Before we get started with this one, I

have a question for you. How many agent

threads do you have running right now? I

don't mean have you run today, I don't

mean are you going to run later, I mean

in the exact moment where you clicked

this video, did you already have things

running in the background? If the answer

is less than five, you really, really

need to watch this video because you are

not taking advantage of the genuinely

awesome and unique opportunity we live

in today. And if the answer is more than

five, you should also probably watch

this because you'll get a lot of nice

edges and solutions to problems you

might not have even known about and

you'll have a great resource to share

with your friends who are not taking

advantage of where we're at today.

I'll be real with you guys though, this

video is not my norm and as such, this

doesn't feel quite right. I don't think

we need caffeine for this one.

We're going full rodeo.

Much better.

This is the video that Anthropic does

not want you to watch and I'm going to

make it very hard for them to do

anything about it. So, before you get

too worried about bans, I promise I've

done everything in my power to prevent

it and of the bans that have occurred

across me and my friends who do all of

these things, of the 30 plus Claude

accounts we're hopping between, I've had

one friend get banned twice because he

was on a VPN when he registered an

account with a credit card for a

business that was not his, it was mine,

and those two accounts got temporarily

banned and reinstated almost immediately

after. So, while this is probably not

something the companies want you to do,

it is a thing that they are not stopping

us from right now. In fact, the only

thing that can really stop us is a quick

break for today's sponsor. I have two

quick questions. First, have you ever

used an agent without search? If you

have, you know how painful and miserable

it is. It basically can't do anything.

My second question is the opposite. Have

you ever used an agent with insanely

fast and accurate search? I personally

hadn't until I started using today's

sponsor, Parallel, because they have the

best and fastest search results for

pretty much every single thing you can

measure. Historically, I've really liked

the search built into OpenAI, but when

you compare it to Parallel, it's just

night and day. Watch and see just how

fast Parallel can get you good results.

Going now. All real-time, of course. It

took just over a second for Parallel.

And Open AI still going, still going.

Meanwhile, Open AI's endpoint took over

6 seconds long. If search was all they

did, they'd be one of the best options

available, but they also have everything

else you would need on the web from a

proper monitor that will send your

agents info when things change on

different pages, to a traditional

response API for when you want to

actually get synthesized results from

your search queries, to their extract

endpoints to let you send a URL and get

back the data that your agents actually

want and need. Even parsing JS heavy

pages, by the way. There's even an MCP

so you can expose Parallel to your

existing agents in whatever tool you're

using now. Every month you'll get 5,000

requests for free. And on top of that,

if you sign up today, you'll get $80 in

credit. What are you waiting for? Join

now at selective.link/parallel.

This is a real, real rough order of

events that I have planned here. We're

going to start with how do you actually

get enough tokens to do the terrible

things I'm about to show you guys. Right

after that, we're going to talk about

actually accessing them once you've

taken advantage of the ways to get more.

Then I'm going to talk about how you

actually use them practically well. And

of course, right after, poorly, which

I'd argue is more fun and much more

important. And then at the end, the

thing that we all want, how do you use

your tokens when both you and your

laptop are asleep? While I will do my

best to make this a top-level guide on

like what things you should do, the

thing that will matter more is the

little pieces that I show. Not because

you should copy all of them, but they

should help you understand how I think

and operate with agents and how I've

been able to do like 100 plus PRs a day

for a bit now, part-time.

The point here is not to give you the

exact formula to copy. It's to get these

ideas in your head and these examples

floating around in your brain, so that

you'll apply some of these lessons in

hopefully your own ways. Like, the best

possible outcome of this video would be

you guys going off, building more cool

with agents, and then coming to me

with solutions for problems I hadn't

even thought about yet that make my life

and my agent maxing better.

I can already tell this video is going

to cause huge blowback on Twitter. So,

I'm going to just list the questions

they're all going to bring up to try and

dunk on me for making this ahead of

time.

So, let's go through the common

questions and comments that I

know are going to happen the moment this

video goes live.

This only works for side projects, not

real apps. I have a good feeling if

you're saying that, my apps are more

real than yours. I also happen to know

that a lot of the strategies I'm showing

here have worked at companies scaling as

big as, I don't know, AWS itself, where

I have friends who are learning these

lessons from me, as well as at

Microsoft, where I have friends who are

learning these lessons from me, and even

some Fortune 500 companies that are

doing some of the subscription abuse

stuff that I'm going to show y'all.

We'll talk about that in a bit. Not all

of us are rich. Cool. I'm sorry.

This is a great way to save a load

of money though. These strategies work

at small scale and large scale, and the

crazy numbers you've seen me spending in

the 300k plus range are not spent at

all. I'm putting in like $1,000 for

every 50,000 of tokens I'm taking out,

like worst case. And if you're doing

worse than that, you're paying API

prices.

We'll get there in a bit.

Of course a JS dev thinks this. Oh,

yeah, the devs who understand the

importance of having software people can

use instead of software that people can

gawk at and not use. Yeah, you're right.

I do know what people want, which means

I am pre-qualified to talk about what

people want in building real software.

Wow, OpenAI has paid you off. I have

paid OpenAI more money than you're

worth. Wow, Anthropic has paid you off.

I've paid Anthropic more money than

you're worth. Now that we've got this

out of the way, let's actually be

useful.

First and foremost, getting more tokens.

Let's do some math here.

Who here knows how much money and tokens

you get when you put in $200 on the

Claude API?

Give you a hint.

It's $200.

What about the Codex API? I'll give you

a hint. The answer is the same.

Which is why what we will be doing today

does not involve the API. You might

think this is silly or dumb or not

viable for real businesses. If I was to

list the big companies I know that have

their employees subscribing to personal

tier accounts and just turning off the

setting for data sharing, they'd all be

really mad at me because these companies

are very private and they don't want

these things known, but they're all

doing it. You have no idea how

many companies are just paying for the

subscriptions. And when you do the very

basic math, you'll understand why.

Because a $200 Claude sub

gets you around $8,000 in tokens.

That's 200 bucks a month for 8K in

tokens. There is a catch for this one,

though. Only 4,000 of that is Fable.

Because they have the 50% limit on Fable

separately. That still means you're

putting in $200 and taking out 4,000 of

Fable. That's a very good deal. The $100

tier is weird because you do actually

get half of this total amount, but you

get a fourth of the hourly limits. So,

the 5-hour limit is much more strict,

which means it's harder to burn that all

on the $100 account. So, personally, I

don't really recommend the $100 account.

I think you should save a little more,

do the 200, burn it, find a way to make

money off how you burnt it, and then

reinvest and keep going. And the $200

Codex sub is even more interesting cuz

it's roughly $12,000

of inference. And there is no

distinction between what you're doing

with Astra and with other cheaper models

like Soul.

They don't split it that way. You just

get the tokens. And if you guys think

these subsidies are brutal, I got an

even crazier one.

Y'all know how much Fable costs?

It's $10 per mil in and $50 per mil out.

That sounds expensive, especially when

you compare it to other cheaper models,

especially in the open weight world

where there are things that are doing

real work for a tenth or less that

price. What if I told you this number

was also more than 50% off.

Fun fact, when Anthropic first announced

Claude Mythos preview in April, they

actually quoted a price. Even though the

model wasn't out, this was just for

internal use at companies for project

Glass Wing for securing their stuff.

Those companies were offered to continue

using the model after at $25 per million

in and $125

per million out. That means the price

we're paying is like almost 70% cheaper

than what they intended to charge. Why

would they ever make it so much cheaper?

