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

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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

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 18/09/2026

example use case: search skills for video generation skills (learn how these projects do it)

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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

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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

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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! (🔈)

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 07/09/2026

the only cli benchmark that matters

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 06/09/2026

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

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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

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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 ⬇️

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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.

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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 ⬇️

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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...

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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

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 13/06/2026

there's a lot of tech companies in Toronto now

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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

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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.

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 28/05/2026

I would take a bullet for this clanker

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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

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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...

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 09/02/2026

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

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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)

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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

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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 📸

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 01/12/2025

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

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 25/11/2025

The soundtrack for deep, focused work

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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)

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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.

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 03/11/2025

Got some new stickers made for Devtools Tronto tomorrow

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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

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 04/10/2025

See you at the combination skate shop + punk show

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 15/09/2025

Counterscale's still humming along – almost 2k GitHub stars now. This summer we (mostly @stordahl.dev) added: - user auth - referrer favicons - works w/ multiple CF accounts - UTM tracking (PR lands soon)

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 12/08/2025

I like how you can be miles away and it still pops

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 18/07/2025

Playing around w/ Midjourney to animate some pixel art scenes

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 12/07/2025

📈 React package downloads/day are up almost 70% (!) since the start of 2025

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 08/07/2025

I think I found the least maintained feature on @github.com

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 07/07/2025

🆕 new Counterscale landing page I first mocked this up in Figma. Then exported a PNG and gave it to Claude Code. That gave me a good start, but I spent hours tweaking afterwards in Claude + Cursor.

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 03/06/2025

doesn't matter how much time I spent here visiting still feels magical

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 14/05/2025

IMO blogs aren't dead yet – with so many having switched to video, I think writing is due for a comeback

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 10/05/2025

Not a lot of cities where you can fit horses, streetcars, bicycles, pedestrians, and cars into one shot.

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 07/04/2025

I've been trying to level up the Counterscale landing page in Figma. Thoughts? Does any of this messaging hit for you? (thanks @jeremymorrell.dev for providing a quote!)

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 01/04/2025

Yesterday I wrote a detailed breakdown of an issue on GitHub, and wrote about 4 potential solutions and their pros/cons to see what people thought. First time I've seen someone ignore all that and just copy/paste it all into ChatGPT to get an answer.

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 31/03/2025

Discovered a useful AI coding use case: You can use Claude 3.7 to approximately "de-obfuscate" minified code. Useful for reverse-engineering scripts. Here's trying it out on Sentry's minified SDK (which is open source). I've gotten similar-looking results on source code w/o accompanying OSS too.

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 21/03/2025

🇨🇦 Last year this post connected me to ~20 Canadian founders & software devs. I'm told those conversations were helpful; for one company, it led to raising a major funding round. It feels important to do it again. 👋 If you're here and building software tools and/or OSS products, I'd like to help.

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 17/03/2025

My new favourite Ottawa museum is the Diefenbunker. It's like visiting a real-life Fallout vault.

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Ben Vinegar @benv.ca · 15/03/2025

Next up: trying to let users upload a pic and it'll turn it into a classy black & white newspaper-style portrait using stable-diffusion-v1-5-img2img on @cloudflare-dev.bsky.social It's not going well

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