stay connected to that all the time.

• 10:33Scott Tolinski?

  Mosh reps. Now, you do need Mosh installed on all of the machines you are moshing into, but a lot of the tools these days support Mosh just fine. It's great. Very nice. Another one is Caddy. So Caddy, Wes, you've used Caddy for a long time. Do you want to explain what Caddy is to the folks here?

• 10:52Wes Bos?

  Caddy is essentially a web server that you can use to... It's like NGINX or Apache. Yeah, yeah. What most people use it for is for proxying through to other applications. So you would have Caddy running on your local machine or on whatever machine that it is. And then it will spin up a web server and take in requests. And then it will then be able to route those requests. It can, of course, like serve up files and whatnot. But what most people use it for is they say, "All right, I'm going to..." Like, I have tips.locals host on my website. And then what that does is it's a Caddy server that proxies tips.locals host, gives it SSL certificate.

• 11:36Wes Bos?

  You know, you got a full HTTPS. And then it proxies it through to like localhost:4922, right? And that's really nice because you can have multiple rules. You can get a really extreme Caddy server where you can do like tips.locals forward slash Scott. That would maybe in that case, I want to route it to a different server. Maybe in that case, I want to proxy web sockets. It's a fantastic little web server for that.

• 12:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And AI is very good at Caddy files because Caddy has been around for a long time. So you can always just tell Caddy, "This is what I need to do." In fact, I did exactly that because I have a... The next tool in here is TailScale. And TailScale uses WireGuard Protocol to connect your machines together. And what's great about TailScale is that to do any of this, it is freaking free. It is free, folks. In fact, so far, all of these tools, except for your AI inference, are free. Free 99. Okay, so it's all sick here. So the TailScale, you install TailScale on the devices in your network, they all run TailScale, and then they can all talk

• 12:48Scott Tolinski?

  to each other with either IP addresses that are local, that you could connect to directly, or in my instance, everything just has a name. And people don't reassign their names in TailScale, because it like by default gives you some long ass terrible name.

• 13:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Scott Tolinski?

  But in the TailScale admin, you can change the name of all of your devices. So my NAS is just NAS, my Mini is just Mini, MacBook Pro is MVP. So now when I mosh into something, it's mosh Scott Tolinski at Mini, enter. That's it.

• 13:23Wes Bos?

  Boom.

• 13:24Scott Tolinski?

  And that's so dope. I don't have to remember IPs. I don't have that stuff stored somewhere. It's just easy.

• 13:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Scott Tolinski?

  And with TailScale, I then am able to connect essentially these addresses with Caddy. So my domain that I'm using, which is, this is actually a sick domain, Wes, it's robo.online. So I can have like ai.robo.online. That's my, and these are only routed locally through my network. So Wes couldn't access ai.robo.online. It's not going to do anything, because all that's doing is connecting to a local TailScale address.

• 14:07Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 14:08Scott Tolinski?

  So I have these, I know robo.online are all going to be my TailScale network apps.

• 14:16Wes Bos?

  That's, that is different than a lot of the other approaches, which is, I have all of these applications, and I am going to expose them to the wide internet, and then you have to put some sort of authentication or access control in front of it. Which I think that this is really nice, because like, even if I wanted to, like, I'm sure there, there is a way with TailScale that you could, like, let's say you have an app running on your Mac Mini, and you wanted to give me access to it. There is a way to like poke through that and expose it to the, the global web, right?

• 14:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah, it's called a funnel.

• 14:49Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 14:51Scott Tolinski?

  So CloudFlare has tunnels.

• 14:54Scott Tolinski?

  I think it's called funnels. Yes. And inside of in tail scale. Yes, it's very possible. I keep everything on my local network, though, just as a serve. And again, well, not even as a serve. I again, I just have it all through this caddy reverse proxy. So.

• 15:09Wes Bos?

  Do you mind if I like rattle off a couple alternatives for each of these pieces in the stack that you're talking about? Because otherwise the comments are going to be, why not? So one caddy alternative that everybody talks about a lot is it's not necessarily like a full caddy replacement, but it's it serves similar purpose that for what we're talking about. And that is portless. It's from

• 15:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 15:31Wes Bos?

  From Versal, where you can just assign each of your apps, one single port, and then you have a single portless instance running it. You can assign different subdomains. I'm not I'm not a user of it. I prefer my my caddy setup, but it's a I know people are crazy about it.