It's cuz their margins are insane. The

prior rumored margins for how much money

they made selling tokens at API price

compared to like the energy costs and

the eventual usage of the compute

causing it to fail over time roughly

calculated from various napkin math that

fishy and autos I know to around a 95%

profit margin. So, if they charge you

100 bucks, they made 95 and they spent

five on replacing dead compute and

paying for electricity. Or in the case

of Anthropic, renting the compute from

SpaceX.

So, why would they knock this price down

so much? Well, Anthropic knocked the

price down because they know everyone

has the margins. They were already in

the lead.

And they wanted to maintain their lead.

So, they decided to make the price lower

in order to make it harder and harder to

justify using competitors. I would argue

that at 25 in 125 out, this model was,

especially at the time,

worth it. But at $50 out, it's a

bargain.

And at $50 per mill out, combined with

the 200 to 8,000, so the 1 to 40 ratio

of subsidization means you're getting

some really good deals. So, you can kind

of mentally double the numbers for

Claude as well. And also, Codex, because

there is no world in which OpenAI

actually plan to charge the literal

exact same rate as Mythos. OpenAI does

numbers very simply. They keep them the

same, they lower them 20 to 80% or they

double them. Those are the only things

Open AI knows how to do. Except for

after Fable destroys them, and after

that, all of a sudden,

they're going to nudge the price a

little bit. So, the reason that Astra is

as cheap as it is is because of Fable.

And the reason that Fable's so cheap is

they decided to eat their margins a

little bit in order to guarantee a win

at least at the time. And this is all

without even talking about the resets.

Last I saw someone do the numbers, Tibo

gave out 14 resets in 30 days. That

means you're averaging a reset every two

to three days with your Codex subs. That

means that the weekly number, which is

four grand, is more like a three-day

number, which means you can double the

Codex sub here with 24 grand if you're

really maxing it out. It's so bad right

now that they've temporarily paused new

subscriptions on the $200 tier for

Codex, which sucks due to the nature of

this video, and I have a bad feeling

this video is going to make the problem

worse. Quickly. Sorry in advance. Feel a

little bad exposing these things to the

world, but my job in my loyalty is as a

journalist and informant, not as

somebody who's trying to protect and

shelter the few hundred people who know

how abusable this is. I think

everyone should know, and I'm going to

share this info with the world, and how

things proceed after is how things

proceed after. Don't be mad that I'm

sharing, be mad that I'm right.

Okay.

When you set up your account, the first

thing you should do in Codex is hop over

to settings, go to data controls, go to

improve the model for everyone, and turn

it off. As soon as you do that, the

terms of service for your personal sub

are effectively identical to the terms

of service for a team account. There is

no real difference. So, if you are

paying for API prices because you think

you're not going to have your data

trained on, you're not saving anything.

You're just wasting money. Every dollar

you spend on API is 80 to 90 cents

you've thrown away. And if you're not

thinking of it that way,

that's on you. There's a similar setting

in the Claude code settings. I don't

feel like going to find it. You get what

I'm talking about. So now with all of

this established, the best way to get

more tokens is obviously to get more

accounts. And since we've established

the accounts aren't meaningfully

different from API pricing, you get a

good deal. You should still use the API

for a couple of things though. One is

very important. Anything facing users.

If you are writing your prompts or your

agents are writing your prompts, or the

prompts are running on your system on

your code base from things that are in

your GitHub issues or whatever,

all that is fine.

That is awesome.

But if you are trying to serve public

traffic, where users can submit a

request and it runs on your inference,

that is entirely against the rules with

the accounts. If you're using this as an

alternative to the API to serve user

traffic, you deserve your ban. That's

not what these accounts are for at all.

They are being very generous letting us

experiment with coding with these huge

subsidies.

You should abuse the generosity by

building cool not by reselling

things to squeeze margin that they

aren't. I'm giving this advice up front

because the things I'm about to show

would make it hypothetically easier to

do that. I think it's time to get there.

It's time to talk about how we actually

access the tokens. In my first token

maxing video, I gave the example of

using two Claude code subs, and I showed

that if you have Claude code running in

the terminal and it's completing a task,

and you use another tab to change the

auth for your Claude code instance, it

will correctly recover and keep going.

That is great when you have one or two

computers and one or two threads with

two accounts. That does not work when

you are doing what we are going to be

doing here. You need systems that manage

this, not just for your local Claude

code with your one or two accounts. You

need a solution that will handle the

insanity that is how often the Claude

code auth breaks in a single shared

bucket on a residential IP address that

you can route all your other traffic

through.

So, let's go through some pro tips here.

So, tip number one, I love VPSs, we'll

talk a lot about VPSs. I highly advise

you do not sign in to Claude Coder

Codex, but especially Claude Code, on a

VPS. Anthropic in particular is very,

very nervous around people reselling

their Claude Code subs in VPSs serving

traffic to other people with Claude Code

because it lets them sell it for cheap

and also collect a bunch of data they

can use for distillation. So, they're

being extra aggressive with sign-ins and

often requests coming from IP addresses

that are known to be servers, like

anything on AWS or Hetzner or any of

these other providers. So, I

highly recommend you do not do this over

a VPN or on a cloud that you're serving

the traffic from. I would also advise

against having that traffic come from

multiple different computers at the same

time because that's how they know you're

doing some sketchy stuff. So, how do we

avoid that? How can we do our best to

make sure most traffic comes from one

place, ideally one residential IP

address, regardless of what you're

doing, what account you're using, and

where you're using it from, especially

with something like Claude Code where

the auth breaks every two to three days.

Dear from the future cuz I forgot an

important disclosure. Before we go any

further,

this might get you banned, this might be

against the terms of service. I am just

speaking from my experience, do not hold

me accountable. I am literally drinking

and filming as I talk about all these

nerdy things.

If you get banned and I didn't, that's

unfortunate and I'm sorry. I can't be

held liable, you'll probably be fine

though. Just don't do this with your

Google accounts because when your Google

account gets banned, you're

Thankfully, there's no use for Gemini

models anyways, so there's no reason to

deal with that.

Cheers.

As we were saying,

it's time to talk about the proxy.

CLI proxy API is a thing that's come up

in a lot of my videos, but not really

been showcased in most of them.

The way that this works is you sign into

it using your off for Codex and Claude.

And once you have signed in, it will

maintain the off for you and give you an

API that you can use in things like

Claude code and Codex, where you point

it to this instead of pointing it to the

traditional off servers. And now

everything is routed accordingly. It is

very very convenient. We'll get back to

this in a sec cuz I realized I forgot

one other thing we need to talk about in

the getting more token section. So one

last thing here so I can actually wrap

it up. You might have noticed the

subscriptions I was talking about. I was

talking about Claude subs and Codex

subs. I didn't include other

subscriptions here. Why did I not

include

other things like the open code sub or

the subscription to T3 chat or the

subscription to cursor even?

The subsidies are comically

comically less. Cursor does probably get

a deal with Anthropic. The deal is

probably 30 to 50 at best percent off.

That is very different from 95 to 98%

off. You get a better deal than Cursor

does. You get a better deal than open

code does. You get a better deal than

pretty much everyone does. Did a reset

just get announced for Codex? Really?

