AI Coding Explained

If you're new to AI coding or you think you know AI coding, we are going to break down all of the different types of files, techniques, and then jargon that you're gonna need to be effective at AI coding. But mostly, what the heck is all this stuff? Where does it go? How do I use it? And how do you become effective? My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me today is Wes Bos. What's up, Wes?

I'm doing doing great, and, like, there's a lot to unpack here. There's it seems like every single day, there's some sort of new file or some sort of new Yeah. Word that we're trying to learn. Like, we were talking about cursor rules many months ago, and and now nobody talks about rules files. It's all agents.md, and there's also, what, skills and sub agents and hooks and MCPs and plugins, and there's all kinds of stuff. And

we gotta break it all down for everyone. What happened to us? We used to talk about cursor rules, and now it's all agents.md.

We got we used to sit and talk about slash commands.

Yeah. Let's so let's get into it first and foremost. I think what we wanna do is we wanna start off talking about, some of the different types of tools. Then we wanna get into what all the stuff is in terms of, like we said, whether that is models and agents and sub agents and those types of things. And it's mostly going to be breaking down, like, what are all the pieces here? What do you need to know? What is actually important? What is effective? You know, in another video, what we'll do is really break down our real detailed tips on being effective with these tools, once you know what everything is, where it all goes, but we're gonna do our best to make sure that you know where the stuff is. So first and foremost, the the tools that you're using for AI coding, the primary ways that people are interacting with their code these days are via their text editor. So something like, Versus Code Copilot.

You have Zed. You have a cursor. You have something like Hero. You have these normal text editors with AI features.

Then you have the terminal based ones, which are either CLI based or TUI, which is like a terminal UI.

Things something like Claude Node or Open Node, TUI, where It is in your terminal, and you're typing into a text box. Right? And then you have something that is like a full on GUI, which is like a desktop app, something like the the new Node app or OpenCode has an app. And these things are much more like a a chat box, like a chat GPT inside of your, your app in an app that you can, you know, drag files ESLint, and it has more information in a nicer UI typically than the TUI.

So, Wes, what are you using

as your main tool for AI coding these days? Yeah. The tools I'm using for AI coding right now are are constantly changing because I'm trying to learn them all, but I find myself migrating to when I'm, like, working on existing application, I find myself migrating to Cursor and and mostly agents.

If I'm trying to fix something in the CLI, I find myself going for either cloud code or open code and just saying, like, hey. I'm working on x, y, and z just for, like, short little spurts. And then, like, the TUI itself. I I'm curious if you think this way as Wes. It's like, I do love a good TUI, but not for, like, long running things. I a GUI is just so much more flexible, and I I don't think you can ever replicate the the experience that you're getting with a GUI. So I I always try to go a little more on the GUI side.

Yeah, man. So the tools that I use for AI coding right now are specifically GUI based. I am a GUI man.

I I use a GUI over a two way. I've I've stated as such, but I like, me personally, Node, I use the desktop app or the OpenCode Wes interface because I can run OpenCodeWeb on my Mac mini, visit it in the browser, and it's a GUI.

And then I'm connecting to my app in my normal text editor to Node and read the code, etcetera, but I'm the tools that I'm using to do the AI coding themselves is pretty much exclusively OpenCode's GUI.

Reasons why I like it, I think GUIs offer things like when you drag an image, it shows the image. Stuff like that. It shows better diffs. The diffs are nice. The UI, you can click on something and it flies open and closed, and it's more shortcuts. Better.

Yeah. I I see the terminal when it's running.

Yeah.

Yeah. I greatly prefer it. Yeah. I agree as well. Plus, like, I find one thing with the dedicated GUI apps that are not code editors. So we're talking codecs, open code desktop.

I find the dance between the code and going back to the app kind of weird, and that's why I still prefer, like, a cursor, or like a Versus Node fork because

that dance between the agent did something and, Node, I wanna correct something. I wanna see how it's done. I just feel a lot more comfortable in that space, at least at the moment right now. Yeah. Yeah. I I I do think it's interesting. I think it's, as long as I I can track what's going on and I'm able to monitor it, it it also depends on the application. What am I building? Is this something I care about? Is this something I don't care about? Is this just, you know, quick and easy, get it done kinda stuff? So for me,

that that's just how it goes. So let me ask you a question. You're working in OpenCode desktop, and it it did something for you. And you're like, that's not really what I want, but it's just Yep. It's like a quick fix. Like, it's it's faster for me just to, like, go in there and move it. What's your process for that, like, that you need to open pnpm decoder? A lot of people just jump into VIM because they're in the terminal. Mhmm. But you're in, like, a GUI. So what's your your process for that? If I wanna go back and forth between

my code and my AI coder, using open code using the GUI, the the thing I do is I put the open code on one side. I put my zed, my text editor on the other side, and I'm following it. I'm watching the commits. I'm looking at diffs. I'm moving to files. If it's doing something I don't like and I can correct easily, it's so easy in that way for me to just tab over and and make changes and then go back and forth with it like that. So, that's how I do it, and I find it to be, decent. It's obviously not as nice as something that's built directly into the text editor. Right? Mhmm. But I just like my tools the way they are.

