00:00.86 James Welcome back everyone to Merge Conflict, your weekly developer podcast. I'm about all things in the world of software development. I'm one of your hosts, James Montemagno, who promises not to freeze this time, Frank. This is round two. But with me, the one, the only ah man wearing triangles for the second time that we were recording this Mr. Frank Kruger. How's it going, buddy? 00:19.89 Frank Hi James, nice to meet you. ah First time listener, I hope I can get some questions in here. I'm curious to see what this podcast is all about. Yes, I'm wearing triangles. I grew up in the 90s. All cool things have triangles and geometric shapes in neon colors. 00:38.71 Frank That's cool. That has always been cool. That will remain cool forever. But I did the subdued look. 00:44.22 James It's very Saved by the Bell max of you. So I like it. um ah Funnily enough, a random thought is I just watched review for the new Geometry Wars game. didn't even know there was a new Geometry Wars, but if you don't know Geometry Wars, as a huge fan. 00:55.80 Frank Tell me more. 00:56.95 James And apparently it's like super epic and it's like super changing. It's like really high energy. I think it's from some of the original creators because I think like Bioware originally made it. I think I'm going to say Bioware. 01:05.88 Frank Was it Bioware? 01:07.22 James thought it was Bioware, right? 01:08.12 Frank I thought it was an indie one. 01:08.50 James Right. 01:09.52 Frank um I'm a big fan of Geometry Wars. Like, it went from, I think they really nailed, like, for anyone who hasn't played it, it's basically an Asteroids clone. But take Asteroids and turn it up to 1100. 01:20.15 James Yeah, 01:22.43 Frank And that's Geometry Wars. And I thought it was like an XNA app at some point. maybe it got bought out. I don't know. you're You're looking up the history now, but the game got good and then it got crazy. 01:36.85 Frank Then the graphics got really good and then it seemed like no one worked on it ever again. It it was a weird development cycle. 01:44.01 James I'm sorry. It's bizarre creations. That's correct. It started with a B, though. 01:47.69 Frank Blizzard, Bizarre, BioWare, who knows? 01:48.81 James Blizzard. Blizzard, Bioware. 01:50.83 Frank Or FESDA. 01:51.13 James and but the the The thing is, it was Microsoft Game Studios, and then it did go to Activision. 01:54.95 Frank Ah. 01:55.85 James So I'm just saying it's all in the wheel wheelhouse. 01:56.53 Frank Ah. 01:59.08 James don't know. 02:00.18 Frank Good shooter. 02:00.56 James That's a junior. 02:00.78 Frank Good 2D shooter, which had, like at some level, simple graphics, but at another level, insane graphics. Because they had the first... like um The bombs were so powerful, they created their own like gravity wells, and they would like draw you in. 02:15.07 Frank It just was just asteroids done really well. 02:19.06 James Yeah, it's I think it's not an official like official in the series, but it's called Sektori, S-E-K-T-O-R-I. And it's basically like, I think maybe it was someone that worked in it or something like that. 02:33.30 James But anyways, it looks like it. 02:33.78 Frank um Okay. 02:35.06 James I was i was watching a video and it was all like Geometry Wars, Sektori. And then like, because it was set was like, oh, don't know if it is Geometry Wars, but it's basically Geometry Wars, which I was a huge fan. Love it. 02:45.58 James Great games. People should make more of them. 02:46.87 Frank okay 02:47.72 James It's so beautiful. Lots of neon. So I knew it was good to go. And there was a lot of angles triangles, triangles, lots triangles and other shapes as well. 02:51.06 Frank Triangles. Exactly. Bringing it all home. Yeah. 02:55.58 James Ah, well, also, you know, it looks like a triangle is our good friends over at Google. They got a bunch of products that they announced this week. They got the Geminis and they got the anti-gravities, like gravities that there's none of them because, ah you know, you're you're levitating. 03:05.25 Frank Ooh. 03:09.34 Frank Oh, it all makes sense now. On the first Gemini spaceships, there was no gravity. But that's not anti-gravity. That's just no gravity. So someone needs to make no gravity. 03:16.74 James It's no gravity. 03:19.58 Frank Well, instead, they've actually doubled the amount of gravity from what I can tell, from what I heard in all the announcements. A, it's gravity 2.0 plus anti-gravity 2.0. 03:30.19 Frank And that 2.0 isn't just a joke. There's actually two of them now. that's That's what the 2.0 It's plus 03:39.45 James three of them. There's even, know, there's all of them. 03:40.60 Frank Oh, geez, there goes the math. 03:44.18 James So what i want to talk about today is the world of 03:49.05 James Windows and session management and agent management and editors and the world that we live in. 03:52.66 Frank Hmm. 03:54.94 James i got to watch this saga. Of course, I have some inherent bias working at Microsoft and working very close to the VS Code team and the GitHub app, all these in the GitHub teams and on the CLIs and all these copilot stuff. but i think it's really fascinating because you know a lot of people work really different. And I've been noticing... 04:14.46 James how like the VS code team works. And I think that, um, and the feedback from folks and I, I sort of like, it's interesting being on the inside. 04:16.94 Frank Hmm. 04:23.82 James We do like a lot of, a lot of like public previews. Okay. Now it's like a public preview, but it's in insiders, but it's not really on. Yes, I got to go turn on. 04:34.69 James Or it's experimental and you want try it but we're not going to talk about it, just thing, want tell some people and then you get some feedback and then like the product changes. And for me as someone in advocacy, I'm just like, just release the product, right? 