Kind of crazy that even in a compute

crunch like they have right now at Open

AI where they don't have enough compute

for all the answers they had to cancel

the subs, they're still giving us

resets. I will point out it is currently

Friday evening which makes it a lot

easier for them to do this because they

are hoping the power users like us, yes,

I'm including you now viewer, you're

joining us on this journey. The power

users like us will burn it all to the

ground before Monday when the

enterprises wants to pay API prices

again. So, yeah. The only subscriptions

that you can really massively benefit

from in terms of you put in money, you

get more tokens out are Claude and

Codex. If Grok 47 comes out good, it

might make sense, but I just It is hard

to token max with Grok because the Grok

models just cannot stay coherent for as

long yet. So, back to where we were with

accessing the tokens. I gave you the

pre-reqs. You want it on your home

network. You want it in one place

ideally, and you want everything to

route through. CLI proxy is a very cool

place to start.

But, CLI proxy, not necessarily the best

UI. The guy who got me into CLI proxy

didn't know it had a dashboard because

he has avoided it to the best of his

ability. Technically, I think the

version he uses and that I started from

was a fork called Vibe proxy, but I have

extensively forked this project. I have

made a lot of changes, and when you set

it up and look at the dashboard, it

won't look anything like this. And if

you want to change that, then congrats,

you have your first token maxing task.

Give it a screenshot of this and tell it

you want it to look like this, and it'll

probably figure it out fine,

especially if you use Fable instead of

Astra. There is one other change you

almost have to make, and I would argue

these changes combined would be

worthwhile if somebody creating a like

real fork with an easier setup like

flow. Because the other change you need

to make is account prioritization. By

default, the way CLI proxy works is it

routes traffic to all of your accounts

evenly, and it distributes across them,

which sounds great until you look at my

usage here, where you see I have one

account that expires at 1:00 p.m.

tomorrow, and I have another that

expires in 4 days. Obviously, I want to

burn as much as possible of the one that

expires tomorrow and not touch the ones

that have another few days. The only

reason you wouldn't want to do this is

cuz you're constantly hitting 5-hour

limits even with multiple accounts. I

can't believe I'm saying this in the

token maxing video. What I would say

there is slow down a little because a

5-hour limit gets you through 40% of

your 7-day Fable. I've done the math. I

know this one for a fact, so

please do not give me I know for

sure that 100% of the 5-hour on the 20x

plan is exactly 40% on the 7-day. It's

only 20% of your full 7-day limit, but

there's a reason I have this column

grayed out. This is the Opus bucket from

hell. Ignore that right column, it

doesn't matter. We only care about the

5-hour and the 7-day, and we really only

care about the Fable 7-day. I often

accidentally call my Claude accounts my

Fable accounts because Opus is a trash

model and you should avoid it to the

best of your ability. Sup nerds, less

drunk future Theo here. Wanted to call

out something that didn't exist when I

filmed this a few days ago. Opus 5.5.

I'll be clear, all the advice in this

video still applies in Opus 5.5 behaves

very similarly to Fable 5.1, so anything

I say about Fable for the most part

applies here, too.

The big difference is you might not need

five to 10 Claude subs anymore because

Opus 5.5 on just one sub, I have found

pretty hard to like hit your limits

with. So, take that as you will. Maybe

you don't need as many subs to take

advantage of these patterns now. You

might not even need to set up something

like the proxy I'm about to teach you

about, but yeah. Thought it was worth

calling this out cuz 5.5 is really solid

overall and has changed my way of using

things. Opus 5 was a useless dumpster

fire that I had to work around a lot.

5.5, pretty good model.

Back to whatever drunk Theo was rambling

about. Once you've got all of these

signed in and you've had one of your

models go through and make these

changes, changing the routing to

optimize for which accounts have the

next reset up soonest. And the other one

I think is important is by default, your

Codex subs won't go through web socket.

So, there's a few changes you can make

to fix that, which hugely increases

performance just like the time passing

messages back and forth goes down a ton.

So, make sure you have the web socket

stuff working. It's a little annoying,

but you can. One last piece that's

important, and thankfully my agents are

a bit smart enough to do it right, is

called session affinity and account

affinity. What this means is if I have a

thread going, ideally the next prompt in

that thread goes to the same account

because caches are account specific. So,

if you are 800k tokens into a thread and

you switch to a different account

quietly behind the scenes of CLI proxy,

Claude doesn't give a It doesn't

know the difference. But, the API then

has to go recreate those cache entities.

You only have to do it once per switch.

But, if your stuff is switching per

prompt or worse per tool call, then

you're going to eat a lot of cache rates

that you probably don't need to.

Thankfully, the affinity stuff works

very well by default in CLI proxy and

the caches only last 5 minutes anyways.

So, it's not too too bad. Just thought

you should know because if you're using

a dumber model to set this up and it

gets it wrong like if you use Opus, it

might get it wrong. So, keep an eye on

that. Make sure that you are looking at

how much cache reading and writing

you're doing and that those numbers

aren't getting crazy. You'll get a good

feel for it soon. You can always just

ask the agent, "Hey, how are we handling

session affinity? Are we writing cache

more than we should be?" And it can

probably get an answer. For this next

piece, I will request that you look up.

At the top of the screen, you'll see the

URL I'm

BB1 which is my framework, my desktop in

the other room. That port is

micro.ts.net. This is my tailscale.

This is my tailnet.

4318 is just a default and then I'm on

the management HTML page. This URL is

being accessed this way because I am

using it over tailscale. Tailscale is

very very good to have for a setup like

this because it makes it easy for other

machines to access this proxy endpoint.

And it means you don't even need off. I

was experimenting with some things

yesterday and I set up an API key for a

different thing and it broke my

inference on everything because by

default, it just works with no API key.

This sounds horrible until you realize

it's only exposed to other things on my

tailnet. So, if you don't have my Google

account that I use to sign into

tailscale, you cannot hit this endpoint.

So, it doesn't matter. So,

you're fine. And this also makes it

really, really, really convenient to set

up other machines. For this next part,

I'm going to have to do a thing you

probably didn't expect from me in 2026.

We're going to look at a real repo.

This is a project that I have on GitHub

and on my machine. And despite the fact

that most of my projects are on most of

my machines, this one's only on this

machine. That's because this is my fleet

management repo. This is the repo that

explains how all of the other computers

I do my work on function, including the

one that hosts my proxy and manages the

Tailscale for it so that everything else

can connect. One of the files in here is

how to set up a box. This describes all

the things I want set up in my boxes

and all the random tools and things like

I want RGFDJQ tmux btop node python and

build tools all of this yet. Codex and

Claude code installed. I want them to

use the proxy and all these other

things. All the deals all the machines

are in here gets updated whenever I add

a new one. So, when I get a new machine,

step one, I set up as a SSH. Step two, I

go to this repo. I open up Claude or

Codex or in my case usually T3 code and

I say, "Look, here's a new box. Here's

the SSH key. Go set it up the way I

like." And in not very much time, I'll

all of a sudden have a page open in

helium for a Tailscale approval. And I

go, "That was probably my agent

running." I blindly hit accept and now I

have the machine set up and it can do

inference on these other boxes easily.

So, now I have what I needed. I have one

machine on my home network going through

a residential IP address that all five

of my Claude accounts and all four of my

Codex accounts go through and all my

machines all around the world

connect to that over Tailscale and it is

impossible for Anthropic or OpenAI to

know that I'm using them for servers.

And setting this up in Claude code and

Codex is trivial. It's so trivial that

I'm not going to tell you how. I'm going

to tell you to tell your agent to do it.