• 15:45Scott Tolinski?

  Portless is fine, but like, but I think I think that's something to think about is the Versal Lab stuff is oftentimes just kind of thrown up there.

• 15:57Wes Bos?

  It's like it's a lab.

• 15:59Scott Tolinski?

  Good example.

• 15:59Wes Bos?

  Like they're testing things.

• 16:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, where caddy has been around for a long time, and it is battle tested. And again, it's more full featured and AI is really good at writing caddy files. And then you look at something like Versal did that zero lang. It's like their their, you know, AI language, and it hasn't been touched in several weeks. Like, it's like they did that initial post and then forgot about it real quick. So I think there is a case to be made about.

• 16:30Wes Bos?

  Three days ago.

• 16:32Scott Tolinski?

  To what? To portless?

• 16:33Wes Bos?

  No, to zero lang.

• 16:35Scott Tolinski?

  What?

• 16:36Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 16:38Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, well, before that, the last commit was three weeks, two weeks ago, or whatever.

• 16:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you don't know if it's if it's a serious or if it's just a labs project, which I think it is. So I wouldn't give them too much guff about that. They're certainly exploring. And I think the portless one is

• 16:54Scott Tolinski?

  No, no, no.

• 16:54Wes Bos?

  Pretty stable.

• 16:57Scott Tolinski?

  The point being is that if you're picking a tool for this, picking this this battle-tested tool that has more features and is AI is like, it's in the training data and all this stuff, like, just go with that. There's no reason to pick the labs thing.

• 17:12Wes Bos?

  Also, alternative to TailScale is CloudFlare Tunnels and CloudFlare 1. CloudFlare Tunnels allows you to poke it through out to the global internet, but then they also have CloudFlare, I think it's CloudFlare 1 here. I've got the app on my phone here. So when I have the, I can't get it to focus. Just imagine seeing a CloudFlare application. There we go. So when I have that turned on, on any of my machines, right? So I have it running on my phone, I have it running on MacBook here, I have it running on my NAS. Then I'm like, sort of

• 17:49Wes Bos?

  in the TailScale network. It is, I would say it's very complex. And TailScale is significantly easier to get set up. I only went the like CloudFlare route because Scott was all in on TailScale. And I was like, we should have like, we should both do a different one and balanced take on it. But it was, it was not easy to get set up. And even then, there was like some weird issues with accessing some local hosts on my phone. So I wouldn't, I would probably say check out TailScale first.

• 18:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And the nerds in the chat are going to say, just use freaking WireGuard. WireGuard being the, I believe, the protocol which TailScale works. Let me tell you about TailScale. TailScale has user management, it has device management and whitelisting, where like, it pops up in a nice UI and it's like, this device is trying to join the net. You don't want to accept them. You want to give them a new name. There's a whole host of cool magic DNS stuff. I will tell you, TailScale rocks and the free tier is excellent. So.

• 18:48Wes Bos?

  The free tier, you get six users. So that's, that's your whole, your whole family. That's my whole family. We got six people in our family.

• 18:59Scott Tolinski?

  I could even get, for me, it's like I could get access to my dogs. So.

• 19:04Scott Tolinski?

  I don't have, I don't have, uh, I don't have two additional kids, but I do have two dogs.

• 19:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Scott Tolinski?

  So they can get access to my TailScale network. Tail scale, huh? Tail, dog tail? Okay. Let's talk about, the next tool on my list is Zed. It's a text editor. Wes is not happy with the tail.

• 19:23Wes Bos?

  No. Continue.

• 19:27Scott Tolinski?

  Not happy with it. Hey, it's, you know what? You gotta, gotta, um, you gotta throw some balls out there sometimes and see if they get some hits.

• 19:35Scott Tolinski?

  Baseball. So Zed. Zed is a text editor that I like to use, and the reason I like to use it is the remote, uh, setup is really stinking nice on it. I just want to do a new remote connection.

• 19:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Scott Tolinski?

  It has SSH built in, and then again, I just pop my details in there and I can browse any of my projects. I can quickly and easily connect to them as if they were local projects. And then bingo, bango, I got a text editor right there to connect remotely and it acts like it's freaking local. So, uh, shout out to the Zed team for making that remote process nice.