04:46.63 James You know, it's, it's kind of, ah but but, but, you know, when you, when you see like, you know, 04:47.42 Frank Yeah. 04:51.64 James you know and we do it at microsoft obviously but was like and here's a new thing right uh just out of the blue there's a lot of excitement because like it's here but you know things take time to cook to to be in the air fryer you gotta let them heat up you gotta let them cook right so really fascinating google um made a a a stake in the ground they said gemini's are the models 04:55.04 Frank Yeah. 05:01.60 Frank Yeah. 05:14.17 James And of course, like I guess like the the the integrations into like Google and Gmail and all the other things. But they're like, coding? 05:21.51 Frank Oh, gosh, you're right. 05:22.75 James No, it's not Gemini. Gemini is the model for coding. Antigravity is the thing. we got the Antigravity 2.0. We've got the Antigravity IDE. 05:28.56 Frank Ah. 05:29.89 James We've got the Antigravity CLI. We've got the Antigravity SDK. right Just like we got the Claude CLI, we got the Claude Desktop, we got the we got the the Agent SDK, we got thelaw the the Codex, we got the Codex CLI, we got the Codex integration, we got the VS Code, we got the VS Code Windows, we got the CLI, we got we all the things, right? 05:37.40 Frank Copilot. OK, yeah. 05:48.20 Frank Actually. 05:53.48 James So everyone's got the thing. Yeah. 05:55.67 Frank I know you're on Microsofty, but does Cloud Code actually have an API and SDK? Because it's I wasn't even sure. They do. You think so? 06:06.10 James They have an agent SDK and the agent SDK, you use your developer API key and then you're billed by usage. 06:08.44 Frank Okay. 06:12.47 Frank Yeah. 06:15.08 Frank OK, gotcha, gotcha. You know, I've actually been i've been using these um agent SDKs more and more. 06:16.34 James From my understanding. Hmm. 06:21.62 Frank ah Back in the day, i was always happy to just call the model directly. But now, I mean, the standards have been raised. That's what we say every week. The standards have been raised. I'm accustomed to having access to tools. Like if I tell it to go read a file and write a file, I expect it to be able to do that. I expect it to be able to access MCP servers and all of that. And it's to the point where you kind of have to use one of these SDKs now because ah that expectation expectation is just there, that the model isn't just a model, it's an agent now, and it can it can access all these things. um So I was writing even very simple things that in the past would just use 07:03.66 Frank uh model calls and tell it you know like go add two plus two for me but now i do that through the agent and sdks i tend to use the copilot sdk but i do it through the agent sdks because inevitably i'm going to ask it to read a file and write a file it just happens 07:18.23 James Yeah, I know I'm a huge fan of the, the SDK. In fact, i mean, you're going to see tons of it, you know, you're already seeing a lot of it, like at, at, um, you'll see it a lot of build, but you've also see it like they announced like the, and the, the private preview of the GitHub co-pilot app, the desktop app, which leverages the co-pilot SDK. The agent's window leverages the Copilot SDK. The CLI, like when you go into VS Code and you select the CLI as the selection, that's just using the SDK, right? 07:46.84 James Like everything's just using the SDK under the sun. There's tons of internal tools that I'm using and that are just using the SDK. I have the, for for this podcast, I have a podcast metadata generator that takes our transcript, use the SDK and does a thing. 08:00.30 Frank fun 08:00.50 James And it you know reads files, it does a bunch of stuff, it writes files, it does all the things for you. Now, that being said, because I'm coding, I can also just write files too. like i don I don't need it to do it. 08:11.73 James But if I needed it to, it could do it, right? 08:13.83 Frank mm-hmm 08:14.33 James It has the tool selection, it can do a bunch of stuff. 08:15.90 Frank Yeah. 08:16.57 James My favorite is John Galloway at work. We send all these newsletters out like internally and to the MVPs. And he just has, I think on his GitHub, he has like newslet newsletter generator. And it will go like scour like releases. It'll scour release notes. It'll look at GitHub repos. It'll look at like work you know work IQ, which is internal. like Our recordings, we do these office hours internally and like shove it all together and like generates a a beautiful markdown file for him and he writes it and then he'll he'll like have playwright then like in from that, like go and like update the newsletter and like send it out basically like all autonomous all through the SDK, which is so cool. 08:44.66 Frank Nice. 08:51.20 Frank Yeah. 08:54.77 James It's super underrated. but every time I do a presentation on it I think people's minds are relatively blown. I've seen people do crazy stuff. Like but you basically just can build your own. You can build your own VS code if you wanted to, you can build your own anti-gravity. 09:07.60 James Like it's just there. 09:08.12 Frank yeah 09:08.28 James It's all, you know, just vibe coded, uh, UI for it basically. 09:12.76 Frank Yeah, I did it like a day. i i even used your precious work trees. Like here's a repo for every request I make, create a work tree, create a session, use the SDK to talk to the thing or go off. 09:24.70 Frank And like, took me a day to code that. I think the joke now is like, We're going need new abstraction levels because at first we had the model. Then we had the agent, which the agent got a little vague, so we called it the harness. 09:37.53 Frank Then the harness got a little vague, so we just call it the SDK now And now like everyone's creating code coding things on top of all of those and creating their own harnesses. 09:48.79 Frank Well, it it makes sense that Google is confused because we're all confused. We're playing out where where these layers are and who's going to be responsible for what and all that. 09:59.58 James Yeah, they did something really fascinating and they got a bunch bunch of backlash for it because you know they just did something. Here it is, right? and And whenever you do here it is and you move the cheese, you're wow, what happened? So they did a few things that I i think are... 10:14.97 James of interest to talk about because, um, inside of VS code, we'll talk about some of the new stuff that just landed as well. There are kind of compliments in this world because people are working with code and they're working with agents really differently and everyone's trying to figure it out. So everything's changing, which again, the the cheese is moving all the time, right? So they, the Gemini's are the models. 