And because I have them all set up and configured to my liking, it's it's a nicer experience for me to have those split app experiences here. So in addition to this, inside of editors, there's usually, like, a chat window. So Versus Code has Copilot chat. I believe you can install many other extensions to do an inline chat window. And this flow of working in the inline chat is going to be very similar to how what we're describing with any of these other terminal tools or even GUI tools Wes you're talking back and forth with the AI. Hey. Can you make these changes? Can you do this? Can you do that? Reference these files, those types of things. But there's also tab completion where you're typing, and it's like a fancy autocomplete.

So the tab completion is usually for a a little bit like the AI agents often are are doing way more. They're going off. They're creating files. They're making big changes, where the tab completion is usually for spot updates and and, like, I need to change this and edit this, and it is kind of predicting what I need or writing you by. Some people prefer to completely stay in the realm of tab completions, but I have really moved away from doing tab completions as I go and because I've gotten more effective with the chat based flow of things Yeah. And then manually just editing things instead of relying on the I Wes I was the same way as well as as

the, like like, the the way that you puppeteer your chat JS you get better as that at that and as the models get better and and oh, that's actually what I wanted. I find myself moving a little bit away from the tab completion more into, into the agent. And then the tab completion is more just like, I need to fix this thing one by one or, like like, especially CSS.

I find myself using tab completion in CSS so much because so much of the AI CSS that get gets kicked out is is awful.

Or, like, that's not what I want. That's what like, I'm just trying to, like, design something that looks nice or feels good. Mhmm. Typing what I want into a box and then hoping it pops out and it just added a whole bunch of, like, hover opacities to everything is is not it. So I I use the hack completion tons in the CSS, more design design y things. And then the more, like, logic based, flow based stuff, like, writing back end JavaScript code, that's way more doing in the agents. Yeah. I think about things like your mad CSS website,

because it is so like, it's it's so deeply designed.

You put craft into that design. That design, if you didn't have that done in Photoshop and just say, hey. Go make this, I feel like that design would be impossible to dictate to an AI to do today, at least with my skill level. Can you I I Sanity imagine being, like, nailing that design aesthetic or or being able to experiment with that, and really nailing it. So I I I totally get that, especially because, like, the things that we're good at, we're good at. And and I oftentimes am like,

what are you doing here with this CSS move? You know? Let me do it. Yeah. Oh, man. That that drives me nuts. It's true. Like, even the last two sites I worked on, the mad CSS one and the the Synhax one, I was battling it to stop writing BEM selectors, like, nine times.

Like like, can you I I eventually had to throw it into, like, the agent's file because, like, it was searching for a way to make structured repeatable CSS, and I don't think it understood, like, the scoping that I was using. And, it just kept going back to making BEM selectors for everything and not using nesting.

Yeah. Yeah. There's so much there too in terms of, like, even, like, context when you get into AI has to keep all this stuff in context. And still, like, when you're dealing with big projects with reusable CSS and re like, the more you add there, the harder of a challenge it gets for the AI. So because of that, you know, dry CSS and dry things like that, I think, are are definitely still a challenge for it. And and I I wonder, like, what the exploration into that space looks like in terms of, clearing some of that up. So that is the tools here. Again, you can use many of these tools just by installing them. Like, Cloud Node, again, is a CLI.

Now people really like Cloud Code. I do find it to be less featured than something like, Node OpenCode, CLI, and it is directly attached to using Anthropic and a Cloud Code subscription.

So for me, if I'm the type of person who is using some of these tools, I personally invest my time in learning tools where they're not tied to one specific subscription or model because the models change so rapidly these days that my tool should sit in front of the model choice. So I personally am not investing a lot of time into Cloud Code as a tool because I would much rather have a tool that lets me use what model I want to use Wes I want to use it. And, therefore, that's why I use OpenCode, but there's other great choices for this. Py, and we just had, Mario on from Py.

Py JS a great choice for this. Have you seen charm, westwards? I I believe it's it's it's not charm. Charm is the overarching I've heard of it. Have not used it. Charm Crush. Charm is like a bunch of, terminal utilities, and Charm Crush is their AI, CLI tool. It's beautiful. It's cool. It looks great. As far as go, this is top tier stuff, and it it looks really super cool. It's got a lot of personality. I'll say that. But, again, same kind of thing. I think it's a great choice to give this stuff a try. And, folks, if we if we don't talk about your favorite tool in here, there's too many of these things. They're changing all the time. Yeah. I agree with you as well, like, being able to switch between models. Obviously, Anthropics had the the lead for for so long, but OpenAI just came out with their new codex model, which in my testing is is actually pretty good. It actually beat it out. I was trying to make it make some some three d printed gears that would mesh together. So there's quite a bit of math to that,

and it did a fantastic job. But I wanna be able to switch, and I wanna be able to, like, use somewhat standards based. A lot of things we're talking about today, like agents.md and and skills and whatever, these things are starting to become, like, standards. They're all a little bit different, sort of a whole ideas that you're using between all of these tools are starting to become the the similar.

Yeah. I I mean, I want my tools to be able to flip it and reverse it. You know? I I wanna be able to choose what I want with what I want and still have my tools adjust. Right? It's just like text editors. Like, I I would hate if my text editor was like, this text editor only allows React files.

You know? I would not use that tool.