• 20:06Wes Bos?

  I need to try that because I had been using the like VS Code remote or the Cursor remote, where the editor lives on, on your machine. Like, there is a way to like put VS Code on your machine and then you simply just visit like a web browser and use VS Code. But the way that I was using it, I was using it on my, my machine. I was SSHing into another machine and working on it. And it was like, it kept disconnecting and like, it wasn't a great experience. And then I found out the like, the hurdle to getting in there. So I need to try. So you're saying that the Zed one works with Mosh? Because Mosh is just a...

• 20:51Scott Tolinski?

  No, I think the Zed one works with just SSH.

• 20:54Wes Bos?

  Okay. So what are you using Mosh for? That just, just for terminals?

• 21:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 21:01Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 21:01Scott Tolinski?

  I use Mosh to connect via terminals where I run all my agents. So we'll talk about that in just a minute.

• 21:06Wes Bos?

  Okay, but the reconnect is automatic.

• 21:10Scott Tolinski?

  Any time I need to term into my remote machine, I'm using Mosh.

• 21:14Wes Bos?

  Okay, okay, makes sense.

• 21:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So again, Zed for editor, I like that a lot. So let's talk about those remote sesh. So I use, um, number one, I, I use Mosh to Mosh in. The terminal app I do use right now is Ghosty. I do like Ghosty. Um, and so I'm Mosh in there and then I'm using something called Herder to manage all of my individual terminal tabs and sessions and all kinds of stuff. So you create one or as many Herder sessions as you want. And Herder is basically TMX. And so TMX, Herder, these types of things. The reason why you would use that is because you can create, uh, different panes, different tabs, different sessions, all that stuff.

• 22:00Scott Tolinski?

  And then if you were to leave that session and come back, all your stuff is still there. We know that like if you are SSHing into something and maybe running an open code session from SSH, you close that session, that open code session is gone. So with something like Herder or TMX, you get those long running sessions that just stay there and all your stuff is exactly where you want it. Um, the benefits for Herder over TMX is that Herder has this unique little sidebar that reports the status of any of your agents in any coding agent platform, whether that is even like Hermes or Open Code or Pi or anything.

• 22:45Scott Tolinski?

  It, it shows you the status. So whether that is blocked, so if it needs your attention, maybe it needs approval for something, or it's running, or it's done, or it's just, you know, just sitting there. You always can look at the sidebar and instantly see, is there something that needs my attention? Before Herder, I was dang tabbing into different.

• 23:08Wes Bos?

  Oh, man.

• 23:08Scott Tolinski?

  Just tabbing into different browsers and being like, does it need my attention? Oh, this one didn't start because it needs my attention. This thing has made that so. Much stinking better. It's just the best. I love Herder.

• 23:22Wes Bos?

  Warp Terminal has had like the agent status for a while, so I quite like that. But I've been using Herder for only about a day now since Scott was telling me about it. I've been using TMOx for about a month since we've had Ben on. And I absolutely love it because it makes

• 23:42Wes Bos?

  having multiple like terminals open and having your agent be able to do it. Because often, like, a lot of people's process might be this. Like, you say, "Okay, I want you to do something." For example, I have this little NFC reader right here. And I want to be able to like read and write from this NFC reader, right? And to do that, it's a terminal process called PM3. And I don't like being like, "Can you just do this?" And then you don't get insights into it. What I like to do is have one terminal open with the actual process. And then another one open with my agent. And I can tell the agent to do things and it will run it in that other one. So watch here, I can say, "Scan the card."

• 24:28Wes Bos?

  There. And what it will do is it will just tell the other terminal. Here we go, HF search. And now it's running that search. It's running against the hardware on my desk right now and bringing back the information. I absolutely love that about TMOx. And I just didn't, the thing I didn't like about TMOx is that you can't just like, like click and drag, you know? Like here I can just like resize things. Absolutely beautiful.

• 24:54Scott Tolinski?

  People got really mad about that when I said that you can't click and drag or any of this stuff. They're like, "TMOx can do all that." It's like, "Yeah, but you gotta configure it." You gotta go back and forth of it. I gotta turn on mouse support. Just give me a freaking working out of the box, you know?

• 25:09Wes Bos?

  And I also don't know why I'm still in the terminal.