It will swap two variables in the

configs and you're done. Thankfully,

both Claude Code and Codex have to work

with API endpoints because they're being

used so heavily with companies that are

doing all their inference through

Bedrock on AWS, which means they need to

put a URL in. So, this will work

indefinitely. It would be bad for them

if it didn't. In fact, the Codex desktop

app handled this poorly and enough

people on AWS complained when Bedrock

happened that they fixed it. And now, if

you're using Codex with this setup, not

only does it work great, it'll even show

you in the corner of your proxy. It's

pretty legit. And if you're skeptical or

you really, really want to have your

normal install with a normal auth, you

can still do that and you can make

another instance of Codex or Claude Code

with a different home directory that has

it configured. So, you have a different

command for each. The other real cool

benefit of this is if you do set it up,

you get access to all the models that

are in that setup inside of your Claude

Code. Notice what I said there, inside

of Claude Code.

Do not, under any circumstance, use this

to use your Claude Code sub in something

other than Claude Code unless you

really, really like dealing with

Anthropic support and getting accounts

banned all the time. You will be banned,

you will be upset. I highly recommend

you only ever use Claude models through

your Claude subs in Claude Code over the

proxy. One last thing I think is worth

knowing about the setup because it

catches me off guard every time.

Anthropic resets work different than

Codex ones.

The difference is the dates. When Codex

does a reset, it resets your weekly

entirely. So, if your weekly was going

to renew in a day or 10 minutes or

whatever else anyways, your reset is now

7 days off. So, when the reset T was

just promised hits at midnight, all my

accounts that are currently 3 days away

from a reset will now be 7 days away

from a reset. And this means you end up

with a weird pacing issue where you can

quickly get to a point where you're 6

days away from a reset across all your

accounts, which really sucks. It gets

kind of balanced out with the banked

resets, which across my accounts, I have

3 6 7 8 I have two more in my other, so

I have 10 resets across my Codex subs.

And the two types of resets are banked

and immediate. Banked resets are the

ones you can click whenever, and those

cost them more money because the reason

they can do these resets so freely is

they do them in hours where they're not

competing for the inference with their

enterprise customers. So, they can

freely give them on Fridays and

Saturdays, especially Friday nights.

They can't give them so freely on a

Tuesday morning when they were to have

all their customers trying to use Astra

at work that are paying API prices. So,

the banked resets cost them a lot more,

literally, because of opportunity cost.

I do see a future where they start

pushing us to only use these subsidized

subscriptions at off hours. I'm

legitimately at the point where I would

shift my sleep schedule in order to

maintain this level of subsidization

because it's so good and I'm

addicted, let's be real. And we all will

be soon. So,

now that this is all established, the

difference with Claude is there's only

one type of reset. It's a limit reset,

and not the timer for the limit, just

the percentage for the limit. So, if

Claude was to do a reset right now, the

only thing that would change is all of

these numbers become 100% again. The

dates and times all stay the same. So,

if I was to get a reset from Claude

right now, and my

next actual one was in a day, that means

I need to turn on the furnace

immediately. I need to burn all the

tokens I can

because they'll vanish

at that point. And this is the mindset

shift I need y'all to get in. When your

normal reset hits, so at 1:00 p.m.

tomorrow for me with this account,

whatever I have left here is money I

lost. Don't think of this as you spent

$200 and you got more, think of this as

you've been generously gifted $4,000.

But every week where you don't spend a

thousand of it, it disappears forever.

This is the opposite of the mindset that

in when you're paying API prices, where

you're trying to get as much as possible

for as few tokens, you need to have the

depressed mindset where you feel

yourself losing money because you are

and

we don't want to be stuck in the

permanent underclass. Burn your tokens.

Cool.

That's most of what I need to show in

this dashboard. I'll probably be back

here. I know I will be back here. Let's

be real.

I guess this is most of the accessing

your tokens bit, which means next we

need to talk about using the tokens

well. This one is going to be full of

all sorts of different layers. What I'll

say for the core of this one is I have

another video that's probably already

out by now that's about how I code

without one of my hands. It's a video

all about my life after accepting that I

can't really type even after my surgery

and I get my hand back. I might not be

able to type very well, which means I

have to use my computer different. Not

just like voice to text, but I don't

want to switch between apps as much cuz

I can't command tab. I don't want to be

staring at the thread as it generates

because I have other things to do. I

don't want to be at my computer that

much. I'm sitting at my computer less

and I'm coding more and these are the

strategies that will get you there. That

video has a lot of the good examples,

but I do want to give a couple important

points I don't necessarily think were in

that and then also show you some dumb

examples that weren't there that could

be useful. The question I want you to

start getting into your head is how can

I use more tokens to care less about

this? When you have a problem that

you're trying to solve, how early can

you pull in the agent to start solving

the problem and how long can you have it

go until you need to take another look?

This is a twofold thing. You could even

think of this in terms of a specific

important button.

Merge.

You want to derisk both sides of the

merge button. You want it to be more

likely that by the time you go to GitHub

and you're looking at the merge button

that it is safe to hit it because the

agent has addressed as many of the

potential problems as possible. It's

kind of crazy to think of it this way,

but I would honestly guess that of my

token use, maybe 10 or 15% is actually

coding. And the other 80 to 85% and the

other 85 to 90% is being spent verifying

the code. So, by the time I am actually

looking, the work's done. And not like

it's kind of done, but it has these

bugs. If you can knock down the

likelihood that the PR sucks or has some

small issue from 5% to 1%, you'll be

able to do way, way more because that

means you can focus less on each PR. So,

you want to de-risk merge on that side,

and you also want to after merge. It

needs to be easier to revert the things

that are failing. You need systems that

catch things before they hit your users

or systems that will revert things after

they hit their users and you've noticed

the problem. If undoing a bad change

takes more than 15 seconds, you probably

shouldn't be vibe coding at all yet. You

probably need to fix your systems so

undoing something broken is way cheaper

and faster. Then you can go a little

harder. Holy I think I just saw

the actual worst take of all time in my

chat. The argument that I'm making is

essentially you need to watch as much

Netflix as you can because you need to

maximize your subscription.

I I'm sorry. I We may be using a

different Netflix. I I just I personally

don't know how I would use my unlimited

movie watching to build real businesses.

I don't see how I would use that to save

40x plus.

I don't see how Netflix

can help you escape the permanent

underclass.

I've actually never I I hope you're rage

baiting cuz this is legitimately the

worst take I think I've ever seen, and

it's my job to read shitty takes.

Which means congrats. You can probably

provide a lot of value to the world

through Netflix

because you've successfully baited me in

the middle of what will be a very good

video by sending the actual stupidest

possible message. So, seriously,

congrats.

Salute. Hats off. Fantastic work. Back

to real world. So, we've talked about

de-risking before merge by making the

code more likely to be good. We talked

about de-risking after as well. So, if

the code is bad, it's easy to fix.

Whether or not you are using agents,

these are things worth doing. Make it

easier to verify code is good before you

look at the PR and make it easier to

revert if the code is bad. But, there is

one other phase here, which is not

really a button, which means this isn't

right UI, but whatever, you get the

idea. Knowing what you want. There's a

very good chance if you're watching this

video and you're using agents for

coding, that by the time you have sent

the prompt to the thread, you probably

know what you want. I'm saying this

because this is the case for me even

just a few weeks ago. That is not the

case anymore. I have

finally rewired my brain where I don't

bring in the agent when I'm done

thinking. I bring in the agent when I

start thinking. So, we can talk it out.