So that that to me is the distinction there in terms of these tools. Okay. Cool. So let's talk about the stuff, all of the stuff. I think the the most logical place to start with is the models. Now we don't need to get into what AI models are specifically. But as far as coding goes, I personally believe the model that you choose will drastically change your experience with AI coding in 2026 because they all function very differently. Even the best ones that are very good still function very differently, and you need to interact with them in a different different way, at least in my experience. So, Wes, what model are you using to code with primarily in 2026?

Yeah. I've been on the, like, Opus models for a long time, and I've been right now, I'm on Opus four six for everything, and then I have been dipping a little bit into GPT five three codecs. And then, also, every now and then, I'll just try a random one. You know? I'll try the grok one and see how it is. And it's it's really funny to see the, like, the tells that they have of of every single model. Like, one obviously, the purple thing was was really big for a long time, and, Anthropic and, OpenAI have tried to beat the purple out of these models in their training. It still sort of ekes up. But now bad gradients.

The bad gradients. Now you're seeing, like, in code, you're seeing the, like, the comment with where it does three line comments, and it does a bunch equal signs on the bottom and the top. That's like an Opus tell. And then, like, I think another anthropic one that's happening is it it just, like, these makes these little pill icons for everything with rounded corners on it. It loves to do, like, a hover and then slightly scale up and then and then make the opacity. There's all these, like, little tells. Every time I look at some code, I can almost tell which model it's been using.

Yeah. Yeah. I know it is very funny.

The AI model that I'm using today to code is currently, I use Node 5.3 for detailed JavaScript work. I do that because I find it to be way more precise.

I find it to be way more reliable in its output. Now it follies a little bit on Svelte five code, but using the Svelte five tools I have, like the Svelte five agent from the OpenCode plug in that I use, Those things, it doesn't it's not a problem.

Without that, it is a problem. But I I find codecs to be more exact, and even though sometimes it requires me to yell at it to, hey. Actually, do the thing instead of you telling me to do it. Because sometimes I'll be like, you should install this plug in. I'm like, well, you can do it. Why don't you do it? And then I use Opus 4.6 for, more exploratory work, more creative work, brainstorming work, those types of things, and I find it to be better at those tasks. I find it to be more creative, more less exact in those types of ways. And because of that distinction, I am using both of those two models as my primaries. It just depends on the task at hand. And I know people out there get way more in-depth with that Wes they they know, like, I'm using this model for this and this model for this and this model for that. Like, that JS too much for me personally.

There's also, like, benchmarks, tests, evals, all of this stuff that warp, like, you can actually get scores from it because I I think a lot of this like, you listen to me being, like, yeah. It's a little bit better on x, y, and z. A lot of this is just touchy feely type of stuff. Vibes.

Yeah. It's all it's all vibes. Yeah. I think, there's a lot of experimenting that needs to happen. But if you're out there and you you haven't really tried AI coding or you tried it last year and you found the results to be frustrating, I would say give the latest codex a spin, and I think the there's a world of difference. I think it it feels incredibly different than it used to. Anthropic also released this fast mode. Did you see this? Where it's

two and a half times faster, and then it's six times the Scott, which is

That's crazy. Deno. Not for me.

Yeah. Well, like I'd rather wait. It's it's crazy to think, like, it can get two and a half times faster at at what cost? You know? Like, I'm sure they're even losing money on that. They're probably sticking a whole bunch of GPUs on it, but kinda neat that it it might get that fast at some point once we can catch up with all this hardware.

Yeah. I know it's already shocking. Even the speed right now, I, oh, I will say back to the models thing, codecs, in my experience, even though it's gotten better as of late, it was way slower. So, like, when I first moved from Opus 4.6 to codecs, I was like, this sucks. This takes forever. I I'm gonna come back after lunch to see the results for this. But in in reality, I I think the the results ended up being that much better. I had to go less back and forth of it. So the time, it kinda evened out at the end of the day, but now they have made it faster. A lot of the speed also has to do with the the tool that you're using. Right? Like, if you use the same model in in several different, like,

earlier on, I'm not sure if it's still still the case, but Copilot in Versus Node was significantly slower than Cursor with the exact same model. And it's just the way that these tools are doing things like like the tool still has to figure out what pieces to shove into context and and to figure out what what to go along with it. You know? Is it is it gonna use the TypeScript server to grab all the types? Is it gonna look at your clipboard, stuff that you recently deleted? All of that stuff is is sort of sent along with the with the request and to figure it out. And, also, there's there's also, like, local models as part of this as well. Some of the tab completion stuff might not be using the model that you have selected. It might just be have it happening locally. Yeah. Totally.

Cool. So let's move off of models and into some of the language that you hear. One of which, the words that you hear is agents. And, to me, I know a lot of people, especially people who are used to using just chat g p t or whatever, they hear the word agents, and they think it's something special. But, ultimately, the agent is basically the AI that's going off and changing the files and doing stuff for you. So if you're in a chat and you say, hey. Go modify this file. That is the agent going and the agent is going and and modifying the file. That's really all it is at a high level. Right? Ultimately, though, agents can have different configurations to them. You can have custom agents that have default context embedded in them. So, therefore, that agent is uniquely equipped to handle certain problems, So, therefore, that agent is uniquely equipped to handle certain problems because it JS brings in its own context.