• 25:15Wes Bos?

  I hate the terminal, but it's I can't get out of it. So like I've tried like solo, which is Aaron Francis's like application. I've been trying to get into conductor. It's a little bit different. Like it's a kind of Git work tree base and projects, but you can have multiple projects going at once. Like there are lots of very good, well polished UIs for running multiple coding agents. And I really like that. But there's just something about my brain that whenever I want to do something, I go straight for the terminal and that's where I like to live. And everything else needs to kind of go over from there. I don't like going to an app

• 25:57Wes Bos?

  and opening up a project first, you know? I want to go to the folder and do everything from there.

• 26:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I there is something great about, because I'm the same way. I'm a GUI guy. I've said it many times. But like I, there is something nice about moshing in and then having access to all of my tools just there, whether that is Claude code or open code or whatever. It's all just there and I don't have to have a separate open code server running and I don't have to have a separate Claude code server running and these things that I have to then open up on my desktop remotely. Like it's all just there when I need it. And so I will sacrifice some of the niceties of a GUI to just to have the ease of having all my stuff just here inside of Herder.

• 26:44Scott Tolinski?

  If there was a truly like, if I could get, if I could just get open code that had my Claude code subscription in it, like I used to, I would just use that for everything, honestly, but I can't. So I gotta run Claude code. I gotta run open code. I gotta do all this stuff. Yeah.

• 27:03Wes Bos?

  I also really like the like whole idea of like workspaces, which is like, you could have like a personal workspace and a work workspace. And then you can have multiple tabs inside of that, which is kind of just different layouts of it. So you might have like logging up top and you might have your agent on the left and your actual terminal on the right. I really like that. And and taking it a step further of not just running it on. Your like your computer or like being able to like close the entire thing and then just reopen it and you everything is still there because it's all on other machines. The amount of times I don't want to reboot my computer because I have like 18 different warp terminal tabs open at once. I'm just like, oh, I don't feel like setting this all up again or figuring out where

• 27:47Scott Tolinski?

  You don't have to.

• 27:48Wes Bos?

  One of the biggest problems I have is where on my computer is this, this, the code that I wrote? I can't, I know I wrote this at one point, but I simply cannot find where this thing is on my computer.

• 27:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And brand new hot off the presses in the past couple of weeks is that Herder has launched plugins and there's a marketplace for plugins now. So I don't even have any plugins installed, but in the age of AI, of course, there's like a thousand plugins already automatically that in existence for this thing. So, man, I love it. And there's just so many little niceties, like the automatic when you select text, it automatically copies it to your clipboard.

• 28:23Wes Bos?

  I hate that.

• 28:25Scott Tolinski?

  I love it. TMX, folks. Yes, you can do all this shit with TMX. Who cares? It's just out of the box and works. I got tabs. I got all my stuff in here and now I got plugins.

• 28:34Wes Bos?

  But why?

• 28:34Scott Tolinski?

  It's just lovely.

• 28:36Wes Bos?

  The like copy to clipboard drives me crazy because I am just incessantly highlighting text. I can't, I can't sit still. Well, I just sit there and read.

• 28:46Scott Tolinski?

  clipboard is free, brother.

• 28:47Wes Bos?

  No, it's not because then my clipboard history has like 80,000 things that I don't care about. And then I use my clipboard.

• 28:53Scott Tolinski?

  Can you search for it?

• 28:54Wes Bos?

  I, no, no, no good. I use my clipboard history as like a, I search it all the time, you know? I know that I copied it at some point in the last week. It's gotta be in my clipboard.

• 29:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. I don't know. I like it a lot. So for mobile, I do Termeus. This is an app I've been calling Terminus for a long time for some reason, but Termeus, you can see I have my Herder loaded up inside of here. And the cool thing about Termeus is that they have this bar just above the keyboard that you can customize with your macros and stuff. So I have mine set up to make it easy for me to get from workspace to workspace or next agent to next agent. And then again, you just type in this bad boy and all of your sessions are here. Now, the one thing I Haven't solved about this, in case anybody wants to solve this, is like touch support. Like, I would love to be able to just touch on the agent that I need to access at any given point,

• 29:45Scott Tolinski?

  considering they're all just right there, just staring at you like, can you touch them? So I can't do that. I have to run the stupid, uh...