10:35.48 James Um, anti-gravity is the coding thing. So they changed the the Gemini CLI to the anti-gravity CLI. So it's just like and Gemini CLI gone, done, move it over. 10:44.47 Frank Okay. 10:48.41 James um Then like you said, they announced anti-gravity 2.0. But if you remember, anti-gravity was a fork of VS code, right? And then adding on a bunch of ah customizations and Gemini and a bunch of like UI interactions, a bunch of like how they work, kind of like Kiro, kind of like Curzor was, you know, anything like that, or the original forks. 11:11.45 James And then this new anti-gravity though is not that anti-gravity. It's a different anti-gravity. Imagine you wake up one day and you open up your IDE and the IDE is gone and it's only agent session management, right? 11:26.60 James That's what they did. instead of, 11:28.06 Frank Hate it. Yeah. 11:29.21 James instead of Instead of ah giving you a way of getting to your code, they say, go install this other application, which is the anti-gravity IDE, but they don't integrate it. 11:41.13 James Now they have Suns fix this. They went under a week, under five days, under three days, under three days, they're really active on Twitter. They're addressing feedback. They now have an open and IDE button back and forth, blah, blah, blah, blah blah for it. 11:52.71 James so you can see those worlds combined, which is of interest. But I guess reading that news, someone that's been an IDE user and a code editor user for a while, like that's a pretty fundamental, crazy shift. 12:09.62 James And I remember when Cursor did this, they actually had a toggle. 12:10.52 Frank Yeah. Oh, 12:11.66 James It was like a toggle that would just change everything back and forth to like agent first or code first. 12:15.27 Frank really? Yeah. didn't know that. 12:16.99 James as a code agent basically in it. 12:19.10 Frank Yeah. 12:19.47 James So it's just really fascinating. 12:20.98 Frank It's weird, yeah honestly, because what they're doing is they're treating the IDE as a code editor now. So it's funny, like we had IDEs, think Visual Studio, then comes along VS Code and they're like, we're not an IDE, dude. We're just a code editor. You know, we're we're not living that IDE life. And then VS Code got so powerful. We're like, you're an IDE, whether you want it or not. You're an IDE. 12:43.45 Frank And now with the advent of agents and AI coding, we're like, oh, you don't you don't need that anymore. You can just look at your sessions and you just trust it. Look at it from a functionality standpoint. You don't have to look at the code, except, you know, unless you want to do maintenance for the rest of your life, you totally got to look at the code and you got to see what mess. that AI agent is making. So they're like, now they're treating IDEs, scare quotes around IDE as code editors, even though they're IDEs. And can I remind all these people, please, that IDE means integrated development environment? Yeah. The fact that you're shelling out to an IDE means it's yeah you're you're you're missing the I in the IDE. It's integrated. The debugger is integrated with the code editor, and the AI agent should be integrated with those two things. It's called integration. 13:34.33 James Yeah. 13:34.49 Frank um So I'm not a huge fan of this um ignore the code world. i get i get the um idea. i get the goal. 13:45.27 Frank But it's really putting the cart before the horse because... I mean, anyone who's done any serious coding with an agent knows it's going to create a spaghetti mess in five days of work. 13:59.63 Frank If you're not back there pushing back a little bit on the code, it generates a little bit. 14:03.13 James yeah 14:05.18 Frank It it doesn't need a lot of back pressure, but it needs some back pressure. 14:09.55 James Yeah. 14:09.74 Frank They're just not that good yet. Maybe. Five years. But um I don't know. um i That's why I still personally live in the VS Code world. Because I like to have the code in front of me. And it's cool. I hit keep more times than not. Sometimes, like, my code review is, ah you only edited 20 lines. Keep. Fine. I don't care. You know, like, but I'm personally not ready to give up the code. 14:36.25 Frank Not yet. 14:37.39 James I'm attempting harder to, but you know, and and you know, ah people have followed my journey and I jest all the time that like, who cares about the code, blah, blah, blah. 14:40.28 Frank Mm-hmm. 14:47.82 James But you know, that's just me being silly because I do care about the code. 14:48.12 Frank Mm-hmm. 14:51.12 James I review the code. I understand the code, uh, especially in existing projects that I have spun up, um, that for like, so like my cadence, my stream timer, like these other applications, my websites that I have, I'm, I'm, especially when I'm adding new features, I'm reviewing the code. 15:05.58 James I just added a feature to my cadence for ah voice talk back basically like five minutes in, tell me how fast I've been going and the time and all this stuff. And and like I'm reviewing the code and understand the code, but I'm spinning up features very fast. So i'm reviewing the code very tight. 15:20.38 James But the thing that I think I've struggled with, which is why I find you know this type of experience, I think that I think like Claude code CLI now allows you to like manage multiple sessions inside the CLI. The codex app lets you do this, the GitHub co-pilot app, which again, it's private preview. But have you seen videos and screenshots of it? It allows you to manage all your sessions. 15:39.99 James But I think what that app does different, which I appreciate is it's kind of solving a problem. and and a bunch of videos are on the internet, so I'm not like spoiling anything, but my normal flow has been this Frank. 