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

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we had an episode for you on background agents' long running AI tasks.

Some of these coding tools that are significantly more expensive and significantly more, like, autonomous, being able to run it on your own, some that are fine tune models. We're talking about, like, the OpenAI Node, Claude Code, the new Cursor background agents. They just released a new $200 a month plan. And, like, I feel like we're on, like, the cusp of, like, another wave of these tools and another wave of of what they can do and and how we're actually using them, which is hilarious because if you go back to the episode of us at the end of last year, one of my predictions Wes, I feel like the AI is gonna get like, like, I feel like we're Scott gonna see any major, improvements this year. You know? We're just gonna get significant or a little bit better in here and there. But, man, this stuff is is really exciting, and I've dove into all the different tools. We're gonna talk about how they work and how you might wanna use them, and and are they really that much better? And is it really worth spending 10 times the amount that you're spending on, like, a Copilot subscription or something like that? Yeah. One thing I think we did get right,

was that the the AIs themselves might not go through some extreme evolution, but the way in which we use them will evolve.

And I think already through June here, we're seeing so many different new totally different new approaches to interaction with them. And I I at a I was actually just got back from JS Nation and React Summit in Amsterdam Oh, yeah. Where I was emceeing both days. And I had a lot of conversations with people about the interfaces in which we interface with AI. And that was, like, such a huge topic of conversation Node so than, like, will the models get better, will this get better, that, whatever. It's more or less like, how are we interfacing with these things? And I I found there to be a massive amount of thought provoking.

I Vercel some discussion there.

Because I I I at the very start, I was looking at all these, like, CLI tools, like OpenAI, Codex, Cloud Code. Those are probably the two big ones Wes instead of using, like, an an editor, like a cursor or or Versus Node, you're simply just typing into the terminal. And I was like, are you really is that really a better interface just typing into a terminal? You don't get the full UI and and all the diffs and all of that stuff. And and granted, there are, like, connections you can use in it. But, like, the amount of people that said, you're thinking about it wrong, Wes. You're thinking about it like that you're just sitting there and looking at what it does. And and these are much more of a set it and forget it and let this thing go off and run. So that's what we're gonna talk about today JS this sort of a new wave of of everything.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. I I'm I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts on on some of these things, because I I did use Cloud Code for a bit. And, Yeah. I I don't know if I got it, so I'm interested in getting it a little bit better.

So I've kind of broken this down into two major sections, both which are are kinda related to each other. The first one being this idea of of background agents and the second one being CLI tools, which can be used as as just part of your your existing tooling.

So the first one, background agents. They're becoming very popular. They task.

Right? Wes we have agents already. You give it a task. You type in the box, and then it goes ahead and and does the work that you want. And then you look at it and say accept or or reject or you type back and forth to it. And sometimes you'll go back and forth with with several prompts. The idea with background agents is you can it can do a lot more. These things are going to have significantly increase in power. They're going to run for a lot longer. They are going to run concurrently, meaning that many people are simply just setting up okay. Today, I have to do three or four tasks.

Mhmm. Let me set off three or four background agents, and they're all going to run concurrently, or they're all gonna run-in parallel,

as I go ahead and and do something else. Can you give me a type of task that which would be appropriate for?

Yeah. So an example might be on, one thing that I gave it. I said ad related episode embeddings feature, meaning that, like, I want it to go off and create an entire feature for the Syntax website Wes it takes every single episode, all the transcript. It does embeddings, and then it will save those to the database. It will create an API endpoint for those embeddings.

It will be able to find use those embeddings to find related episodes to each other, as well as create a whole bunch of Svelte components that we we could pop, like, in the Syntax website. Say, like, if you like this episode, here are three more that are similar to this. And then we could also have, like, a two d graph that would sort of group them together, and then, theoretically, we could use that for tagging the episodes as well.

So that's that's a fairly significant feature, which may take an AI agent, like, I don't know, thirty minutes, an hour, to go off and and do.

So what you can do is you can give it a we'll talk about this, like, requirements document or tasks document, and it can go off and run that. And then you can go to another one, which JS, like, we simply just have, like, lots of, like, little one off issues on GitHub that are, I don't know, maybe half an hour, forty five minutes worth of work. And we we are beta testing the Slack integration right now where you can simply just set it at a GitHub issue, and it will go off and and fix those things for you. So background agents, they're a little bit different than just regular agents in that they they will run for a larger amount of time. And simply by by using back right agents, and I've also been testing the, like, max mode in Cursor as well, it seems to simply just, like, check its work and just kind of keep recursively going back over itself until absolutely everything has been Node. And it's it's pretty pretty impressive. Like, another example was I needed to migrate.