• 29:51Wes Bos?

  Really?

• 29:51Scott Tolinski?

  You know, Ctrl B.

• 29:52Wes Bos?

  They haven't hooked up, because you can click them.

• 29:56Wes Bos?

  But they haven't figured out how to like transform a touch to a click?

• 30:02Wes Bos?

  See, this is why, like, why are we doing this in the terminal?

• 30:05Scott Tolinski?

  So...

• 30:06Wes Bos?

  Like, uh, what? Come on!

• 30:09Scott Tolinski?

  That's what I was telling Dax, is the GUI is so much better.

• 30:12Wes Bos?

  And I don't, and I say this, I was like a heavy terminal user, that I just am like, why? And I've tried all of the like GUIs, and they just have, they're just not as sticky. I don't know what it is.

• 30:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so folks, if you, if you have a solution to this, I would love to hear it, because this sucks to do. And in fact, I have a list on here, it's like annoyances. So, uh, number one annoyance, screen tearing in Herter. Have you experienced screen tearing in Herter?

• 30:40Wes Bos?

  What is that? Like, like a rendering thing?

• 30:43Scott Tolinski?

  So, yeah, sometimes what I get is that like the text, uh, is, gets like, from some, some tabs bleed into other tabs, and then I have to like resize the window, and then it reshuffles it. It's like just too kind of annoyance stuff.

• 30:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, uh, so I do get some of that sometimes, especially when I am going from mobile to desktop, because that's like reshuffling the session and things like that. So that, that's an annoyance. Again, the mobile sucks for, for TUI. I still, you can't be convinced me that Terminus is really like a great experience. It's like a, an evil that I have to do if I want to prompt away from my desktop, so.

• 31:22Wes Bos?

  I had asked on Twitter what everybody is using in this sort of space, right? There's lots of TMUX, lots of C-MUX. Uh, Andres, who's the guy behind Coolify, is building gene build, you know? There's, Conductor is a really good one, Soloterm, we talked about. Crazy space right now. I think, and they all like overlap different parts, you know, like, like whereas like Herder is a bit more terminal SSH based, where, where it's just like, it connects to remote things. A lot of other ones are, oh, I'm gonna run them all locally. This Herder one is like the most sticky that I, I did. Like, I read the docs in like, in like,

• 32:05Wes Bos?

  like 15 minutes. I was like, I get it, you know? I totally get this. And this, this feels really good for me.

• 32:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for me, again, like, I was one of the things, I didn't resist it necessarily, but I didn't get it. And then once I got TMOx and I was like, oh, I get it that I need these long-running sessions, then Herder for me was kind of like a, oh, this just works. And once I got that flow, it's like, all right, I guess I'm just living in the TUI for now, just because it all feels very nice. Another annoyance that I have with this flow and setup is that if you need like browser testing, which we often do, Chrome DevTools MCP and Agent Browser, those types of things. I like Chrome DevTools MCP more than Agent Browser specifically because I like to see the little window open and see the stuff do the stuff in front of me. And like, that's just the flow that I've established. But

• 32:52Wes Bos?

  Agent Browser can be head, head full?

• 32:55Scott Tolinski?

  Can it?

• 32:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Scott Tolinski?

  It's just not by default?

• 32:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Scott Tolinski?

  I just haven't, yeah. You know, Chrome DevTools MCP has been so effective for me that I just use it that way. But like, now it's running on this machine. And you can kind of even see maybe some, some ones in the background here, if you're watching on video of it, working on some stuff. It's working on Better Randy for me. And Better Randy's gotten really sick, Wes. I don't know if, I'll show you some time here. But it's not running on your local machine. So there are some things that, and like, even like the Auth story there with these things. Now, granted, I'm not doing Auth in the right way with these headless browsers. And so, folks, how are you handling Auth for headless browsers in this type of AI agent world? Because

• 33:42Scott Tolinski?

  Outside of giving it some, you know, fake local credentials that it can fill in, I think most people are doing it via just straight up, uh, the API is validating with real tokens.

• 33:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Scott Tolinski?

  How are you doing that? Because I'm not doing it the right way is really what it comes down to.