15:51.49 James is I go into VS code usually or the CLI and i tell the agent to do something um and write some code. But normally I might be working on multiple projects at the same time, you know like like a madman, I'm just working on multiple things um and not always, but sometimes. 16:01.19 Frank Yeah. 16:06.58 Frank yeah 16:09.56 James And I'll have multiple VS codes open or i'll have multiple CLI instances open or I'll have a CLI working on something, the VS code working on something. And then I'm like, okay, now, you know, that looks good. Let's create a, you know, we're in a branch. Let's, let's push it. Let's create the PR and then I'll do a code review and then I'll do the code review and then I'll pull it back down. And then like, I'll review those notes and then I'll have it review the notes and I'll integrate it and then I'll push and I'll do a thing. 16:34.49 James So what's fascinating. And again, I haven't used the new anti-gravity stuff for some of other stuff we're talking about, but like, um want to talk more about how we talk and work with these agents is The GitHub Copilot app has like sort of this auto merge type of feature that when agent merge that gets you kind of to that point with working with the agent, reviewing the code, you can say, do what I just do with one button click. 16:57.66 James It'll do all that for you. 16:59.12 Frank Yeah. 16:59.74 James And that's pretty cool. And you're working with the differences that you're working across all of your repos and all of your projects. And when you're with the GitHub Copilot app or you're in a Codex app or you're in something that there is no code editor, you shell out to the code editor, right? So like inside the VS or the GitHub Copilot app, or let's say T3 chat or like inside of like our T3 code and like some of the other, you know, session agent session management will be like open in VS code, open in cursor, open in whatever, right? So you can then get to the code. 17:28.22 James So it's like a code second, right? Where VS Code is inherently code first, agent integrated there, zoom out to it. 17:30.23 Frank Mm-hmm. 17:35.74 James Um, so I find that really fascinating, but I just did a stream with the VS code team all about the agents window. Right? So there's a, on the top right in VS code, there's this open in agents. 17:47.00 James And this for all intents and purposes is very similar to what the new anti-gravity app is or the codex app or the cursor agent app, or these other things, which is you're working with a bunch of agents. 17:58.41 James Let me go work with all of my agents, no matter where they're running or what they're doing, et cetera, et cetera. 18:02.21 Frank Mm-hmm. 18:04.89 James So when you're working with this, it's working working in the CLI or in the cloud, or it's working you know you know with different agents basically on your machine or somewhere else in the cloud. And you can see all of your different repos on the left-hand side. You can click around. And those are the same sessions that we're running in VS Code. so you can click on them. You can review them. You have a terminal. All of your run commands work. So you can see it. You can see the integrated terminals, you know the integrated browser, all of your skills, instructions, all that stuff pops up, right? 18:34.36 James So that's really nice from a zoom out. And while like this is on an ultra wide, I can put my agents window on the left and then I can my VS code on the right. And then I can work on my code. 18:43.37 Frank Yeah. 18:44.16 James But if I have an idea, I don't need to like boot up a bunch of VS codes, open the workspace, do a thing. I just, said I can agent session manage it. Right. And then the other thing it lets me do is very similarly is it helps me streamline that process of, okay, I have the code. 18:52.98 Frank Mm-hmm. 19:00.38 James Let me go ahead and create the pull request. You can do a code review and it does one locally. You can provide feedback. The cool part about this flow is that you can like give feedback on the code in real time. And again, maybe the other code editors do this. 19:15.38 James But one thing I really like about it, that VS code doesn't do, maybe it's just, maybe they just add it or maybe it's in there somewhere, but let's say there is code changes, right? 19:23.16 Frank here 19:23.45 James And you see the the files that have changed right now, what do you do? Would you say, oh, actually, i don't want you to add two plus two. I want you to add four plus four but in this file, right? And you'll go tell it to do it and go figure it out what you meant, do this. 19:33.72 Frank a 19:36.63 James But what you can do is you can like look at the code and you can just add a comment to the code. So you can make comments on the code and you can say, apply comments, and it'll go execute your feedback as if you're code reviewing in real time. 19:47.22 James And I was like, oh, that's really clever. 19:47.92 Frank That's nice. 19:48.98 James That's really clever. 19:49.27 Frank Yeah. 19:49.90 James So the ways of which I'm working is like, I don't think there's one right way or wrong way. I find myself being in VS Code more personally and using sessions on occasion when I'm working across multiple code bases. 20:02.71 James But I haven't given in yet to... to that because like you're saying, it's like in VS code, the agent is there, right? It's only when I really want to work on multiple projects and I still have session management for that project. 20:12.43 Frank Yeah. 20:14.91 James It's when I'm working on multiple projects all at once. And that's where I think these session management tools get really fascinating. And, but not not everyone's living that right and every single day. 20:26.01 Frank Well, and you can get a little bit scatterbrained too. Like in honesty, I'll work iCircuit and Kelka at the same time because I can handle those two. I know the code base is so well. But like once you start doing like three different projects or four different projects, five different, I don't know how you could possibly focus on anything. Like your attention is just not there. 