We switched the RSS feed for the Syntax podcast. We moved from Libsyn to Megaphone.

And and part of that was we have 912 markdown files that have m p three URLs in them. And I needed to take the old RSS feed, line up the GUI, the guaranteed unique identifiers. I needed to line that up with the new RSS feed, and then I needed to find the related episode markdown file, parse the front matter of that, switch out the m p three URL, and then push it to GitHub. Right? And that's, like, seven or eight steps.

And the thing ran for for, like, twenty minutes, and it did an absolute perfect job of of getting them all in for me. I maybe not a perfect job. I had to step in two or three times and clarify what it Wes. But if I had been a little bit more upfront and a little more clear with how it worked and there was a lot of, like, kinda messy data. Some of the URLs didn't follow the same patterns as others, and it did, like, a really nice job where I could simply set it off. I went and went and worked on something else, and then I came back to it, and it had done, twenty, twenty five minutes worth of work in the background. And it's it's quite amazing if you're willing to spend the money on these.

Like, the $20 a month plan is not gonna do as good of a job as some of these pay as you go or more expensive plans.

Yeah. And, hopefully, maybe this is something your work could be covering. So possibly being able to use something like this episode to convince your boss that this might be worth your time.

That's interesting. So is it in this particular case, are there there Vercel different agents' processes handling different things and coordinating with each other? Is that what's happening? Or The idea with the idea with a background agent is

you set off one background agent, do this task.

Mhmm. But you can have multiple of those running at the same time. Okay. So it's not like, an agent is gonna spawn off multiple agents on its own.

Yeah. You would just set it off. The one thing about the cursor integration is that it has to run-in their their Cursor cloud.

And it's essentially just running an entire Versus Node instance in the Cursor cloud, and then you can go in at any time and and see how it's going. So, basically, you can, like, tap into the the whole Versus Node UI Yeah. At any time, which is kinda interesting because some people said I would just set this off at work, and then I'd maybe check-in on it on the bus ride home. And then by the time I got home or you can, like, just, like, set things off without having to be at your computer, which is is kind of an interesting one, which is being able to code from your phone or or code mobiley.

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

Yes and no. Like, it run you have to, like, run it in, like, in in, like, a sandbox. Right? Yeah. Because if it that's also the nice thing about the cursor code is that it runs in the cloud. So it's not running on your computer, so it's not necessarily going to run and, like, nuke your entire machine or something like that. Because yeah. Should you trust it? Maybe.

But will something bad happen eventually? Probably.

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

Wild.

Yeah. So Cursor background agents, they just released a $200 a month plan, which just goes to show that, like, these things are using quite a bit of compute power.

OpenAI has their own codex, which is both a CLI and there's, like, a UI as part of chat GPT.

Devin is probably was one of the first on the scene.

Again, it's it's kinda funny how much we laughed about these things six months ago, and and now we're starting to see them. It's actually actually half decent. I've not personally tried Devin, but it's the same idea. Copilot workspaces or Wes, like, Scott, you have tried this yourself. Right? You you went in and gave it a whole task, and it just went off in the background and did it.

Yeah. And I found, at the time, I mean, it was, like, super early access. And I wasn't super impressed with the Copilot workspaces, but I was impressed with the workflow itself.

So I would only assume it's gotten much better by now. I I would love to give it another another rip because I did really enjoy the workflow if only it had succeeded at the time. So but, again, that was that was, like, what, a year ago. That was very early.

Mhmm. The one, like, UI I didn't like is Wes we were using background agents as part of the, like, Slack, what I didn't like about it was that, like, it went off and did all of its work, and then it came back, and I had to, like, give feedback to it. And I much I much prefer the whole IDE.

You can see all of the steps that it's taken.

You can see all the diffs, and then you can you can either change something yourself or simply just give it another chat. And the Slack integration, you can give it sort of a follow-up, but I don't know. I I think I still prefer that type of thing. I certainly don't mind watching over

an agent doing work and then, like, confirming it as it goes. Or Yep.

Yeah. I I don't mind that because it does feel much more like a more controlled workflow than sending a Slack message.

Totally. Other ones, there's Cline, Node. There's a whole bunch of similar ones in the space of the, like, sort of background agents. And then the second category I have here is CLI tooling.

So Cloud Code is probably the biggest one in the space right now, and then there's OpenAI Node CLI.

And then DAX is working on another one, it looks like, called, OpenCode, which is is kinda cool. You'll be able to just, like, run it, and I'm assuming put your own models behind it.