• 33:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I, I keep dancing between like an agent browser. I tell it to fire one up and then I will just manually log in versus like, I know you can get, this is actually something that's disabled with the Sentry Enterprise Claude code, um, is the Claude code Chrome extension. I'm not sure why that's disabled, but like it can like control your browser. Cause like, part of me is like, yeah, I want it to have access to my main browser so it can do, have access to my like logged in things. And then the other part of me is like, mm, I'm not sure if I trust that just yet. I, I prefer to just simply spin up a headless or head full, uh, Agentic browser and then

• 34:42Wes Bos?

  have it be able to, to puppeteer it. But also like.

• 34:47Scott Tolinski?

  I do prefer head full to headless.

• 34:49Wes Bos?

  The, um, what, Cloudflare Turnstile is getting pretty smart about having those things open, right? I was looking into how these captchas detect if you're running a like puppeteered browser. And it's crazy. They throw, they could throw a tiny little debugger statement in a file that does not exist. It's crazy. If you watch it, you can't even pause it to like disable that because it's, they have some pretty nifty things that they do around that, which is good because you don't want, you want websites to be able to stop bots as well.

• 35:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I think a big thing here too, is that these are all like free services. I know there's things out there that can run browsers in the cloud and stuff and, and do all that. But again, I want something that just runs on my machine, machine is nice and easy.

• 35:36Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 35:36Scott Tolinski?

  And all that good stuff, uh, which is a big part of this whole workflow is that it all runs on my stuff. I'm kind of sick of the F-ing cloud, man.

• 35:45Wes Bos?

  Bring on the cloud. We need more cloud. Somebody did send me this Muxie, muxie.app. I've not tried this yet, but it's a terminal.

• 35:53Scott Tolinski?

  There's so many of these. Oh my gosh.

• 35:56Wes Bos?

  But it has an iOS app.

• 36:00Scott Tolinski?

  Interesting. Okay, now I'm listening. Yes, okay.

• 36:04Wes Bos?

  Lightweight, memory efficient.

• 36:06Scott Tolinski?

  Lib ghosty.

• 36:07Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Meaning that like it uses the underpinning of the ghosty terminal to render, right? So you know, it's probably performant. How does this work? Control your terminals and monitor sessions remotely with the iOS and Android companion app.

• 36:27Scott Tolinski?

  Does it give me my agent status? Like, I'm seeing like projects, I'm seeing like an open code style thing where your projects are on the left and then you have tabs.

• 36:36Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 36:37Scott Tolinski?

  Like, I want a big old listing of all of my projects all at once, all the stuff that's going on. So that way I can not focus on one singular thing at a time and I can focus on 20 things at a time.

• 36:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Where, where does this fit in?

• 36:52Scott Tolinski?

  I mean, it seems like, kind of like it fits in, kind of like.

• 36:57Wes Bos?

  It's like a T-Mux alternative, right?

• 37:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and that's the one thing is that like Herter is a T-Mux alternative as well.

• 37:04Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Scott Tolinski?

  And so when people suggested, what was it, C-Mux?

• 37:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Scott Tolinski?

  Man, when I tried to find C-Mux, we talked about C-Mux on this show before. When I tried to find this recently, I found G-Mux, I found D-Mux, I found, I think you could just take any letter. Here's G-Mux, steer every agent from any device, same thing, man. There's just so many of these. C-Mux, though, to me is just like another, it's a terminal app built on ghosty for vertical tabs. I just, this to me.

• 37:36Wes Bos?

  No, it has a built-in browser.

• 37:39Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. But it's not a multiplexer.

• 37:43Wes Bos?

  There's an iOS app, there's SSH, but then it, I don't know, there's skills, workspaces.

• 37:49Scott Tolinski?

  This to me seems like if you were running all your stuff on one machine, yeah, that's fine. But in terms of needing a multiplexer, I don't see this being it. So people who would say, why not C-Mux? It just, to me, it's not the same thing. G-Mux, who knows? Muxy, who knows? There's so many of these.

• 38:06Wes Bos?

  This seems like the same thing as Muxy, but also has a. A browser built in, right? You can have multiple terminals. You can have workspaces on your left. You also have a browser built in and there's a companion iOS app.

• 38:19Scott Tolinski?

  No, but Muxie is a multiplexer.

• 38:21Wes Bos?

  What does that mean? Oh.

• 38:23Scott Tolinski?

  So you're having these-

• 38:25Wes Bos?

  Instead of running multiple terminals.