Agents can be, scoped to tools sometimes. So that way, you can, like, have an agent that only has access to some tools very specifically and not access to other tools. And then you can have an agents that are, like, scoped to specific models. So we mentioned that some people get really deep into using very specific models for specific tasks, and you could have an agent that is really good at one task. It's scoped to that specific model that's good at that task, and it is scoped to the tools that used to complete that task and has the the context there as well. You might have a code review agent.

Anthropic in in Cloud Code has a web design agent where they specifically try to beat the purple out of the prompt. I think it says something like don't use, like, overused AI things, like like, gradients and overly you know, like, it it it tells it to do that stuff. So if you're if you're constantly finding yourself telling it to do, like like, that BEM example I had. Right? I was like, stop using BEM. You know? Like, that's probably something that you should be sticking in your agents where you're telling it exactly what type of of coding you like to use rather than just having to put that into your prompt every single time. Yeah. Yeah. And a good example of this, I've mentioned before JS the the Svelte

Node plug in has a specialized Svelte file editor that, again, has access to the Svelte MCP stuff. It is always looking only at Svelte Svelte TS or Svelte dot JS files. It automatically knows to, you know, fetch documentation and validate the code.

So it's been given specific instructions on how to interact with those files in the best way to get you the best results.

And you might be out there and feeling like this is too much. Like, oh, I just tell the thing to do the thing, and it does it.

Once you get into some of these things, I do think that specialized agents do make an impact. Personally, I have found that this is something that makes an impact for me personally. Cloud Node has this thing called output styles, and,

like, I've never used this. This is typically something I would put in the agents where it's like, don't yap, basically. Yeah. When you're when you're telling me what you did Yeah. Yeah. You make me, like, this, like, whole book report. I ain't reading that. You know? Like and, like, you don't have to be nice. You don't have to use a whole bunch of flowery words. Like, just like you said, keep it terse. Yeah. I have mine. Mine mine, especially, I like that about my Cloudbot. My OpenClaw setup was that, like, when you're creating it, it asks you to like, how would you like me to to respond to you? And I said, like, bulleted lists.

Yeah. You Node, keep keep it minimal language to express your your topics. I don't need any extras and stuff like that. And I do think that that makes a big impact for sure. Because, man, I hate it when it gives me a giant paragraph. Like, just tell me what you did or didn't do and what needs to happen next. Alright. Next up, we have sub agents, which is I'll Wes and I'll say, I haven't used sub agents a whole lot. But from what I understand and and maybe Scott will will tell us what he uses them for. But, like, basically, you have parallel processes. You want you want some specific agent to go off and do one thing and and sort of come back to you, delegate one specific part of it, then you can you're basically puppeteering a whole bunch of stuff. So what are you using for? Yeah. And that that's really it. So, like, the the agent is the one that you're talking to. Right? It's the one that you're going back and forth with. And the sub agent is oftentimes when you need to spawn off a process to go and do a task. Like, hey. Go and review this Svelte file. It is going to spawn the Svelte sub agent to go and work on it. And that's going to have its own thing, and it's gonna go off and do that. Meanwhile, I can continue interacting with the main agent to do other things and then tell it to go spawn off other sub agents. So that's the big thing there. And and sub agents, in the same way as agents can be tuned, you're giving them default context. You're potentially giving them, you know, scoped tool access, or you're giving them specific models or, again, MCP instructions and stuff like that. Yeah. So when you are defining an an agent and a subagent, those are those are essentially the same thing? In many ways, they are. Yeah. Yeah. They they in many ways, they are. Create an agent, you don't then decide whether it's a sub agent or an agent. Oh, no. It's how you do. Yeah. Just an agent. It this fact that it is sub is because it just goes off and does it for you while you continue on. No. My understanding in different platforms, they treat this differently. But in in Node, specifically, you define if something is a sub agent or not. Okay. Like, in many of these chats, they give you access to, like, have a drop down of which agent you're talking to. I'm talking to the build agent, the plan agent, the the Svelte agent, whatever.

Those are your agents, and then the sub agents do not show up in that list. They're not something you're going back and forth with. They're going, just specifically, so you are defining them as sub agents specifically.

And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at century.io/syntax.

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

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

So the first file that many people are, introduced to when working in AI is the thing that's usually created when you initialize a project.

This is often now referred to as the agents dot m d file, which is just a markdown file that is going to prime the AI with context in every new session.

So this file, I'm actually so annoyed that they nobody's come up with the standard yet. It seems like we're kind of standardizing on agents.md, but, like, there's cursor rules. Kiro has its own thing. Claude dot m d, Copilot instructions dot m d. And, like, some platforms allow you to customize and configure what these files are and where they live. If we could just all standardize on one, that would be awesome. But, again, this is a dedicated place to put context that should be there in every session Node matter which agent you're using, no matter what you're doing. This is like this is a TypeScript only code Bos. This uses Svelte five. Like, this is a SvelteKit app. Whatever. The stuff that every single session and anything should have at the top of it, this is it. Now the one thing that I think Wes this first came out, this was, like, the only tool that you had in your tool belt to, like, steer your code base. Yeah. And so because of that, people just threw the entire kitchen sink into here. I think that the more you put in here, you know, again, that is additional context that is being set in every single chat. And we've all had the experience that the longer you go back and forth with the chat, the worse it gets because that context just keeps getting bigger.