So these are just straight up CLI tools, which can you can integrate it into your editor.

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

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

Yeah. Yeah. That it all sounds wild in in have you spent some time with Cloud Code?

Yeah. Yeah. I I went into it, and let me tell you. I went, as pay as you go, which is is not the way to go. It's so stressful.

Every single keystroke I made, I was so concerned about it costing too much because, like, it it it adds up pretty quickly. So, like, example, I I went into a very simple demo that had maybe seven or eight files. I think it was a simple React application, and I just asked it, what does this repo do? 9¢.

9¢ out the door. You Node? Like, that's not obviously, not a lot of money, but if if every single time that you hit enter, you're you're paying 10¢ out the door. And then I I another prompt I gave was add a new example called iPhone dot HTML with some CSS replicate in iPhone layout.

That went ahead and and spent 8¢, which, again, not a ton, but imagine it going off and and it come it went back and forth three or four times. But then imagine going on, like, an actual real mega code Bos Yeah. And simply it understanding how JS this code base work, which files do I need to include, what are your what does your database model look like, how are how do I run all of these things? I just ran a linter. Now let me take the linter and the TypeScript output. Let me send that back. You're you're going back and forth. I think, like, some of my examples with background agents were, I don't know, back and forth a hundred, hundred and fifty times, which can can really add up. So pay as you go stresses me out. I'd much rather just pay the the single amount and then be able to just blast it. And and I was surprised at how many people were willing to pay to I I haven't shelled out the $200, but we're part of the century cursor.

And David Kramer was just like, let her rip. Like, you Node, like, this stuff is this is this is game changing stuff, I personally. So, he he's like, let me know if you need more more credit or whatever. Just, like, go nuts with it. Sanity I I am still impressed by how many people are willing to pay this much money, which I I think I understand. What do you think? $200. Is that too much?

It depends on who's footing the bill.

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

If you're paying like, I guess you have to see, like, the actual quality output of this to see, is it worth it? You know? You have to see some kind of return.

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

Would you pay an extra thousand bucks a month? Probably.

I don't know. It's it's hard to say. Yeah. And that's that's hard that's a hard conversation anyways because sometimes you'd rather employ people for a number of reasons beyond just,

the effects of each other. I'm not talking about replacing them, but I'm like, like, would you give them this $200 a month tool? And, like, I guess, like, corporate probably would. Because the amount that these companies spend just for you to be able to Zoom each other is

is quite a bit. Yeah. No kidding. Yeah. It is. That is always mystifying to me when you get into corporate

accounts on anything, just how expensive it is. Head is the Yeah. Is the real moneymaker on these things. Yes. Let's talk about approaches.

So what I've learned with doing these background agents is you can't simply just YOLO, type in the box, make this thing.

You need a very good planning document for it to follow because it does its best when it's able to have very clear inputs, very clear defined tasks to do, very clear outcomes and and success.

And and, also, I I found that a lot of them will start to log their work as they are doing markdown. So what was happening with the the migration of the RSS feed is that it would it would loop over and it would log. Okay. Out of a 100 and out of the 912 episodes, a 115 didn't work. Let me now evaluate those and see if there's anything that I can oh, I see. These ones had a different URL structure. Let me update the regex so that it would match a little bit better. And it put all of that in a markdown document, then reran it, and then and then put it the updated. Okay. Now out of those, 80 more were successful. Now let's look at the the last 20 that we we need to do. So it's putting it all into a a markdown document.

So what I found is for it to be able to sort of tear off a task and and work on that specific task and then and then work on the next thing, I think you get much better outcomes than rather just saying implement this feature.

And hilariously enough, a really good way to make these documents called PRD I didn't even know what this was.

Product requirement document, which is you can create a really nice structured PRD document by just kinda spitballing all of your ideas of what needs to happen. Throw that into chat GPT or something like that, and then get back a really nice structured document, and then give it a once more, once over, clean it up, make sure it does everything you want. Because the cleaner your input is yeah. Go ahead. No. To be to be clear to the audience, a PRD document, not an AI specific thing.

No. That's that's a software engineering thing Right.

Where you you define what it is you actually want and how things will be approached and what technology you're going to be using. And by putting as much of those things in upfront, you're gonna get better out the other end. Alongside this, I've been seeing a couple people on on Twitter talk about this, which is Taskmaster AI. So this is built I believe this is built on top of cloud code and MCP servers.