20:47.96 Frank um But, so that's my little caveat. I am actually trying to move more toward this session-oriented style, but I have a slightly different reason why. 20:55.86 James m 20:57.95 Frank it's It's not necessarily the multitasking, but that obviously helps. It's more the balance between what's happening on my dev machine versus what's happening in the cloud, the code. 21:08.53 James Ah, yes. 21:09.24 Frank um Because, yeah, there's there's only so much I can multitask with on my dev machine. But if i my favorite flow is, you know, assign an issue to a thing and it's cranking on it and I'm doing code reviews with it, or i just an idea pops into my head, I can start up another session. But I don't really want to devote my dev machine to it. I don't want to corrupt my crazy Git on my own machine because it's already a delicate balance of insanity. I can just say, you know, start with a fresh copy and start working on this one idea in the cloud. So I like these session-based UIs because I think... 21:48.17 Frank I'm personally trying to embrace cloud based AI agent stuff more. um it for For the James thing of working on projects from the airport, that's a big reason for you know doing trips and not having to make sure my dev machine is all set up the way my dev machine needs to be. 21:59.47 James Mm-hmm. 22:05.20 Frank i can just pick up any cold computer or a friend's computer or my iPhone and be like, oh, here's all my agents, go do a code review, comment on this thing. 22:15.22 Frank Yes. um So I, and that's the UI I have, I actually prefer, but I've been doing it through like the github.com interface and actual pull requests. So any UI that streamlines that process, I'm actually really here for. I will critique your ah two windows setup though. um Sessions on the left, ah code on the right, your kind of code diff that all these tools give you. They don't give you a code editor, but they give you the code diff, thank goodness. 22:43.12 James Yeah. 22:43.16 Frank I do wish um they integrated the previews a bit more. 22:43.22 James Yeah. 22:47.12 Frank Like it wasn't just a few months ago we started getting the integrated browsers. And I think that was a real nice feature of the original anti-gravity IDE was that like it would show you your running website as it's editing it. 22:59.44 Frank And all the good online tools have done this too. Like all the no-code tools have been doing this for a while now. Show me the stupid app, you know, like If you're working on, if I'm working on an iOS app, run the simulator and put it in there. 23:08.18 James yeah 23:13.28 Frank This isn't rocket science. we We know how to launch the simulator. We know how to do screen captures of windows on Mac. Like just put it there and let me see you working on it. 23:22.18 James Yeah. 23:24.60 Frank Because i i guess if you're just working on like boring backend stuff and API junk, it it doesn't matter. But most of us are writing like real apps that have real user interfaces. 23:35.78 Frank And in the end, like, I care what the code quality is, but more importantly, I care what the user interface is and what am I presenting to the user and how are they giving input and all that. i think that's the difference between someone who cares more about the code and someone who's like us and is an app developer. 23:52.26 Frank I'm not writing this stuff for myself. I'm writing it for other people that need to use my code, my my someone's code, my app. And so like the app is what's important. 24:01.23 James It's true. Yeah. 24:03.55 Frank Yeah. And the code is secondarily important and the sessions are tertiary to all that. So don't know. I just, I want to see more emphasis on the app actually running. 24:14.94 James Yeah, I do think that's the next, I was talking to the VS code team and, and, uh, we were going through this agent's flow. And, um, one thing that I think is, is nifty about it is that a lot of that integration that is there from VS code is there. So the browser there and all your tools are there and all the MCPs are there. And it can be, it can show up in line in it. 24:37.69 James um But I agree with you. I think that the web is there, which is great. But then what about some of the other things? 24:41.22 Frank Yeah. 24:42.73 James You know, Maui DevFlow is something I need to, yeah, I need to play around with. 24:43.48 Frank Play-wide? Priority? Priority. Yeah. 24:47.34 James um I was just using Xcode and the GitHub Copilot stuff inside of there. And now Xcode has an MCP server in it. 24:52.51 Frank Mm-hmm. 24:54.06 James So like it can connect automatically to and get official tools and all this other stuff, which is really nice. But yeah, I'm like thinking about, that how does that work with agents, right? 25:04.49 James Because you're saying it's it's right, it's like I can see the code, I can maybe run the thing, I have a terminal, but how do I, you know at that point then maybe I just jump back into VS Code, right? 25:09.42 Frank Mm-hmm. 25:14.62 Frank Exactly. 25:14.68 James Now the one night the one nice thing I will say about the agent sessions window 25:15.21 Frank Mm-hmm. 25:19.61 James um And again, maybe this high integrity works as well. But when you're working with workspaces or work trees, sorry, work trees, um this thing is a game changer and because when you're working with get with work trees, the problem with VS code is that it's a workspace, right? So you, you have to open the work tree. So you'd have a bunch of instances with it and it's kind of hard to manage. It's a little unruly. 25:44.73 James So the one nice thing that I like is that if you are in VS code and you open the agents window and you spin off and you open a work tree. There is an, ah open an editor button. 25:56.61 James And when you open an editor that will open that work tree automatically for you for that session. 26:01.59 Frank Yeah. 26:01.68 James And like, it'll have it super localized. So that makes it really nice because often i am losing my mind, which is okay. Where are my work trees? Where are the, and the, and the sessions are localized for that work tree, not necessarily for the project. 