So you're probably going to wanna put

just the stuff that you need in here for it to be effective at its job, and, like, that's it. You're not gonna wanna put, like, just, you know, 10,000 lines of of text in here about your project because that's probably going to have the opposite effect for you. Alright. So let's talk about skills then. And, like, quite honestly, a lot of this stuff overlaps each other, and you might not be sure where to put it. But another idea that we have here, and and and probably one of the more popular ones aside from that, like agents.md, is is giving your agent more skills.

And these skills are the skills are a set of, like, capabilities that will extend the functionality of the the AI tool that you have. So this is where you can teach it how to do something specific.

And before we get into, like like, what you can make it do, I think one of the the key things here is that a the AI won't necessarily reach for a skill unless it needs it.

And that means it's not stuffing all of the stuff into context unless it absolutely needs it. So it's it's able to figure out what skills it has. And then if it thinks that one of those is is helpful, it will sort of bring that into context and and give it a little bit more information. I find that to be really helpful as well because the, like, context stuffing, giving it too much can certainly it's it's expensive. It It makes it slow. And then it once you have too much stuff, then everything gets kinda muddied. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And that's a that's a problem, I think, that, people experience when they're getting into this. And and

normal normal use normal people experience that context issue. Again, like I said, they're just using chat GPT. My wife was just lamenting about Gemini being, like I just been going back and forth with and it's doing so many, like, weird things in these ways. I'm like, you gotta start a new chat. Like, the context is is shot at this point. Yeah. So skills to me was one thing that I didn't I had a hard time, like, kind of grokking what, skills were useful for, but it's really just a a way to, like, instruct the AI how to do a thing. I got hung up on, like, Node, JS this being along in a slash command or a skill, or is this, like, better suited for an agent? And we can talk about some of that. But, ultimately, like, skills are a way to define your set of instructions or best practices for doing one specific task.

And I I think, if it's something that you go back and forth with and on this task, maybe that's more appropriate for, like, an agent definition. I'll talk more about that later. But have you dove really deep into any specific skills, or is there any skills that you're liking?

The skills is something that I have been using more than the agents. And quite honestly, I don't know the difference between an agent that is preloaded with all of the stuff and just a whole bunch of of skills that you can load up into a project. Because so Vercel has this website skills.sh, and, essentially, you can use their little CLI, and it just downloads a markdown file in into your project and puts it there. And then and then your AI will pick up that markdown file. Right? Just a set of instructions of how to do things. So I was, like, going through it, and the one of the most popular ones Wes, like, a Remotion one. Like, here's how to use Remotion to make a video with code. Right? That absolutely blew up, and everybody started using it. And it also will it's not just one markdown. It's it can be multiple markdown files, meaning that, like, you don't have to stuff everything in context. But if it if it thinks, oh, I need the docs for three d or I need to know how to do something for three d, then it will download go ahead and and download the markdown for that one. So one skill that I used, and this is something that everybody was saying as, like, the best skill ever, is this thing called superpowers.

And this is a GitHub repo that you can download and put it in. It's it's it's superpowers is a complete software development workflow for your coding agent built on top of a set of composable skills and some initial instructions that make sure your agent uses them. So I installed this thing, and, essentially, it gives it the workflow of building out an app. It it brainstorms.

It uses Git work trees. It it writes a plan. Mhmm.

It queues up all your sub agents. You've got test driven development. It does code review and then finishes the development branch. And it says, like, anytime you are gonna go and work on something, follow this very rigid workflow, and and here are all the skills that you have to do that. So I I installed it, and I I loaded it up with Cloud Code. You can, like, you can install it with with Cloud Code or or any of these these tools. And I said, like, go and make me a website.

I I gave it, like, a a Word document with all of the details about our cottage. And I was like, make a website for our Scott. You know? Because every now and then, we, let a friend stay at the cottage, and and they wanna know all the information. You know? Like, what do you do with the water? And and, like, where where are the keys? And all of this information. I was like, it would be nice to have it as a website with the with the images and everything. So I gave it that document. I gave it all the images, and then I let it I let it rip. And it worked for three and a half hours.

Made a plan. Mhmm. TDD, get work trees.

Three and a half hours later, it kicked out a two page HTML website, and it was $26 in anthropic thing. And I was like, this is not good. This is not good. Yeah. It feels like you just did a whole bunch of nothing work. You know, you sometimes meet these people. Yeah. Well, they just love the structure, and they love all the, like, the process of everything.

And then the output of your beautiful process sucks. So I spent I'd let this thing run forever.

$26 later, a very mediocre website that I probably coulda, jab GPT'd in in three or four minutes or or, like, any of these other things. So I think a lot of this, like, people getting obsessed over getting the perfect AI thing dialed in, you know, all your different agents and sub agents and skills, I think they're really handy, and I use them quite a bit. But I think you can certainly go overboard

Totally. And end end up costing yourself in money and time. Yeah. Totally. I money and time. That's for sure. And I I find the same thing. The eighty twenty is, like, largely that, like, that 80, percent of it you can get with very minimal amount of tools. Like, again, like, if I'm working in Svelte files, I need that Svelte thing so that the output is good. So, like, for me, just straight up YOLO ing it without that is a less effective thing. But the moment that you're adding too much, again, you're just, like, passing compute around, and it it is it is like, what are we doing here? What what is going on? So I haven't really also gotten into skills that much, either. Well, I Wes may not either. I have. That's the thing. I haven't gotten more into the agents.