Maybe we find a shortcut that I hadn't

thought about before. I've had times

where I thought about a problem not like

fully, but like pretty actively for 3

weeks. And then I went to an agent to

build it. And I just asked, is there a

stupid simple solution I'm not thinking

of here? It gave me one. And I realized

I had just wasted 3 weeks of my time. I

want to be really clear here because

after the video about knowing your code

base, I realized you guys don't listen

very well. So, I'm putting this in

largely to have a quote that I can grab

when people misquote me from this video.

I am not saying you should stop

thinking.

I am saying you should figure out if

something's worth thinking about before

you think about it. Because you don't

know until you put the time in thinking

about it. But, if the agent can solve it

before you have to think about it, you

both just saved a bunch of time. And

tokens, too.

Because if I ask the agent about a

problem and the agent has a good

solution, then I don't have to trick it

with my bad solution and run in circles

a whole bunch with it. You save your

tokens and your brain if you give the

agent the problem instead of the

solution.

And this was a hard habit for me to

break. When people would DM me a bug in

T3 code, for example, I would think

through the bug, I would think through

where the problem was, and I would go to

my agent with a solution. I would tell

it, "I want you to change these things

in this way." And then it would change

it, and then I would look at it, and I

would realize it doesn't actually quite

solve the problem I wanted to. So, now I

just hand the screenshot to the agent

and say, "Fix it." And it often does.

And if it fails to, I now know this

problem is too hard for the agent to do

itself. At which point, I know it's time

to think more about it.

I think it's been really cool to learn

that a lot of the problems I would have

used a bunch of my mental energy on

didn't need it. And also, and this is

even cooler, some of the problems I

thought were really simple weren't. So,

the agent outright failed. You ready for

the spicy take here? This is similar to

how it felt to be a manager. When I

realized that my team doesn't need to be

handed solutions, it needs to be handed

interesting problems, and they would

usually come back with solutions. And if

the first few times they come back with

a solution, it's not quite right, then I

know this problem is novel and difficult

in some weird way, and I have to dive in

and help steer it a bit. So, instead of

diving in once you know the solution,

dive in when you discover the problem.

See if it can solve it autonomously, and

if it can't, whatever, buy another

Claude account. Or get your boss to.

Usually, though, if you're not employed

as a dev, don't stack subs until you're

making money. Like, I know this shit's

expensive, but devs make a lot of money,

and the companies hiring devs also make

a lot of money. Burn the money when you

have it, burn somebody else's when you

don't. So, the core thing I'm trying to

say here

is that at each of these stages,

from

problem to knowing what you want to do

to the code being written and merged,

too many of y'all live not even this

whole range, but like between a small

set here, where you are just letting the

agent operate between knowing what you

want in PR filed. I want you to do this.

Go all the way from where you first hear

about the problem to when you hit merge,

and maybe even let the agent merge

itself once you build more confidence.

And now your job is talking to users,

and of course

SRE for when things do inevitably fail.

The time thinking about this changes you

in important ways.

So again, Dan, I respect you heavily.

You were fantastic to work with, but I

will push back on this specifically.

Because I again, I even gave myself this

quote earlier to make sure I have my get

out of jail free card. I'm not saying

think less.

And I personally believe it is a better

use of our time to think about problems

agents can't solve than the ones agents

can. You will learn more and better

yourself more

thinking about the problems that your

agents can't solve or reading through

the solutions that they can solve than

you would get thinking about a problem

for days that an agent can solve in

minutes.

I'm not saying that you should replace

your thinking with the agent. I'm saying

that you should optimize for thinking

about things that matter more. Don't

outsource thinking, scale it. Yes,

exactly.

Pull in the model to figure it if you

need to think about the thing, and if

you do, that's where your brain energy

goes.

And we're going to get to this tip in a

bit,

but part of the skill here isn't to give

it the task, let it go do the thing

while you go and play a video game.

Since the agent's doing the task, it's

time for you to do the next task, and

then the next one, and then the next

one, and then you see the first one

done, so you go back and check it. And

that's where this starts to get really

cool. If you let the agent run for this

whole path,

this can take hours. It is possible that

from when you show it the problem to

when the PR is ready to go, the agent

has to run for a couple hours. Maybe it

runs for 30 minutes and it tests the

thing quick, it gets up a pull request,

it waits 15 minutes for getting, I don't

know, like a review from any of our

awesome AI code review sponsors, and it

spends 10 minutes fixing the changes,

puts it up again, waits another 15 for a

follow-up review, addresses those, and

now it's good to go. That's an hour plus

that you could be spending

sending more prompts to other threads to

do more things.

Here's where that ends because I'm going

to be so real. I have been very

kind and polite to the alternatives to

T3 Code,

but they suck when you have more

than three threads going.

And here is where we need to talk about

a very good question we just got from

Strawman Twitch.

How do you keep them all straight in

your head? I'm going to be so real with

you. If you're not using T3 Code, I do

not know how you do it. I I hate that

this is the case because the competitors

have been trying to copy us, and they

are not succeeding.

And it is really genuinely frustrating.

I want the Codex activity thing to be

good. I've offered to go there for free

and write the code for them because I

want to use these things well more than

I want us to win with our open-source

that makes no money.

So, what the hell am I talking about

this arrogantly?

I'm not actually arrogant about this.

I'm pissed off about this because the

solution was really simple.

It was admittedly one that I thought

about for far too long cuz I was trying

to figure out how do I deal with the

fact that I have, let's be real, far too

many threads at any given time.

I realized that I'm not treating threads

properly.

Threads are not histories that you

actively go back to all the time.

Threads are tasks. They're to-dos. And

when they are not working, they should

not matter.

I have a bunch of stuff here cuz I've

been streaming, so all of these things

are done. Also, I was at Demo Day

yesterday, but normally at any given

time, I got 10 plus things running in

five plus in the done state. And this is

where things get really, really cool

with T3 Code specifically.

When you are done with a thread, you

check settle,

and now it is gone.

I know, I know, Theo thinks he's so cool

for giving a new word to archive.

This is not that. Settle is different.

The goal here is to turn your sidebar

into inbox zero. You should try to end

your day with all your threads gone or

running, so when you go to bed and wake

up the next day, you have some cool

things to look at. But, that doesn't

mean we have cured the context switching

costs. We haven't. We have just made it

easy to see which context needs your

attention.

And it's really to start rewiring a bit.

This is where if you have ADHD, you have

a solid advantage. Because once you get

in the mindset of thread is up, not my

problem now, you're not going to get out

of it. What's something I want to add to

T3 code? I'm going to be so real, T3

code has progressed so much and added so

many of the things I wanted, I don't

really think about it that much anymore.

Like I I don't I'm running out of things

to add, which is great. It means we're

doing very well. Once orchestrator V2 is

in, that will change. But, let's say I

want some things, and I do. I have a

couple in mind. Here's the first one. I

would really like a simple and minimal

queuing system where I can send a

message and it will show as pending, and

it will go up when the next tool call is

completed, or I can click steer and

immediately send it. The attached

screenshot shows an example of what I'm

thinking of here from another app. Since

I don't have a good way to get the

screenshot cuz my codex don't reset for

another 3 hours or so, you should be

able to find a good example of this in

codex. Look for screenshots online if

necessary.

I have two tips I'm about to give you

that are important, they're going to be

rapid fire, so pay attention right now.

Tip one.

Look at the computer I have selected on

the bottom left. This is one of the

things I think T3 code does

exceptionally. Right now, it's Theo's

MacBook Pro.

