1011: tmux + Terminal Maxxing with Ben Vinegar

**Scott Tolinski** (0:00)
Welcome to Syntax. Today, we have the former general manager of Syntax and the co-founder of Modem, which is an AI project manager and a non-annoying terminal guy. Too often times, we have terminal folks who are just, why don't you do it this way?
Ben has a really awesome setup and we're going to be diving into all of the ways that he is using his terminal for running agents, all of the cool things that he is doing. And man, I'm so excited to catch up with Ben, but I'm also excited to dive into some of his projects because just watching his most recent talk, man, it solves a lot of the problems I'm personally having. So we're going to dive all into all of that and more. My name is Scott Tolinski and with me is always this Wes, but most importantly, welcome Ben.

**Ben Vinegar** (0:50)
Hey, guys. It's good to be back.

**Scott Tolinski** (0:52)
Yeah. This is your second time on Syntax?

**Ben Vinegar** (0:56)
This is the third time. It's the third time.

**Scott Tolinski** (0:58)
Yeah.

**Ben Vinegar** (0:59)
Going back a while. Yeah. But the last one was an emergency fill-in, so it's nice to be properly invited.

**Scott Tolinski** (1:08)
Sometimes we need emergency fill-ins and you're just the guy for that. So.

**Wes Bos** (1:12)
Yeah. You got lots to say. Ben had a talk at the AI engineer conference a couple of weeks ago, and I just watched the video, and I thought it was super interesting, his rig of how he's doing agentic coding, how it's done remotely, SSH-ing into boxes and doing it on a box versus locally. TMUX, I would say it's fair that I'm a TMUX hater.
You're a hater. Maybe changed.
Never really understood all of the hype around it, but Ben's usage of it, pretty good. I think, let's dive into that, man.

**Scott Tolinski** (1:50)
Yeah, I'm a TMUX not understander. Yes.

**Wes Bos** (1:53)
Yes.

**Scott Tolinski** (1:53)
I'm curious.

**Ben Vinegar** (1:54)
Okay. So, I don't know. The background is, look, I'm a Mac enjoyer. Okay.
I like IDEs. I have used cursor primarily, but even before that, VS Code, like probably a lot of people, look, even gave the JetBrains stack a pretty good go there for a while. So, that's like, I like debuggers. I like all those tools and everything.
And look, when we're building Modem, I think it's worth mentioning that Modem is like, we started like a year ago, and it's AI product management, product. It could be project too. That's okay.

**Scott Tolinski** (2:30)
Oh, product. Did I say project?

**Ben Vinegar** (2:31)
Yeah, but like, you know, the lines blur between them, so it's okay.
Really quickly, product management, you know, helping you do the non-coding tasks. I could talk about this later, but, you know, synthesizing feedback from customers, making sure your ticket backlog makes sense, following up with users when you land some stuff. I'll cut it off there. We started about a year ago, and we actually decided that we would code gen the product, like the project from the very beginning. It was kind of like, look, the whole thesis of Modem is AI coding is 100% going to be totally real, and if you believe that, then it's going to go down, like, the time to deliver code is just going to keep dropping, and then, like, the other parts of your job are going to be boring and slow, so can we work on that? And that's kind of where Modem came from.
And if we're going to build it, if we believed in that future, we had to, like, build it that way from the beginning. So I'd say it's, like, 99% code gen, but, like, tasteful, curated code gen, like, everything is code reviewed. We go back and forth with the agents a lot. We do edit the code. Man, I was having this problem, which was, I feel like it's a problem that you're seeing a lot of lately, which is, I don't have a setup where I have, like, there's no JIRA backlog or linear backlog where agents are just spinning up all day.

**Wes Bos** (3:46)
Yeah.

**Ben Vinegar** (3:47)
Have you guys tried that?

**Wes Bos** (3:48)
No. No.
I think that's the craziest thing that people have, like, agents just constantly picking things up and churning. Like, if I were to let a rip on my GitHub issues for all of my projects, I'd be done in a couple of days and it would not be very good.

**Scott Tolinski** (4:05)
Yeah, it would not be very good.

**Wes Bos** (4:06)
Right.

**Scott Tolinski** (4:07)