And the idea is is that you can give it a PRD document, and then it will generate all of the tasks Mhmm. And be able to figure out which tasks can be done concurrently and which tasks rely on another task to be be done be done first, and then it will just kinda go off and and and do that all for you. So I haven't tried it myself, but it's it's this is a a really good example of Node that we have these lower level primitives like cloud code and MCP servers, we're starting to see some really cool tools that people are now building on top of that.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. I I've I've recently gotten, some interesting tasks done with MCP via, what's it, Godot, the gaming engine with Godot MCP.

And, like, there is something really magical about being able to interface with, a a UI like that via cursor or any of these things because the tasks are no longer then divvied off into, like, what can code write. It's like you can think more broadly about the tasks that you need to do. And and, yeah, it's a it's a whole new world of stuff. That's for sure. Yeah. You know, one thing that I'm surprised about with all this MCP stuff is

where's If This and That in this whole space? You know? If This and That was killing it in the whole connect anything to anything, and then they rode, like, the whole, like like, automation phase. And then all of the, like, smart home stuff, they rode that whole thing.

Where are they with the MCP stuff? The Yeah. They're like it feels like they're prime for being able to make MCP servers for for absolutely anything. You know? Yeah. I do have a tool for you that is if the if this, then that, like, that we can talk about in our AI tools episode that we're gonna be recording. So I'll see if it's At least drop it drop the name of it for anyone who's gonna get mad right now, and then we'll talk about a bit more

How about next Monday? How about they have to leave a no. I'm not gonna do that. You don't you do you hate that on Instagram where people are like, leave a comment of this to Yeah. Find out what I'm talking about, and then everybody's, like, actually does it.

Validating this people.

Often.

I saw one this morning. I got a TikTok of some guy Wes like, power of sale real estate right now is is really hard to find. I was like, it's not hard to find.

It they're literally all on realtor.ca.

They're all on on this, like, system.

You just have to search the word power sale. He's probably has a script where he's he searches for power Vercel, POS, and a couple others, and then he emails the them all the time. He's like, I am I have a whole collection. I'm really good at finding them, and you really need to understand how to navigate these. I was like, and all the people below are, like, typing the word so they get it in their Npm.

Dude, there are some really awful social media, like, trends right now. That being one of them, and another one just people just, like, blatantly saying something that is, like, incredibly and obviously antagonistic and false just so everybody like, rage bait. I mean, rage bait's been around forever, but it feels like it's so much worse now. Yeah. It that drives me nuts. And and even further, when, like, somebody you thought you trusted sends you

that thing, like, you got God. You got God. You got God. You got God. Yeah. For sure. Clearly fake or very clearly bait.

Yeah. Okay. By the the just so I'm not falling into that, the tool is lang lang flow from, DataStax.

This thing's really cool. So we'll talk about this in another episode, but give that a give that a check. I'll have the link in the in the show notes. Cool. I'm not I'm not doing that.

That's for sure. Alright. Cool. Well, this was this has been awesome, Wes. I I haven't spent a ton of time with background agents just yet. I'm I'm still liking the You're a bit more of a foreground guy right now. Been more of a foreground guy. Yep. But I no. I I've I've gotten into cloud code a little bit, but that's that's about it. I'm gonna try some of these background tasks in Cursor, today and, get get busy with some of that stuff.

Do you wanna head into sick picks and shameless plugs, stuff you want a sick pick? I got sick pick for you. One sec. Me too.

As he dips below his desk.

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

Oh, okay.

Alright. So Projector. Little projector.

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

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

money. Yeah. So

I was like, I gotta find, like, another cheapie on, marketplace and whatnot. And I've been looking for a while, and I found this one, which is a Dell m two ten x.

And it's I don't know. It's, like, ten years old or whatever, and I found it. And these were really big in, like, corporate world, so there's lots of them on the market right now. It's bright as hell, 2,000 ANSI lumens, which is bright enough to have, like, in, like, daytime, be able to project. Not outside, but Inside. Yeah. Inside during daytime.

And it's got HDMI inputs. It has audio in and out. And it's just like I got for $50. And $50.

$50. And, like, man, if you want, like, a good I initially bought a, like, $200.01 on Amazon, and I was like I plugged it in. I was like, this thing sucks. And it said it Wes, like like, 8,000 lumens or something like that. And then I've I very quickly realized that projectors on Amazon are mostly a scam unless it's from a reputable company. I guess you can say anything on Amazon JS mostly a scam. So I returned it because I was like, this thing sucks. It's garbage.

And I Wes and found, like, a, like, a proper little corporate one. So if and look how nice and small this is. If you want a nice little projector, go on marketplace and search for, like, Dell projector, and they have mercury bulbs that say last, like, sixteen thousand hours, something like that. It has this one has two hundred hours on it. So I'm, like, 1% of the way through its actual life. And so I'm I'm really excited about this thing to be able to bring it back to the cottage and watch some shows on it. Nice.