That is the computer I'm currently

using. This computer is going to have to

be closed when I go downstairs later. I

don't know if this thread will be done

by then. So, I am not going to to this

on this computer because I don't run

anything on this computer other than my

fleet management, cuz I'm doing that in

the loop. So, we're going to click here.

This is going to be any repo, and as

long as the origin for Git is the same

on the different machines, they will all

be bunched under here. So, I can pick

any of my servers and pick where I want

this to run. Usually, I pick one of

these three cuz they're my Linux boxes,

but if I really want this to work on

mobile or do computer use, which right

now is better in macOS, I can pick my

two Macs at the bottom here to do it. I

don't care for this one, so I'm just

going to throw it on a random cloud

server.

Cool.

Now, it's going. And I just realized I

missed the second tip. So, I will give

that after showing another thing that I

want to fix. If I hop in here to

connections

and scroll down, you'll see all the

devices that currently have connected. I

hate the UI here because you have update

or disconnect and no remove for my T3

Connect machines, and disconnect doesn't

seem like it is or isn't permanent. So,

it's not very clear.

So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm

going to grab a screenshot of the whole

UI here.

Screenshot grabbed.

Going to go back.

Command shift O, enter, new thread,

cool. Paste. I really want to rethink

the UI for the devices connected in T3

Connect in settings on the desktop app.

There's a couple issues I have. First, I

feel like disconnect doesn't seem as

temporary as it is. It would be nice if

that was a toggle instead. I also don't

like that when update is an option,

remove isn't. I should always be able to

remove, and it should be very clear that

it's a permanent destructive action. If

you think this is simple enough to do

directly, go do it and send me a

screenshot. If you feel like you aren't

quite sure, make me a few mocks using my

HTML scale, and we can decide between

them. Cool. There's a couple things I

did here that might be useful. First, I

gave it the exact issue I have with not

a prescribed solution, but the problem,

and then some ideas of solutions. I then

told it that it can go do it directly if

it has a solution it's happy with. And I

also told it that if it doesn't, to give

me mocks using a skill I built so that

we can make a better decision together.

And now if it does make one solution I

don't like it, I can tell it again like

go make the mocks and it knows what I

mean. And here is where one of my

favorite T3 code pro tips comes in. I'm

not going to press enter, I'm going to

press command enter, which sends off the

thread in the background and leaves me

exactly where I am. So I can now send

off another prompt without having to do

anything. It's very nice. And this helps

you get into the mindset of oh, that's a

problem. I will go fire it off and I

will look when I am done. I do not check

my threads until they say done or input

in the corner. And if you're too lazy to

even pick which server to run, Maria has

built an awesome feature for you in

settings here.

Load balancing. You can now set up auto

load balancing across all of the servers

that you have connected in T3 code, so

it will fire off the threads across your

different machines. And once you work

this way, your job becomes different.

You're no longer sitting there carefully

babysitting the exact change. You are

firing off different things you want to

have done, and then you go through them

when they are ready for your attention.

And here is the harshest reality I need

you guys to get through your thick

skulls, and this was so hard for

me, that's why I'm being mean. It took

me forever to accept this.

Agents can be multi-threaded. Humans are

single-threaded. You cannot focus on two

things at once. You cannot do it. This

means our job's a bit different now. We

are the bottleneck. So how can you get

the agents to unblock themselves as much

as possible so you only have to come in

when they need you? And how do you make

it so they need you less and that you

come in later? So look at this one that

I filed cuz people were mad about how I

think about streaming. I wanted to move

to a chunked by paragraph solution

potentially. So I sent a prompt asking

specifically how hard would it be to do

this. If I really was committed and

wanted this, I would have just told it

to go do it. But I wanted to see if

there's any difficulty here before doing

it cuz if it's any friction I just don't

want this feature. So I asked and it

said not hard and then it hallucinates

it about half a day all in one No, I

don't care about what you think

half a day of work is. It's kind of

funny that these models still don't know

how long work takes. Yeah, eventually

it'll be fixed. Regardless, it said it

would be pretty easy. It said a bunch of

variable names it seemed fine. I then

said, "Can you build it for me? Once you

get it working, file a PR and spin up an

environment with Tailscale for me to

try." Now, and this is very important,

imagine I didn't do the second sentence

here. Imagine I just said, "Can you

build it for me?" And then in 5 minutes

it comes back, "Okay, I built it." Then

I'm like, "Okay, can you spin it up on

Tailscale so I can try it quick?" I

leave and then I get the ding. I go back

and then I click the link and I try and

I'm like, "Okay, this is great. Can you

file the PR?" And then it does. And I

look and I'm like, "Oh, cool. You should

babysit this, too." I probably should

have included babysit here as well. So

I'll do that now. Can you babysit this

PR and make sure everything is good?

Cool. Now it will continuously monitor

that PR and it's not my problem again.

So your goal here is to make sure

everything you need is there the next

time you click. Ideally, you want to

maximize the chance that the next time

you check that thread, you're ready to

merge. And really think about that. What

can you add? What context can you give?

What tools can you let your agent use to

make it more likely that by the time you

go back to that thread, you can merge

the PR. And this is where one of my

favorite T3 Code features comes in.

When you merge the PR, the thread

disappears. Which means if you tell the

agent, "You can merge the PR if it

passes these conditions or meets these

requirements," then you can send the

prompt and never see the thread again.

I would honestly guess that around half

my threads are archived without me ever

seeing their final message because it

doesn't matter. I see people

confused about the agents stepping on

each other's toes while they're working.

I thought we were developers, guys.

We're not five coders. We made the right

default in T3 Code for this for a

reason. By default, [clears throat] when

you start a new thread, it starts in a

new work tree. Not going to pretend work

trees are perfect, but they are good

enough. And now that the models are

smart enough to deal with the weird

that is get, they will fix your

work tree issues for you. For example,

one I run into a lot is I have a work

tree with a branch that makes a pull

request, and then I want another agent,

usually another model, to review it and

give thoughts. And if those both are on

the same machine, and they're both on

work trees, they can't both have the

same branch, and then get freaks out.

Previously, models were dumb enough they

would get stuck there. Now they can

figure it out. They have workarounds.

They make a new branch. They'll like

pull it down in some other way. They'll

make a clone. They'll do whatever they

have to. It doesn't matter. I don't

look. I don't care. Models are smart

enough that if I give it a pull request

with a branch that it already has in a

work tree, it'll figure out how to read

it. Don't spend your time thinking about

those things anymore. They don't matter

anymore. This is another habit I've

gotten into. By default, T3 code auto

settles threads that you have not

touched for at least 3 days, which I

think's the right call. I bumped it to

seven cuz I usually have better

discipline about clearing out my inbox,

but I'm not good enough at it here,

which is why my sidebar is a little

chaotic. I was exploring thread

pop-outs. This one I actually do want to

play with later, but not now, so I'm

going to use this news feature to make

this my problem later. You'll start to

see my mindset as I go through this. I

want to make it so I don't have as much

stuff trying to take my focus. This is

why I've done some strategic things with

the UI in the sidebar.

Notice that the ones that are working

are semi-transparent.