26:16.53 Frank Yeah. 26:16.63 James sometimes so it's it's it's like a little bit chaotic so this makes it really nice or really like focus down into it and then see all your sessions together in one place um but i agree i think that that is that is definitely um next next generation needs to focus more on the the ui bits and pieces that's for sure 26:29.11 Frank Yeah. 26:39.10 Frank Yeah. And that WorkTree abstraction, it's I don't like it because it's a little bit messy on my dev machine. But I do like the isolation it provides, you know, we work on one branch, you know, per request. 26:47.48 James Yeah. Yeah. 26:53.52 Frank That's totally cool by me. Then you can actually work on multiple things at once. um Where I get a little bit annoyed with these session based apps is they take that idea and go a little bit too far. um Some of them start like sandboxing your app and running it in like ah a constrained container. It may not be like a Docker container, but Like in a constrained environment where it's not using any of your dev tools on your machine. And it has to be Linux compatible. This is my constant gripe I have with all these tools is they're so Linux obsessed. You know, it works great on the web, but um it's it's pretty useless for doing Mac development ah whenever they do this sandboxing stuff. So... 27:34.04 Frank it this whole sessions based thing, it's just a UI switch. It's just, here's how we're going to present the information with a different user interface. It's all the same information. 27:44.28 Frank that The difference is like, is it running in the cloud? 27:44.62 James Yeah. 27:47.46 Frank Is it running on my dev machine? Is it running in my Git checkout? Or is it running on some work tree thing that you created? And now the new um aspect to all that is, is it running in some silly sandbox? 27:59.21 Frank Because y'all took it too far. You're you're not you're you're you're losing the goal here. hmm. 28:07.51 James Well, I think that the new cool thing in my opinion as well that I've seen in the agents window specifically, that is a little bit different is they have the ability now to do sub sessions. 28:11.80 Frank Mm 28:20.28 James So when you're working on a session, you know, you're working on something often you need to either spin up a brand new session that doesn't have the context of that session, right If you want to work on two things at once. 28:29.77 Frank hmm. 28:32.12 James Um, Um, but now you can have a session and you can say, create a sub session, which will basically snapshot where you're at and then you'll have tabs up top. 28:43.82 James So here's a session and there's a bunch of agents running all in this work tree or all here, but it'll have the context of what's going on and there's one main orchestrator. 28:46.42 Frank Interesting. 28:51.98 James So whenever you're, you know, the, the sub agent, the sub. The sub session finishes, all the changes are back in the the main session. So it's, that's really, really cool. So for example, I, a great, a great example of this was I was ah using my tool tiny tool town sample basically, which is the tiny tool town.com from Scott Hanselman. And now with this demo flow, which is, Oh, go add a count up timer or count up display to show how many tools are there. 29:19.42 James So I add it. And then on the main session, I'm like, hey, can you go, like when the user scrolls down and it counts up, can you add a little bit of confetti? So it's like, wee, fun. And then I was like, oh, you know what? We should also add this control on another page, on the browse page. 29:35.35 James So instead of just waiting for that to get done, i just clicked subsession, which is inside the work tree. And then I said, hey, you know, with the context of everything that's there with all the changes, can you go add it to the search page? 29:49.20 James And then it did it. And then it was done. 29:50.71 Frank interesting 29:50.76 James It's like, cool, I'm done. And then, it you know, just all put it back together. So it's similar to just spinning up another session, but it's it's like, hey, I'm working on these features and I'm having different agents all run together on it And they're kind of being orchestrated together. It seems like it at least. 30:05.83 James It's kind of cool. 30:06.28 Frank branches of branches, work trees of branches of work trees. 30:11.41 James sessions and forks and all sorts of things. 30:12.12 Frank It can get a little bit confused. And then there's 12 sub agents running and then, oh, I moved it off to the cloud and now I brought it back to my dev machine. 30:14.37 James Yeah. 30:19.64 Frank Yeah, it it gets a little bit confusing to be honest. 30:20.18 James This is true. 30:23.04 Frank um But I totally get um wanting to capture the context. That makes a lot of sense. 30:27.88 James Yeah. 30:28.96 Frank I wish a lot of these interfaces treated the context a little more um a little more um delicately, like it's it's good information here. It's important information. i would Like there's always you know start a new conversation from this point in the context. 30:47.29 Frank And I think that that's a powerful feature that I know my I myself do not use enough. um where like you've had to go do a whole bunch of research. It knows a lot of things. The context window is at 120,000 tokens. It's read every single file in the repo. It'd be good to kind of like freeze that context and be like, okay, there's here's now six things I want you to do with all that kind of stuff. 31:09.98 James Yeah, I do think that's a good point. Uh, they do have like a fork. You can like, once anything is done, you can fork a conversation. So if you did a bunch of research, you can like create a bunch of forks of it. 31:21.28 James So you go do a bunch of things off of it, which is kind of fascinating too. 31:24.51 Frank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 31:24.96 James I'd say the last thing that i I, want to talk about is like, these are all really fascinating things. And I think all of these agent sessions and coders and integrations are going to continue to evolve as like the agents evolve and like the SDKs evolve and how we work with them are different. But i think the final final thing that I think is really fascinating that we showed off in that live stream that kind of applies to you because you're about to do a road trip is, 31:49.21 James um you know, inside of the CLI, the GitHub Copilot CLI, there's a slash remote command and the slash remote command allows you to create a remote session that you can access from like the GitHub mobile app or from github.com. So why is that important? Well, because if you're using the cloud agent, you are confined to a cloud environment, as you said, Frank, right? Like a little Linux box that's running, that's up there. 