Yeah. I do really like my laser projector.

It looks like you can get it on eBay for, like, $300 now because they stopped selling this model specifically.

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

Oh, yeah. But I gotta say, man, it's projector season over here at the Tolinski household, and we're watching what are we watching? Love Island. We're watching, Top Chef. We're watching all of the shows out there, in the back just projecting on the warp. And then it's just like, man, there's something so lovely, especially in in Colorado because there's no mosquitoes.

It's dry climate. You're just sitting out there and being like,

mhmm. You do got you guys have a fire pit back there, don't you? Yeah. We got a fire pit. And, And what do you do for speakers?

I have I bought, like, boat they're not boat speakers, but they're, like, outdoor patio speakers.

And they're there's, just one powered, and I I basically just I'm running an extension cord out there anyways. Like, whenever we set we have our setup, I just plug in the one speaker. And they just stay out there all all year long because they're they're waterproof even though the waterproofing was just like a piece of foam inside the thing. They're like they they're I had I I I ended up, like, sealing them up pretty heavy and stuff like that to get them to actually, be able to withstand the elements. But, yeah, I just leave them out all year. I leave them out there in the snow even. And then, yep. So, it's nice. They're Bluetooth. Connect the projector to the Bluetooth. Put a little Google Home in that projector, and then, or JS it Chromecast? It's an older Chromecast, and bingo, bingo. Ready to go. You got you got speakers behind the the You can connect the patio furniture. Google you can connect the Chromecast to Bluetooth

speakers? Yeah. Oh, maybe you just solved my problem because I'm thinking, like, we have I've got speakers run, but it's not a great run. And the, like, robot vacuum always sucks the cord up, and I'm so sick of it. And I'm thinking, like,

what could I do without having to run cables everywhere? Warp Bluetooth The Bluetooth outdoor speaker is great. Connected. It all works super well.

Big, big fan of that setup. And it it Wes sort of, like, third year running it maybe now, and it's just, like, so so lovely. Node next thing I need to do is three d print, a little, like, riser for the projector so that way it's always perfectly aligned. Because right Node, I have some, like, plastic shims that I'm, like, shimming underneath the projector, and I gotta, like, set it up each time. So I'm gonna build a little box for that thing. Oh, that's a great idea. Maybe, put a cover on it to make it rainproof. Sometimes we're out there in the rain, and we wanna watch it we wanna watch our stuff in the rain. Yeah.

I'm gonna sick pick. I got a a smart ring, which Oh.

You know what? People Yarn always talking about wearing the Apple Watch to sleep and stuff like that. I just cannot do that. That thing is do it every night. And bulky. Yeah. Man, I like I I sometimes, like, lay on my wrist and stuff. I just can't do it. Yeah. Sometimes I wake up with, like, no feeling in my arms. Yeah. But Well, the the big thing about these Scott rings to me has always been the subscription fees and stuff like that. I cannot justify another subscription.

So Courtney did a bunch of research, because she wanted to track her sleep, and she got a RingCon gen two. And I had never heard of RingCon before she did that research on it. She got this one specifically because it does tracking of sleep apnea and stuff.

And I've had it now for I got it right before I left for, Amsterdam, and it's just been lovely. It's been lovely to track sleep. It does a really good job. The battery lasts for, like, eleven days.

Oh, man. And then it it charges and everything like that, and it you know, it's calculating all your stress and all those things. And for me, I've been very stressed out. So, like, being able to look at that and be like, oh, I need to, like, really get it together right now has been very nice.

But Vercel, yeah, I, you know, I I do say for, like like, just general, like, vitals and whatever tracking, I found this thing to be much nicer than having the watch.

Yeah. Honestly, amazing that the tech like, the health tech, is getting so accessible in the last however many years. Like, even my Apple Watch, I like when I was on the last conference, I, like, was, like, super jet lagged, and then we went out drinking.

And and then the next morning, it's like, hey. You're probably getting sick. And, or like like, something's going on with you. You know? Your heart rate was up when you were sleeping and and, like, all of your thing. And it's amazing that it it can predict those things ahead of time, so, hopefully, you can curb it.

Yeah. For sure.

Well, that's sick picks. Shameless plugs. Check us out on YouTube. Syntax on YouTube. Syntax I believe it's syntax at Syntax FM on YouTube. Check us out. At Syntax FM. Alright. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll catch you later. Peace.