I wanted to hide working threads, but

nobody would let me. So, I made them

more transparent so you don't look as

closely at them. I like this a lot. It

has made it much easier for me to only

prioritize things that need me, things

that are done or things that are waiting

for input. I also really, really, really

want to emphasize there are few worse

uses of your time than watching an agent

as it works. If it works and it

succeeds, awesome. Merge the code. If it

works and it fails, look, maybe read the

reasoning trace or even better, ask the

agent why. And this is a good

opportunity to pivot into the next

section here, which is using your tokens

poorly. I know this sounds silly, but

I'm actually going to be framing these

things in ways that could genuinely be

helpful. God, I

One last thing I want to crash out on a

little bit. You can censor the chatter

if you prefer Jeff in the edit.

I see a lot of sentiment like this

still. Like, if it works, that's fine,

but what if it installs some malware on

the side?

I need to be so real with y'all.

If you think your agent is more likely

to install malware than you are, then

you are dumber than your agent. If you

are smart enough to realize that won't

happen, then you're both smart enough to

not install malware. If you think the

agent is more likely than you are, you

have installed malware recently and you

probably have someone on your machine.

You should consider a new Windows

install because I know you're also using

Windows. Let's be real here.

Anyways, we're going to go back to

talking to real engineers cuz that's

what we're here for. Let's talk more

about using tokens poorly.

One of the things I want you to think

about is when you face a problem or have

a question or uncertainty about

something, how can you use your tokens

instead of your brain? When I have a

pull request that is hard to parse that

a teammate filed, how can I use tokens

to figure out what it is? If I'm curious

what's changed in the orchestrator V2

rewrite that Julius is working on, I

could ask him, but he's busy. He's

prompting. I could rather just ask my

agent to get me the info on what he has

been working on. If I've lost track of

all my pull requests and I don't know

what I should focus on today, I ask my

agent to go through them and find

something that I should be more focused

on. If I can't find an email for one of

my five email inboxes, I open chat GPT

and tell it to go find it and it does.

If I don't want to sit there and

download all my medical records for my

surgeries, I don't ask my assistant to

do it like I used to, I ask Codex to go

through my inbox and go through all of

my dashboards for my medical on my

browser and get it all for me. And

what's even more fun is I would have my

computer going through and spending 30

plus minutes collecting all my medical

records, and while it does that, I go

back to T3 Code and I fire off four more

prompts for things that I notice that

are annoying me or for a feature I want

to iterate on. And every couple minutes,

I go back, I take a quick look and I

see, "Oh, these things are done. These

things are still working. Cool." I

really need to finish the durable

objects if it's going to save us a

load of money if I can get it right.

This is how I think about it. The issue

with the other tools that you can use

for this is that the sidebar doesn't

help you prioritize the work that you're

doing and the work that is done. It

doesn't make completed work go away. The

search isn't trustworthy enough to get

old work back, and you can't use the

same sidebar across multiple machines.

Like, of the threads here, this first

one is on one of my MacBooks. This one

is on my server Alvin. This one's also

on Alvin cuz I just spawned it. This one

was too cuz I just spawned it. This

one's on BB1. This one's on my MacBook.

This one's on this MacBook. This one's

on the other MacBook. This one's on my

main cloud server. They're all on

different boxes and it doesn't matter.

They're all on the same UI and they're

all on my phone app, too. I will say

that right now, sadly, if you're not

using Tailscale, you'll only be able to

connect three devices at once with T3

Code for free by default. We're working

on it. I want to bump the number a

bunch, but since you're already going to

be using CLI proxy, that means you're

also going to be using Tailscale. That

means you don't even need to use T3

Connect. You can just connect directly.

This all works without using our servers

at all. T3 Code is fully free and open

source. It fully supports your

subscriptions. It works incredibly with

CLI proxy. So, if you have a couple

boxes that have Claude Code and Codex,

and you have them CLI proxied, you go to

one of those boxes. Here, I'll show you

just how hard it is to set up T3 Code on

a new box. I don't have a new box to set

it up on. All my boxes are configured.

Let's say they weren't. You go to the

box, you SSH in, you're on NPX T3

connect.

And then you click the link. Oh,

email leak, great.

I should work on that, but yeah. You

click the link that comes up, you sign

in, and now as long as you're signed in

on the client, on the website, the

mobile app, and then once you're signed

in on the mobile app, the website, or

the desktop app, you can now control

that machine. You don't have to install

anything, you just need Claude or Codex,

ideally with a sub or a proxy. You're on

the T3 connect command, and now you can

connect through our layer. Or, you can

do NPX T3 serve, and it will instead let

you use Tailscale. We even have a {dash}

{dash} Tailscale built in directly. Or,

crazy thought, I don't know, kind of

risky here, but we are in the use your

tokens poorly section, you can just tell

your agent to go set it up. You have a

new server, and you're already building

a repo that manages your servers, you

can tell Claude or Codex, "When you set

up that server with Claude and Codex,

you should also probably set it up with

T3 code so I can connect remotely over

Tailscale." And it will just do it, and

it will just work, and it will be just

great. I'm going to frame the stupid

prompts a little silly. Have you ever

found yourself Google searching, "Where

did I leave my keys?" because you got so

in the habit of Google searching things

that you just default to that? If you

don't find yourself doing that with

agents, you're not offloading to them

enough. You need to get to the point

where you ask a thing to agents that it

obviously can't know, and you feel silly

for asking. If you don't find the things

you're asking the agents a little bit

silly, then you're not asking it silly

enough and you're not pushing the

limits here yet. Here's a fun example. I

have a lot of side projects, and I had a

bit of inference to burn the day I sent

this. So I asked, "I want you to go

through all my GitHub projects as well

as unfinished work on this machine using

lots of sub agents to help me figure out

what I should be putting more time into.

What are some of my ideas and side

projects that seem like they're more in

demand now that I might have foregone or

that are worth bringing back and

finishing. They might be half-baked or

projects that have been abandoned for a

while and deserve another pass. Go

through all my work on this machine and

GitHub and find things I should

potentially revive. This is a shitty

prompt for a shitty problem. None of

this matters, but I feel bad when my

limits reset and they weren't at zero.

So, I was looking for things to burn

them on so that I could have them all

dead and not feel bad when they reset.

And it found a handful of my things that

it thought I should prioritize more. I

think that is fun and cool. And I

already decided what I want to

prioritize, so now the next step,

snooze. Well, subtle. I don't need to

snooze cuz I don't want it back. Context

usage breakdown, I decided what I want

to do on this one and what I want to do

is kill it. So, we're going to go here

and I'm going to close it.

And I'm going to archive it cuz I don't

care anymore.

Show work tree creation progress. I

don't know how far we got with this.

How far along is this work? Is the

Tailscale dev server still up? Spin it

up if you can. I'd also love for you to

file a PR and babysit it to make sure

everything is good to go. And then I'll

come back later. Here's one that I

forgotten about cuz it was a while ago.

It says three days, but I'm pretty sure

I started this way before then. So, I'm

just going to ask. I'll be so real, I

haven't kept up with this workflow in a

bit. I have no idea what the state of

this is or what the value is. Can you

give me a rough idea of where this PR is

at and why we should merge it? This was

going to fail cuz I'm still mostly out

of Astro. It might route correctly. I

have a weird routing issue right now.

We'll figure it out.

These two are still going. That means

that they are legitimate prompts doing

legitimate stuff. Awesome. I will come

back to them later when they say done. I

would not have ever clicked these two if

I wasn't making content because I don't

care when they are still working. Here's

a real example of what my sidebar looks

like when I'm actually working. Do you

see how many threads I have here? There

were even more below.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 and then a monitor.

There's at least like two or three more

underneath that. And across my five

Claude Code subs, I was able to do all

of this and still have some usage left

over. Not bad.