I'm into the the skills.

Yeah. I've gotten more into the agents than I have into the skills, personally, but it is something that I'm adding more and more here. But I'm I'm doing so in a more minimal, kind of cautious way rather than, like, oh, let me head to skills.sh and install all these ones. Oh, good. Okay. This one looks like my planning one, my TDD one, all that stuff. So, yeah, I have not gotten that deep into them. But, again, a skill is primarily useful when you wanna accomplish a specific task. Another thing to accomplish specific tasks would be something like a slash command. And the slash command is something that, you use manually. So, like, a skill is something that I would say, hey. AI, go work on this, and the AI is able to determine and use the skills. You could tell it to use the skill specifically, but, like, it's it's not like calling a function. Right? Where a slash command is more like calling a function, even to the point where open code slash commands have arguments in them and can have arguments.

And those essentially are running a dedicated single prompt that arguments or whatever, that is essentially a snippet.

It's the equivalent of copying and pasting a prompt that can have arguments. It's a calling of function. So that's what a slash command is. I'm a big fan of these slash commands because, like, I often will have a whole package dot JSON full of all of these different scripts Mhmm. That I would very rigidly run. And it's nice to have have a slash command that doesn't have to be as rigid. It can just simply be natural language prompt, where you can do things like add a new page or add a new route, scaffold this this thing ESLint, run the Wes, and and you can just put these reusable prompts under these nice quick slash commands. And then as you're using the UI, you just hit your slash command, and it will auto filter them. I'm a big fan of that. Like, probably looking at all of these things today, I would probably say skills slash commands

and couple MCP plugins are probably my most heavily used. I'm kind of stoked to hear you say that because I have a bunch of my slash commands tied directly to my Stream Deck, and I also really like using slash commands. And when all this stuff comes out, I keep on just, like, wondering, like, this feels like I have a better time doing this with the slash command, but at the same time, like, nobody talks about them. And there's no hype around slash commands. There's all this hype around skills and whatever. So,

I do like slash commands myself again because they feel a little bit more like I'm in control, and and I like that. Next thing we have is is hooks. This is something that Claude Code has. I know OpenCode has a similar idea in their tools, or plug ins. Sorry. Not tools. Via plug ins. Essentially, this allows you to run some code on a specific specific ESLint, you know, like save a file before you do something, before you make a change, after you make a change. And this is really helpful for running linting or formatter, TypeScript checking. A lot of these tools will simply just try to to run TSC after it's done a specific prompt for you. But if you're trying to keep your code quality in check, having these extremely rigid tools that will throw errors is super important. Otherwise, it just goes off the rails and and starts making a whole bunch of slop.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And and I first really got into hooks with Kiro because their interface for it was really nice.

Like, you can say, alright. The package dot JSON updated Node. Update my README. You know? It's essentially things like that. And when I was at the Versus Code Insider Summit, that's one of the things I told them I wanted the most Wes a way to do hooks. They mentioned it was, like, a really tough problem to solve, but I do think that hooks are greatly underutilized.

But at the same time, since not using Kiro, I haven't been, like, going nuts to to reimplement them in anything. I'm just looking at the list of events from Cloud Code. You know? Session start, user prompt submit, pre tool use, permission request, post tool use, post tool use failure, notification, sub agent start, sub agent stop. So, like, if you're building out your own little UI for these types of things, you're probably gonna wanna listen to all of these different events.

But I don't know. I think the the regular user is probably not building out they're building out these things. It's the same thing with, like, a lot of our our code quality tools as well. A lot of us are simply just users of them. And then and people that build

ESLint and ESLint or whatever, they're the ones that figure this stuff out for us. Yeah. Let's talk about plug ins. Now a lot of things have the the idea of having plug ins. Specifically, I know OpenCode has plug ins. Plug ins and OpenCode can do a number of things where they're adding, like, one of them I've seen. I asked on on Twitter the other day, actually. It was like, what are you even using plug ins for? Because I'm not using plug ins, that much. And and people were saying they use, like, a super memory plug in that gives them access to a specific type of memory.

There there's a handful of plug ins to make open code, like, use cloud code conventions in various ways and things like that. The only plug in I use personally is the Svelte one that I mentioned. There's a Svelte open code plug in, and all that's doing is it's adding the MCP, the MCP tools, and it's adding the a the sub agents. It's like basically wrapping up a bunch of the the features that we've talked about in this episode into one package. That's it. Yeah. That's it's shareable. You can wrap it up. You can put them like, with with Cloud Code, the plugins can contain

skills, agents, hooks, MCP servers, all of that type stuff, and and you may want to share that with people that work on your team. Like, you can share it in your Git Deno, but if you've if you've got multiples, right, or or if you're starting a brand new project or or you're doing anything, you may want to just find a way to bundle this on up. The ESLint can can be plug ins, but they can also contain rules and and all kinds of stuff like that, so very similar. And then finally, we have MCP. MCP, we've we've talked about it many times on on the show, but an MCP is a way to programmatically connect your AI to interact with external apps and external services. So, the way that it works is that you you put an MCP server in your tool that you're using, and then it will call that MCP server and figure out what are the tools that are are available to me.

