iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 28/09/2026

Opus 5.5 product vids aren't just good because they look great they're good because they can explain the product better than you can

130

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 22/09/2026

I recently learned there are way more monospace fonts out there than I was aware of somehow this led to making a video that tours 18 different fonts in 3 mins, set to chill lofi music (🔈) hope it's useful for folks - it was for me! www.youtube.com/watch?v=XukW...

youtube.com

18 Monospace Fonts in 3 mins (chil lofi)

YouTube video by Ben Vinegar

091

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 22/09/2026

🔧 tune your AGENTS.md in 5 mins go to ossrules.md, copy the prompt, hand it to your agent your agent will browse our index of OSS project rules and see which apply best to your repo

030

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 18/09/2026

📜 introducing ossrules.md - learn how leading OSS projects use agent rule files - discover skill files that projects actually use - level up your own projects and workflows I've personally learned a lot just exploring

2384

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 16/09/2026

today an engineer found a bug where we over-billed some event types, and made a fix Modem pinged him - a customer flagged this 2 weeks ago, but it got lost in the noise he had no idea! so he followed-up & let them know it was addressed 5 mins of setup → never miss a follow-up

140

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 10/09/2026

🏛️ announcing hunk v0.22.0 - now w/ `hunk log` - TUI for reviewing git/jj history - quickly jump from commit → diff - OR multi-select a commit range - supports mouse + all colour themes also in this release: multi-line comments, lower memory usage, more efficient --watch mode, and more! (🔈)

2131

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 07/09/2026

the only cli benchmark that matters

290

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 06/09/2026

👀 here's another take on browsing git history inside hunk: hunk-history (extension) ⬇️ looks pretty nice

150

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 03/09/2026

we're now processing a lot of data, which is great but the days of infrastructure easy mode have come to an end

280

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 17/08/2026

🎙️ State of Agentic Coding w/ @mitsuhiko.at and @benv.ca returns In this episode (#9): - how agents are getting more autonomous - the subsidies will continue until morale improves - herdr and VC-funded terminal apps - vibe coding from your car, and more! Available on YT, Spotify, and via RSS ⬇️

4114

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 31/07/2026

It's becoming normal practice to plug your coding agent into tools like Slack and helpdesk software to find customer insights. Turns out it's super inefficient, because you're just fetching and smashing raw strings into your context repeatedly. So we released a new MCP server that solves that.

350

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 24/07/2026

✅ Yes the code matters In experiments we ran, well-named and organized code can dramatically improve agent outcomes: - fewer tokens spent/more context window preserved - fewer confidently wrong answers developed Verified against 14 model/harness combos incl Sol, Fable, GLM 5.2 and more

1131

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 20/07/2026

👋 New blog post: "How coding agents read files – and how to write for them" In it I explain how code optimized for agent-discovery can lead to major token savings on search + retrieval, even with frontier models like GPT-5.6 Sol Plus other important findings ⬇️

1251

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 14/07/2026

🎙️ State of Agentic Coding #8 with guest Mario Zechner is out. In this episode: - Vibe-checking Fable & GLM 5.2 - @mitsuhiko.at teaches us RL - How harnesses smooth out model jank - Loops, surviving AI fomo, and more YT: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lfp... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6m40...

2132

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 07/07/2026

🛠️ hunk 0.17.0 is out Patches from 10 new contributors, w/ small fixes & quality-of-life improvements like: - official homebrew install (brew install hunk) - launch hunk w/o menu bar - better session reliability - esc no longer quits, proper transparent bg colours, & more

2142

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 28/06/2026

Just noticed a vibe-coded project of mine cost $200/month to serve a few dozen users/day 😭 Turns out it was doing 10s of millions of unnecessary Redis polls/day, even when idle - telemetry alone cost $$ a possible clue for why infra providers are growing so much right now

1130

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 13/06/2026

there's a lot of tech companies in Toronto now

120

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 09/06/2026

🎨 hunk v0.15.0 is out: - supports git --color-moved - transparent backgrounds - color token fixes - more themes - Sapling support (it's a VCS from Meta) also now there's a website → hunk.dev

1140

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 02/06/2026

A pattern I'm seeing with AI debugging: it's easy to get stuck inside the model's search space. So you burn tokens & time chasing candidate fixes, while the real answer sits in context only you have ... but never explored, because you quietly surrendered your thinking.

0150

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 28/05/2026

I would take a bullet for this clanker

270

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 27/05/2026

hunk 0.14.0 is out w/ lots of user contribs + fixes: 🆕 expand/collapse inline source (vid 👇) 🆕 custom themes 🆕 new theme: catpuccin latte/mocha 🆕 select + copy to clipboard 🆕 renders wide chars like 你好 & emoji properly

160

Reposted by Ben Vinegar

Jacob Stordahl 🏳️‍🌈 @stordahl.dev · 07/05/2026

As expected, another tool by @benv.ca has become part of my workflow - Glance solves the problem of given terminal based agents access to screenshots. It's been super helpful while I'm building by first TUI glance.sh

glance.sh

glance.sh — Share an image with your coding agent

Paste a screenshot, get a temporary URL. Built for terminal environments, coding agents, and CLI workflows where copy/pasting images is hard.

131

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 04/05/2026

In 3 weeks at the next Devtools Toronto: traces.com - share agent coding sessions polarity.so - sandboxes for agent testing superuser.app - agents in your team chat tidra.ai - AI code maintenance at scale docsalot.dev - docs agents can read codepathfinder.dev - trace vulns across your codebase

891

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 10/04/2026

State of Agentic Coding #5 with @mitsuhiko.at is live. In this episode: - death of the IDE premature? - what's with all the bugs - will future models fix yesterday's AI code? - token abuse, slowing down, and more! YT: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCpY... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7wUV...