• 38:26Scott Tolinski?

  Sessions. Yes. You're having the sessions that you can connect to like T-Mux. Yeah. So again, there's a lot of stuff out here, folks. What are you using? Let us know. Another consideration, Wes, that we haven't gotten into at all that I know people are going to talk about is work trees. Do you use work trees at all? And if so, do you do anything to manage work trees?

• 38:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I've been getting them into them a little bit more. I mostly use them with like remote agents. So if you have Claude Code in the cloud, or you've used Cursor Cloud, or anything like that, I much prefer to just like fire it off, have it run in that cloud and then come back with the pull request. When I'm working locally, I don't find as much of a use case for like firing off two or three things at once, unless I'm specifically like, I'm going to work on these two totally different features that like won't overlap each other in any way. Maybe that's a bit of a skill issue, but I just haven't found the need for that just yet.

• 39:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I, same thing, man. Like I find myself being like, I guess I just, I, it's not that I want to manage things that tightly, but like I don't want to work on that much different stuff at once that is not touching each other. Like to me, that feels like I've lost control over it. So I don't know. To me, I just, I have not really gotten into work trees in a way. And if I'm working on one singular feature, I don't see the need for work trees. I'm just going to use a regular old branch, so.

• 40:05Wes Bos?

  I'll tell you one place I have used them, and that is different implementations of features. So if you say, okay, I want to explore the best UI for doing X, Y, or Z, you can like go down one- Route, or you can take one model and say, how would you implement this? But in some cases, if you've got tokens to burn, it may make sense to like have three different models, approach it three different ways. And then all of a sudden, you have nine different approaches to a specific implementation. Because so often you you implement something and you go, that's not at all what I wanted. And then you have to sort of like wind things back.

• 40:49Wes Bos?

  And due to the cost of tokens, I don't think a lot of people are doing that. But it is an interesting use case. If if there was no cost, could you run three or four implementations and then choose which one is you you actually want to go forward with? And in that case, it makes a lot of sense to have three or four work trees running at once and you can you can fire them all up at once.

• 41:12Scott Tolinski?

  Well, Wes, let me introduce you to DMUX, DMUX.ai, the other letter MUX. Multiple manage multiple AI coding agents and isolated Git work trees, branch, develop and merge all in parallel. And I do believe that this is doing a lot of that specifically because you can have different models attaching the same project on different work trees and stuff like that.

• 41:39Wes Bos?

  So yeah.

• 41:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yep.

• 41:41Wes Bos?

  That's good. I've mostly used this feature in cursor. Yeah, what are yeah, syntax MUX. I'm in.

• 41:48Scott Tolinski?

  No, there's already a smux. It is a smux is a stream multiplexing library for Golang with minimal memory usage. Okay, the next JS or Naas that we're doing on the live stream needs to be just a blank MUX. Okay, so we found there is an A MUX, an open source Claude code agent, B MUX.

• 42:11Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, there's no B MUX.

• 42:12Wes Bos?

  MUX is such a cool word, though. So props to people using that. Props to the actual MUX, the video guys.

• 42:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, shout out to MUX. There is an X MUX. My God, there's one.

• 42:26Wes Bos?

  Is there a W MUX? Hold on, let's see.

• 42:31Wes Bos?

  The terminal built for Claude code, W MUX.

• 42:37Wes Bos?

  The window application built on Electron, vertical tabs, notifications when agents need attention. Everybody is building the same thing. Everybody is building tools for agents. Nobody is building actual products. Everyone just is making tooling.

• 42:54Scott Tolinski?

  There's gotta be, Wes, ah, there's gotta be, you gotta start moving into double As. So like double A mucks, double X mucks.

• 43:02Wes Bos?

  What about M M M U X? Mucks.

• 43:07Scott Tolinski?

  M mucks.

• 43:09Wes Bos?

  No.

• 43:10Scott Tolinski?

  M mucks.

• 43:12Wes Bos?

  Do you want, would you buy a domain name where if you search it, Google doesn't think you spelled the thing right? M mut. Did you mean mut? Did I?

• 43:22Scott Tolinski?

  I get so annoyed with Google doing that sometimes. It's like, obviously I meant this, the thing that I'm searching for, but yeah.

• 43:29Wes Bos?

  It's Indian University. M mut.