32:16.18 James The difference is if you wanted to work on iCircuit, you can say slash remote and then it legitimately is like running your CLI. If you have access to your CLI anywhere in the world, on your machine, with your tools, have it do whatever you want, right? 32:30.69 Frank Good call. 32:30.90 James So, um yes. 32:31.05 Frank Thanks. i I needed to know that. That's a pro tip. 32:35.64 James Now, did you know, Frank, that there is a feature in VS Code? so So there's two things here. One, did you know that there's a feature in VS Code? itself called tunnels. 32:49.94 Frank I feel like we've talked about it on the podcast before. So my answer is going to yes, of course I know, James. But could you refresh my memory about what Tunnels is, please? 32:57.88 James Okay. On the bottom left, there's this little greater than, less than little connector. and That's usually where you connect to a dev container or to a code space. 33:04.86 Frank ah 33:08.06 Frank Right. 33:09.14 James Or to SSH, you can SSH there, but there is this thing called tunnel. And tunnel allows you to create a tunnel to your machine, a dev tunnel that you can then open anywhere in the world at VS code.dev. 33:25.82 James And at VS code.dev, you can then connect to the dev tunnel and get all of your VS code available to you from the browser, which 33:26.21 Frank Right. 33:34.94 Frank Okay. 33:36.25 James is crazy and I had no idea even existed. 33:38.15 Frank Yeah. 33:39.92 James It's just like there. And I don't even know how long it's been there for, but I will say that I'm gonna look here on VS Code and I'm gonna open up this video from Reynolds from one year ago, okay? 33:47.55 Frank Yeah. 33:56.54 Frank yeah 33:57.21 James Which is crazy, it's called Access Your Computer Anywhere with VS Code, no VM needed. Now, here is the crazy part about all of this. is that you now can actually open the agents window and connect and create a tunnel from there. 34:14.55 Frank Ha. 34:14.58 James So you can you can do in the CLI or just at your terminal, you can say code tunnel, it'll create a tunnel. And then if you go to VS code.dev slash agents, you get the agent window And you can connect to your tunnel. 34:29.78 James So instead of just like working with one CLI, you can work with all every single agent, every single thing on your machine, every single, anything that you want, basically. Anything that you could do on your machine, you are on your machine, but you can do it there. And then the team though, here's the crazy part, Frank. 34:46.55 James The team created a mobile optimized platform. like responsive website. So if you go to vsco.dev slash agents on your phone, it is a mobile friendly version of the agents window, giving you access to everything. 34:55.75 Frank Uh-huh. 35:03.13 James And this is like in the release notes. It's in stable. It's there. And like, nobody knows I'm, we're doing a video on it like next week, but I'm going sign a highlight. It's in, it's, you can watch it. 35:10.23 Frank Can... 35:11.51 James You can watch the last live stream of let it cook from last week or whatever, but yeah, it's wild. 35:16.21 Frank I need to tell you, I feel really embarrassed now because I knew the term was familiar. James, can I tell you, i am an active user of tunnels. I just totally forgot that that's what the feature name is. um i think we might have talked about on the podcast before where I have my robotic lawnmower. 35:32.09 Frank And coding on it is a real pain in the butt. 35:32.86 James Yes. 35:35.97 Frank um So I learned it's a little Raspberry Pi, by the way. I learned i that I could install ah VS Code Tunnel on the little Raspberry Pi. And now from any browser, i can basically log into the machine. 35:49.91 Frank I'm putting scare quotes up if you're listening on the podcast. You're not logging into the machine. Whatever. It's doing SSH magic. And um it's great because like literally in Vision Pro in VR, I can bring up a browser window, look at my robot and be coding the robot while looking at the actual physical robot with like no screens or anything like that. 35:55.73 James Pretty much. 36:11.31 Frank I found it is the premier way to do development on remote machines. Now, I actually do SSH remote ah VS Code stuff too, but this tunnel thing is really hard to beat um because it it forwards so much stuff. 36:27.23 Frank In the end, it feels about the same, but the the beauty is... on the machine that you're using, you don't have to have VS Code installed. You just have to go to the website. It spins up a web version of VS Code, which is basically VS Code. 36:40.40 Frank And then it connects to that machine and in a lot of the same feeling way as the SSH stuff. So I am an active user of tunnels. Now, what I didn't know was, and it never occurred to me because I'm an idiot, ah all this agent stuff could work through that too. 36:57.54 Frank It just didn't occur to me. 36:57.78 James yeah totally. 36:59.78 Frank I'm like, of course they made that work because it's Microsoft. They're thorough. So um that's super cool. 37:04.47 James Yeah. 37:06.59 Frank I will have to A, get a tunnel going on my machine. No one hacked me. ah B, start practicing with it more um to get a good feel for it. 37:17.72 Frank um It's tricky because, you know, I don't mind installing VS Code. It's easy to install. But it's just having that. 37:22.98 James Yeah. 37:25.10 Frank It's the permissions and the port forwarding and all that nonsense. Like connecting to SSH to my own machine is a pain in the butt. But somehow through the magic of um very smart engineers, they just made this tunnel thing work, which is really cool. 37:41.57 James Yeah, which is is crazy. Yeah, it's just bananas. So anyways, um what this comes down to is Google did a bunch of crazy stuff, which is really fascinating and like really interesting, like watch and learn on the internet. 