1110

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 09/04/2026

My terminal diff tool, hunk, has added a lot of good stuff: - horizontal scrolling w/ mouse support - pinned file headers - way better file browser UI - draggable scrollbar - perf & bug fixes ⬇️ Here's what it looks like today

4202

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 04/04/2026

Montreal's Metro is the 4th-busiest rapid transit system in North America But for brutalist vibes, it's unmatched

0220

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 23/03/2026

I've been building a terminal diff tool for agentic code review: - agent comments + agent remote control - syntax highlighting - auto-responsive layouts (stacked & split) - file browser - mouse support - uses OpenTUI + Diffs from Pierre Computer Co

1140

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 03/03/2026

Coding was never the slow part. That's why we built Modem, your dev team's auto-triage PM. It listens to user signals 24/7, finds problems before you do & does the in-between work – filing tickets, pinging teammates, closing the loop. And it's not vaporware! You can try it out today at modem.dev

1122

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 09/02/2026

Modem's auto-generated release notes are getting really good

120

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 07/02/2026

How I vibe-eval new model releases: - Am I spending more time building because it's more fun? - Can I give higher-level guidance than before and it works out? Only a few days in, Opus 4.6 clears both. 🤷

040

Reposted by Ben Vinegar

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 02/02/2026

🇨🇦 Devtools Toronto #6 – the version where we just hang out – returns Tuesday, Feb 17th at Mascot Brewing 👇 RSVP below

121

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 05/02/2026

Scenes from last night's Claude Code meetup in Toronto

3 people in focus in the foreground, backs to the camera, facing the presenter

Wide shot of a presenter facing a large audience

Boris Cherny addressing the audience (pre-recorded)

000

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 02/02/2026

🇨🇦 Devtools Toronto #6 – the version where we just hang out – returns Tuesday, Feb 17th at Mascot Brewing 👇 RSVP below

121

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 29/01/2026

At Modem we've gone all-in on database branching to accelerate our development – sanity testing migrations, making sure preview builds work end-to-end, and more. 👇 The folks at Neon thought we were pushing the envelope enough to merit writing about it. Worth a read! neon.com/blog/behind-...

neon.com

Behind Modem.dev’s Product Velocity - Neon

Modem is building an auto-triage, PM agent that centralizes scattered user feedback and automates follow-ups. Powered by Neon branching.

020

Reposted by Ben Vinegar

Armin Ronacher @mitsuhiko.at · 18/01/2026

Weekend thoughts on Gas Town, Beads, slop AI browsers, and AI-generated PRs flooding overwhelmed maintainers. I don't think we're ready for our new powers we're wielding. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/ag...

lucumr.pocoo.org

Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?

What’s going on with the AI builder community right now?

2327465

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 31/12/2025

It was a good year: 1. Started a company (modem.dev), raised some money, hired a great team 2. Hit 1.9k GitHub stars on Counterscale (w/ @stordahl.dev) 2. Hosted DevtoolsTO 3x 4. Invested in some great 🇨🇦 startups 5. Visited Japan & Austria 6. Took some pics 📸

1140

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 21/12/2025

Blue Prince was my GOTY and I think nerdy programmer types here would enjoy it. Also it plays well on Linux via Steam's Proton compatibility layer.

180

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 01/12/2025

"make a picture of a cool S" Nano Banana Pro vs ChatGPT vs Midjourney

150

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 26/11/2025

I want to dork around with new technology and talk about it the way I always have. That includes AI, LLMs, etc. But the response to Armin's post here illustrates why that feels kind of hard on Bluesky. So my posting here has dropped a ton.

3130

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 25/11/2025

The soundtrack for deep, focused work

120

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 23/11/2025

I made a Chrome plugin that converts your typing speed to tokens/second (TPS) so you can compare your output to LLMs. 150 WPM = roughly 3.3 tokens/sec (🔊 Sound on)

3271

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 21/11/2025

Any startups/companies looking for a good TypeScript + JS developer? I have someone in the US, remote, has a strong GitHub portfolio + OSS contributions. Let me know!

172

Reposted by Ben Vinegar

Jacob Stordahl 🏳️‍🌈 @stordahl.dev · 18/11/2025

Curious if any Counterscale users are against this being enabled by default? tl;dr, we run a daily cron to backup the previous days analytics into an R2 bucket using the Apache Arrow file format

101

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 18/11/2025

Feels like the demand for OSS hasn't felt this low in a while: 1. People can just codegen what they want 2. Companies will use whatever gets them to market faster to capitalize on AI – if it's a black box so what Touched on this on the Hard Part podcast.

050

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 03/11/2025

Got some new stickers made for Devtools Tronto tomorrow

370

Reposted by Ben Vinegar

Jacob Stordahl 🏳️‍🌈 @stordahl.dev · 15/10/2025

Counterscale 3.3.0 it out! 🚀 Here's what's included - UTM Tracking Support (!!!) - @/counterscale/tracker now includes a server-side module for those that want to track analytics on the server - @/counterscale/cli now verifies API tokens when settings them via the install command

github.com

Release v3.3.0 · benvinegar/counterscale

What's Changed fix: link pkgs via pnpm-workspaces.yaml instead of npmrc by @stordahl in #220 chore: upgrade zx by @stordahl in #219 Fix: Wrap Long URLs in TableCard Component by @congdv in #221 Tw...

152

Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 09/10/2025

🇨🇦 Devtools Toronto is returning Tues, Nov 4th at BDC Community Square. Featuring hands-on demos from 1Password, Tempo, Keyflow, Wispbit, and Varlock (DMNO) 👇 RSVP link below

192