• 43:33Scott Tolinski?

  V mucks. Neo V M session handler for T mucks.

• 43:39Wes Bos?

  I think that's the craziest part about all of these things.

• 43:41Scott Tolinski?

  Package manager for AI assisted development.

• 43:44Wes Bos?

  Then they're all doing things slightly different, right? And one feature I, we didn't even talk about is this, like the scratch pad feature is really cool in solo term, where you can have multiple agents running on something and they could be done in different harnesses, but they all have access to a single scratch pad, which I think could just be a text file on your computer with, with some instructions. But it's kind of neat to give it a spot where it can store stuff and communicate with the other agents.

• 44:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Okay, sick. I'm compiling a list of all of the different muckses right now. So we talked a lot about hosting these on, on your local machines or anything like that. Like I host mine on a refurbished Mac mini with an M2 processor that was fairly cheap and it runs everything just fine. There's also services, like we just talked to DAX and DAX shared with the EXE dev, which I had seen before, but this is something if you're looking to host in the cloud, you can host this stuff on the cloud too, if you want to. Now granted, I'm just tired of paying for subscriptions for stuff. So for me, throwing something else on the cloud and managing another server that needs to be powerful enough to run this stuff

• 44:57Scott Tolinski?

  is not super interesting to me, but if you're hosting this on the cloud, that's another possibility. Maybe you don't have the ability to have another machine in your workspace or whatever.

• 45:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah, or the internet connection is another one as well. A lot of this stuff works so much better when your speeds and your pings are fast. And it sometimes just makes more sense just to SSH into some rented machine that lives somewhere else.

• 45:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, sick. So let us know what you're using, all the tools and all that stuff. Now's the part of the show where we get into the sick picks and shameless plugs. Or just sick picks in that regard. So Wes, do you have a sick pick? Anything that you've been feeling, anything that you've been liking?

• 45:39Wes Bos?

  You picked this probably three or four years ago and my wife just told me to get into them. And that is packing cubes. We're about to go on vacation and we've got four kids, two adults. We've got all kinds of stuff and it's just chaos trying to pack it all.

• 45:56Wes Bos?

  And simply just giving everybody a suitcase doesn't work because it's just, it's too much room. Can't fit it all into the car. So now we give everybody several packing cubes. You put your socks and your underwear in one, you put your t-shirts in another one. And it's just so nice to have everything. It made no sense to me when you sick picked it. I was like, why would you want like more smaller suitcases inside of a larger suitcase? But the organization, absolutely on key.

• 46:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I, on key, on key is fine. If you're a music head, yeah, it's on key. I will say that like, yeah, I, the packing cubes were so essential to me. And I was gone for like two weeks and some days. I've never been gone for that long in my entire life. And like without packing cube, I would have been absolutely hosed. So shout out to packing cubes. I think they're very effective. I'm going to sick pick a foot pedal. I got a foot pedal. I mentioned this in the last episode with Dax, but let me show you.

• 47:00Scott Tolinski?

  It's made by Elgato and it has three pedals on it, which is nice. All the other foot pedals look like garbage and they're also expensive. So Elgato made this one and it has the same software that the Stream Deck has on it. So you can set up macros to your heart's content on this thing. So the way I have mine set up is that I push to hold to start dictation. So I can talk. I have this one that is just enter. So it's the enter key. And then this one hits a macro that I use for all kinds of things. But the thing I really like to use it for is cycling through my active agents in Herter. So I'll just click this, click this, talk, hit enter. Click this, click this, talk, enter. And my God, it's so goofy.

• 47:46Scott Tolinski?

  So it's so absurd, but it's really pretty dope. I am like, I'm absolutely shocked at how much I've grown to really like that workflow. So shout out to Elgato for making a nice hefty foot pedal. That doesn't look like it was made in the 1970s.

• 48:04Wes Bos?

  That's sick. Man, I think we're thinking about inputs quite a bit. And I think we've got a video on this coming up down, down the pipe. But funny inputs or just like non-standard inputs. Everything is changing right now, you know? We're using everything called mux. Your keyboard is maybe not the best way to input anymore. Everything is absolutely changing and it's kind of fun to experiment with these different inputs.

• 48:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 48:32Wes Bos?

  All right, that's it for today. Thanks for joining in. Peace.

• 48:35Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.