November 8, 2025
Codex CLI + iPhone + ssh + tmux.
The progress this year in both LLM code generation and coding agent harnesses is truly amazing. I can now get actual work done like this. Limited slices of actual work, but obviously this will increase.
There's also now lots of crossover between the way we're thinking about building the next generation of realtime voice and video AI agents, and the way my friends building tools for coding are thinking about what they're doing.
Conversations with people like @vaibcode and @dexhorthy have been super helpful (and super fun). @swyx pointed me to the "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of an LLM Agent Loop with Tool Use" post when I posted about 2026 being the year of the for loop. @alioto and I have been talking about how everything old is new again.
My first year in grad school I did a lot of stuff with visual programming languages. I wrote the spec for what became the LEGO Mindstorms software environment. I built several prototpyes of visual programming environments. (In Smalltalk!)
I've been thinking again about that work, lately. Dex Horthy has talked a little bit about how, as composable and flexible as CLI environments are, the right interface for pair programming with LLMs is probably visual, zoomable, graphical.
Is anybody working on a next-generation programming UI designed to run on an iPad?
If you're interested in this stuff, come hang out with us at the voice agents meetup on Wednesday.
Voice agents meetup link[1]