And and it that might have some like, a very common one is is contact seven. Just looking up docs. The ability to search for and download documentation for specific libraries.

You can bring that in. Another MCP would be, using Playwright, the ability to use an external browser and sort of puppeteer it for you. That's different.

Sometimes, it's different than than skills and and agents. You Node? There there is some overlap between the two. I think that's what's confusing about all this stuff is the overlap between all of the different pieces. I think it's because everyone's just trying to figure out, like, what this looks like. And then the next time, like, one of these new models comes out, they may just be trained. Some of these things might just be trained away, meaning, like, you don't need x, y, and z anymore because it simply is is way better at figuring out what it is that you wanted. But, like like, even, like like, Sanity, you know, you could Sentry has an MCP server, and you can hook it up to that and say, hey.

Working on bug x, y, and z or or check my check my century. That's one thing we didn't really talk about is this idea of, like, cloud agents Wes I was laughing the other day because I was running something on my computer, and I had to go bring my daughter to ballet. So I tethered my phone, and I left it open on the passenger seat thing while I was driving. I was like, if this was a cloud agent, then I could've closed my laptop and then opened it up when I got there. Right? See my Tailscale video, folks. I did a video on Tailscale.

I'm running open code on the Mac mini on my dev process.

If I, on my computer, tell open code to work on a problem, I can shut my laptop. I can do whatever. I can pick it up on my phone later and then, finish it or see what's going on, and it's just gonna be just cranking away on that thing. So,

man, it rules. And a lot of these these things will have or do have the ability to have cloud agents. Right? Like, I know Cursor has it for sure.

Oh, does OpenCode that that's probably their, like, monetization platform, I I'm going to guess, is the way that they're gonna make money. You know? Like, OpenCode is a business, but it their tool is open source. They have a subscription service for models in in compute specifically. So if you wanted to say, like,

I wanna subscribe to all of the models, you would, it's called OpenCodeBlack maybe JS the the new one they've changed. Yeah. But the the being able to serve it over the web, one line command, open code Wes, or open code serve, bingo, bango. You got it on your IP. If you're on a Tailscale network, you just log in to that, and you're there.

I don't think that most people are going to do that, though. I think that most people Man. I don't think so. I I lazy. I will put money on it that OpenCode is gonna roll out OpenCode cloud Sure. Where you can just run it in their sandbox on their their cloud and and Not me. That that will be great. Right? Because Not me.

One thing, like, Sanity can do JS, like, I hooked it up to my cursor cloud. And then, like, if there is is a problem, I can just, like, sic, ChryssrCloud on it right from my phone. And then it will submit a pull Wes, and and you can merge it. That's got that's that's a really neat workflow. And I I think that I bet they they will be going that way. I bet that's a big, like, I don't know that a lot of these big model providers are gonna be making a ton of money on these models because, they're eventually, we're gonna get a lot of these open source models that come out that are are good enough or just as good. And then all of a sudden, someone says, well, either I host it myself because I have some, like, 10,000 supercomputer or, like, the I think I think the, like, profit that they're making on these models is going to be, like, razor thin, and there's gonna need to be other things like paying for whatever cloud at the end of the day.

So let's go back real quick to some of this because we were talking just about, like, the confusion on overlap. And one of the questions I posed was, like, is this better as an agent or a skill, or what is this better as? I do wanna just, like, touch on that because I did a little bit of of diving into that for my own personal ideas here. So, like, the here's here's a a a question, that I had personally. Is it better to have an accessibility agent for completing accessibility tasks or an accessibility skill that any agent can use, or is it better to have an accessibility skill that an accessibility agent can use? So skill, agent, or agent plus skill. Like, what is the ideal combination there? And and the answer that I personally landed on is it basically depends on what you're doing. Like, if this is a one off thing and you're saying, I wanna I yeah. Hey. Go fix accessibility issues, then an accessibility skill is more than appropriate for that. And that for the most part, that is the answer. The answer is, hey. Just go off and fix these issues. But if this is a longer running thing where you're, like, gonna go back and forth with it, like, hey. I want you to go and do a full audit.

I wanna then talk about that audit. I wanna then go maybe potentially fix things based on that audit, or I wanna dive into that more or go back and forth. Then you're in the land of, like, oh, this should be an agent, right, that is taking care of this. So it depends on what you want there. And then that third thing of a ally skill and an ally agent, that actually could work, and it could work well where the skill might be run these specific tools.

And then the agent could have instructions to run those specific tools as a part of your process or as a part of its fixing process.

But that does feel like you're getting into potentially overkill territory, but it really depends on what you're trying to do. So if you're feeling like there is overlap here again, specifically for me, skills was always one of those things. I just had a hard time, like, really latching on. I but I have an agent for this. Why would I need a skill? Yeah. And that's really it. If you need to go back and forth, agent makes sense. If it's a one off thing, a skill makes sense. If the agent can use a skill, like, that is also something that absolutely can work. At the end of the day, experiment with this stuff, and I think that is a, a decent answer. Yeah. The I think the decent answer is nobody totally knows. No. I know. I know everything. You know? And we're we're all

figuring it out in what makes sense. And I bet we come back to this in six months. We'll have a bit more of a solid answer as to how these things can work. And and maybe even a lot of these things will be distilled down into some sort of smaller piece of information that you can just load in. You don't have to worry about whether it's a hook, a plug in, a skill, etcetera.