37:56.31 James And at the same time, a bunch of crazy stuff has been happening all around us all at once. It's just been features rolling into products. Right. 38:02.97 Frank Yeah. Mm-hmm. 38:03.22 James And as we learn more and as we interact, we're changing how we work with code. We're changing how we work with agents and even like where and how we do this stuff. is really bananas. Cause always joke, like I would write tons of code just on my phone, right? I just go to the GitHub app, spin up all these agents, do a bunch of stuff. 38:20.15 James But now I have access to my real machines. I have access to my real SDKs. I have access to all this stuff if I want to from anywhere in the world to work on any of my projects at any time and manage all of them really seamlessly, but still get access to the code, still do all the things. 38:37.61 James and I have access to all that because of all of these tools like integrating together. There's the integrated part of it, the integrated and environments in a way. 38:43.51 Frank Yeah. Oh, are they? 38:47.26 James Well, it's a lightweight code editor. It's a lightweight code editor, Frank. 38:50.81 Frank Is it? 38:51.32 James oh 38:52.25 Frank It's not so lightweight anymore. 38:52.50 James Lightweight. 38:53.69 Frank I hear it can do internet tunneling. um 38:56.82 James That's crazy. 38:57.02 Frank Yeah, I don't want to be, um I feel a little awkward. I feel a little bit like Steve Jobs, where I'm like, is this session-based UI, is that a feature or an app? 39:07.93 Frank And we're we're living in the months right now where people have decided it's an app and we got to rewrite all our apps because the UI has switched. 39:14.11 James Mm-hmm. 39:15.73 Frank to me it's just another UI. Like, okay, it's just put that UI into your app. That's why i kind of prefer, i wish it was just a window in VS Code. 39:26.99 Frank I get it. Like VS Code is so um workspace oriented, you know, that they probably felt constrained by the VS Code design. And that's why they decided they had to have a separate app. 39:39.54 Frank But, I feel a lot like Steve Jobs. It's it's a feature, not an app. You know, his old critique of Dropbox. um But he was proven wrong. I could be proven wrong. And obviously Google thinks that um they're different enough and that's why they're they're messing around. But they got pushback. 40:00.63 Frank I'll just say what I say every week. It's the wild west out there. We just got to keep up, keep keep seeing these crazy apps these big companies are releasing and see which ones fit what we enjoy and and our own workflows. 40:11.12 James Yeah. 40:13.46 Frank yeah 40:14.26 James I think use what makes you happy when I just did the VS code or the GitHub copilot dev days. It was basically that I was just like, you know, we have this, we have that, we have these things. And I was showing them how they all work together. Right. Like you said, going from the cloud, pulling it down, pulling, it's like you know, relatively seamless going from my phone, remoting a session. was like, you know, use the tools and do the things that make you happy, that makes sense in your workflow. And at the end of the day, that's actually the thing that actually matters the most. Um, but they're all available there for you. Right. I think that's the kind of, 40:47.10 James fascinating part is like they're there and use the things. But I know one thing is a lot of people don't know that all this stuff is, is available. 40:56.16 Frank Yeah. 40:56.37 James Like I'm just still learning about stuff of features that have been the product for a year a plus or whatever, you know what i mean? So there's that aspect of it. So i think the more we talk about it, the more we use them and integrate into our flow, the more interesting they get. 41:07.54 James So, um, well, Frank, I think that's going to do it. 41:09.10 Frank Yeah. 41:11.47 James I am apologizing to our YouTube Literally because apparently I've been frozen. i didn't even see the Zencaster recording. I guess I should have plugged my cam link directly into my Mac and not in the hub, but that is a bummer. 41:24.78 Frank Ah. 41:25.24 James um But I've been frozen. So I'm going to, I guess 41:29.75 Frank But you did promise not to freeze. it's it's I feel like you're just breaking promises, James. 41:34.52 James ah did I did, guess I'm going to edit this video. It's stinks that this is Sunday night, but I guess I'm going to edit this video and just put my face, you have picture of my face. 41:48.82 James So sorry for people that apparently I froze like five minutes into this recording. So there's that. 41:53.77 Frank We could just do B-roll of puppy dogs playing in a field, and that can be your avatar for this episode. 41:59.64 James Perfect. There you go. I will do my best. That's all. It'll probably the best episodes. I'm sure like the YouTube algorithm will optimize that. So, um, all right. Well, Frank, thanks so much for letting us talk about, don't know. 42:12.65 James talked about stuff. don't know. We've talked about things. 42:15.26 Frank Session-based UIs. 42:16.89 James Session, session based UIs, session based UI controversy, 2026. 42:16.91 Frank That's it. 42:20.09 Frank census 42:21.55 James That's true. 42:22.46 Frank I'll let you know what we were talking about, James. I know you've been frozen over there. um I'll catch you up with what's been going on here. 42:26.38 James ahs true Well, on that note, I guess that's going to do it for this week's Merge Conflict. So until next week, this is one of your agent sessions spinning off into the ether. 42:38.31 James I'm James Montemagno. 42:41.59 Frank And I'm Frank Kruger, your other session spinning off into the universe, hopefully to finish at some point before your credits are run out. thanks for watching and listening 42:51.58 James Peace.