You can be effective with these tools without having to go down all of these Wes, but it is, honestly, it's kinda fun to experiment with. So I I've been I've been having a good time, like, exploring this stuff, and it makes me feel, like, excited for the tech. I know people get down on AI or aggressive towards AI. We see it in the comments and stuff like that. But these Yarn technical, interesting

computer science problems, and I do think that there's they're fun to work on. The same thing with, like, all the the Claude Bos stuff. Like, everyone's mad about, it's, it's hype and whatever. And, of course, of course, it's stupid. Of course, people are losing all kinds of money on it, and, of course, it is very hyped up. But all of that is that people are figuring a lot of stuff out. They're figuring out what works. They're figuring out how to actually interact. They're figuring out security.

And, like, this Claude Bos or what's it called? OpenClaw Node? Like, we might not have this in in a year, but I guarantee you the lessons that we have learned from this whole thing are going to be put into

all of the products that we're we're using today. Heck. Yes. Cool. Well, let's get into the part about sick picks and shameless plugs. This is stuff that we're liking, enjoying products that we like, podcasts that we like, YouTube channels, whatever we're feeling at this given point in time.

Wes, is there anything in your life that has been nice for you? I got Node. Real quick. TV show, St. Dennis Medical. If you like, like, The Office and, like, Parks and Rec, my first recommendation to everybody JS if they like that type of stuff is to watch the paper because it's it's literally half of The Office characters, and it's I think it's made by the same people. It's fantastic.

But if you also like that sort of

vibe of The Office, ESLint Deno Medical is a very good show. Me and my wife love it. They just really sit, the second season, and we've been thoroughly enjoying it. Nice. I I've been out on I I I watched The Office, but I didn't get into Parks and Rec. I have noticed that, like, every single show on TV nowadays is like, what if we did The Office but for, but for a grocery store? What if we did The Office but for cheerleading or whatever? This is The Office but for hospitals. So

yeah.

They got a formula. Yeah. They got a formula. Yeah. The Burt and Rec is by far the best. The paper, also, I would say maybe even better than The Office. Interesting. Maybe, but very good. Interesting.

Okay. Cool. I'll check it. I have a a sick pick JS a smart lock. I hate smart locks. I have tried so many of them.

I had an Acara one that my I had I had to have a locksmith, like, destroy it, and that locksmith was like, I am furious at this company for designing this lock this way. So I I had an Ultra Lock on on one of my doors that I really like, And I I, since then, for some reason, have for my office door, have, like, gone through different locks, the Aqara one. I had a Vercel lock, man. The level lock sucks. I hate it. And so I was finally like, I'm so sick and tired of dealing with this thing, and I bit the bullet. I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna buy the latest Ultra Lock, whatever it is. And so I got the latest fingerprint Wi Fi Ultra Lock Bolt fingerprint Wi Fi smart lock works with Apple Node, Siri, Alexa keyless entry with fingerprint ID, app remote control, keypad, deadbolt, BH m a cert easy install I p six five black.

I got that one, and it's nice. It's great. For Scott locks go, it's a $130 or whatever.

It's got fingerprint. It's got number pad. I don't have to pull out my phone to use it. I do do do do do do or I fingerprint it, and it works, and it's reliable. It has auto lock. I can connect it to home assistant. Oh, that's great. So Ultra Lock. Shout out to Ultra Lock. I I I should have never left you. You. I should never have doubted you and just, bought you for the first place on my office door. I've been wanting to get one of these forever, but our front door is like a weird

has a lock and handle and Ours is two. All in one. Yeah. That's why I don't have one there. Yeah. No. No. I don't have one there. This is for my office, and then we have, like, a backdoor because, yeah. There's a backdoor. Yeah. We have one on our back our backdoor as well, but it always runs out of battery. And, like, you need to put you gotta put double a's in it, like, probably every forty five days.

And because of that, we just never

replace the batteries on it, and it just, like, stops working. So I need to get something that is better than that. Yeah. I would say that's what I hated about the Vercel lock. You had one of those little batteries, just a single one of them, and it died, like, every 14. And I was ready to, like when it died, I was ready to lose my mind. This one takes eight double a batteries, and it supposedly will last for many, many, many months, like, six plus months on a a battery set. And I will say from personal experience on the other one, we, like, never change the batteries on that one, and it's only four batteries. So yeah. Hey. It JS very effective. Yeah. I've been looking at, like, hacking mine to put, like, a, like, a lithium battery in it. Somebody's done it because that would last Returnable. Probably four or five months, which would be way longer. There's also, like,

wireless charging locks now Wes you put this thing, like, 10 feet away, and it somehow puts a little bit of power through the air That freaks me out. Which is wild. But yeah. I don't want that. I don't want laser

I don't want them to Yeah. Stand in front of it and have it fry my balls or something.

Yes.

Alright. That's all we have today. Let us know what your skills and agents and tools and all of your things are down below that you're using. We'd love to hear it.

Peace.