And after this, I went to bed and I woke

up the next day, I went through them one

at a time, made a decision. Do I want to

merge this? Do I want to do a follow up?

Do I want to get rid of it? What do I

want to do? I went through them one at a

time, did all that and after, I noticed

some other things I wanted to fix. So, I

spun up more threads to fix them and I

went back and looked to see if

everything was done and went through and

clicked all the ones that were done and

did it. I really have been treating this

like an email inbox now and it has made

me so much more productive. So, I just

said they're confused cuz the threads

have only been running or the threads

only ran for 20 minutes.

I had spun them all up within the last

20 minutes. Some of them took 30

minutes, some of them took 18 hours.

That was me trying to get everything

going before bed. That wasn't work

going. Those all said working. I had 12

plus threads that had been working for

at least 20 minutes. Most of them kept

working after. All of them actually did.

I don't think any of them were done even

within the next 10 minutes. So, as silly

as the using your tokens poorly section

may have been, I do want you to get into

that mindset. Especially when you notice

a limits coming up and you haven't

burned it, find silly things to have

your agents do. You'll learn things from

that. You'll learn a lot more than you

expect from that. I am still amazed at

how good agents are at triaging large

numbers of PR's, at finding things that

I should bring in and merge that I might

have missed or forgotten about

otherwise. You'll be amazed at how much

random you can find. And here is

where we get into the last section. I've

touched on a good bit of this here, but

I want to really, really emphasize this

part.

Using your tokens while sleeping. I mean

this both literally and metaphorically.

If you've ever had the feeling of, "I

want to fix this right now, but I have a

meeting coming up or I have to leave the

office soon, so I'm not going to send

this message to this thread because I

have to close my laptop." I get it. I

was like this not long ago.

You need to move your dev work remote.

You need to pick up a crappy little

Linux box. You need to take some old

computer that you haven't used in a

while, install Ubuntu on it, set it up

with Tailscale, install CLI proxy on it

so that it's always coming from your

residential IP, and then you use it as a

box that your agents can work with. Now,

connect it with something like T3 Code,

and you can fire off on that box

and not have to think about it. I see

people asking if they don't have a

computer, what's the most budget option?

The most budget option by far is to talk

to your friends and family and find

somebody with an old laptop or desktop

that they'll give you for free that has

at least 8 gigs of RAM and at least

what or at least four cores, and you'll

be able to do some real work there.

And I'm already seeing some very, very

stupid replies.

If you think a VPS is the solution here,

I might have to get into selling VPSs

cuz those sound much more lucrative than

bridges nowadays.

Need 32 gigs of RAM and 16 threads? You

can get it on Hetzner. It's only $275

a month. That's a great deal. Or you can

waste all your money spending $700

on a box that has 32 gigs of RAM and a 1

TB drive. That would be terrible. That's

such a waste of money. That's like 2 and

1/2 whole months of renting a worse

computer on an IP address that'll get

you banned from Claude. Why would you

ever buy hardware that you can run on an

IP address that won't get you banned

when you can rent something for 2 months

that will get you banned? Hopefully you

understand sarcasm because there is

pretty much no reason to do cloud

servers unless your grandfather into a

good deal. Theo, you're wrong here

because insert something stupid. It's

actually very funny someone said that in

chat right after somebody complained

about electricity costs for a computer

that pulls conservatively

60 to 80 watts of power at worst. And

remember, it's not doing inference.

It's doing code. It's going to be using

one or two threads most of the time.

Let's go hop into my massively

over-speced server to take a look. I

have six threads or so running on Alvin

right now. And let's take a look at Btop

quick. Huh.

You can't see because my face is

covering it. This is a box I have at

least six threads running on right now.

It's got 32 cores because I got it for a

good deal. You might have noticed it's

not using them very much. It's rounding

to 0%.

So once again, you don't need a lot, you

just need enough. Sadly, that box I

showed earlier with the GMK tech has

gone up in price because my tweet caused

them to sell out. You can still hunt

find something, but I would highly

recommend you do not do a Mac for this

because Mac OS is a show for

parallel work. If you are looking at the

numbers of sharing here and saying

that's not right, I run three agents in

code X and my laptop's overheating.

You're right, your MacBook is

overheating because your MacBook has a

file system and an even shittier

security policy that is hard

bottlenecking how much you can run

at once. Move to a real OS like Linux

and you won't have these problems. You

don't need a lot and I bet my ass if you

can find your mom or uncle's old PC

that's got 4 to 8 gigs of RAM in it and

an okay-ish chip and you flash Ubuntu on

it and you plug it into your router

somewhere,

you're going to have a better experience

than you have doing dev work on a Mac

like immediately.

And if you live in an area that isn't

San Francisco,

well, I'll be real. If you live in San

Francisco, hopefully you can afford

compute and if you can't, get out. The

city's too expensive. So if you live

anywhere else, Facebook Marketplace will

be your friend. I bet you can find a

surprisingly good deal. And any old

laptop with any real RAM, you're going

to be fine.

And once you make that change, suddenly

you're not bottlenecked the same way.

There will obviously be edges like if

your agents run CI on the machine

locally and it's a rust project that

saturates all your cores when it

compiles, you'll run into problems.

You're an engineer though, and you have

tokens. Burn your brain and your tokens

to solve the problem. Maybe you move CI

to only run on GitHub, or you use one of

our awesome partners like Blacksmith or

Depot. Maybe you have a different server

that runs the CI. Maybe you set up a

queuing system where the CI gets

triggered one after another, so you

don't have five rust compiles destroying

your machine at once. You're engineers,

you can solve those problems. I don't

want to just tell you all the solutions

to those things, because your problems

will be different from mine. Apparently,

I succeeded with my goal of moving Maria

to the Blacksmith CLI in order to let

her run the CI via CLI instead of it

running on her machines directly, cuz

she was a bit RAM constrained. And now

she's way less RAM constrained. And

that's how we end up with posts like

this from Stephen that Maria shared.

Request, can you make T3 code less

productive in experience so that he

burns fewer tokens? This is where you

want to be.

And I've one last thing I want to lean

into with this bit.

This shit's so fun. I know a lot of

engineers have felt like the thing they

loved died, and that everything has

changed too much, and now engineering

isn't fun anymore because you send off a

prompt and then you sit there and watch

it make a bunch of mistakes and then get

annoyed that the code doesn't work and

you could have wrote it faster yourself.

I still have that experience. The only

difference is I don't watch the thread,

I go do something else. And then another

thing, and then another thing. Maybe I

spin up three threads and then I go to

dinner with my friends. Maybe I spin up

seven threads while I am waiting in the

lobby to queue in a game. Maybe I go

skate while I have some things running

and when I'm sitting and recharging, I

pull out my phone and check on two of

them quick and kick them off to go do a

bit more work. And the fun isn't in

those parts, I'll be clear. The fun

isn't that I'm checking my phone and

sending prompts. The fun is this new

type of engineering problem. I can now

justify spending more time

micro-optimizing how and when I trigger

CI. I'm thinking more about my cores and

how they're being used. I'm thinking

more about how I can work on the same

thing eight times on one box and not

have to think as much after. And I love

doing this. I find it so genuinely fun.

And I hope this video helps inspire some

more of this fun for y'all because

that's my real goal here. All of this

chaos has made engineering the most fun

I've ever had with it. And if you're not

having fun yet, I hope this can help you

get there. And maybe just maybe you have

reason to go spin up a couple more

accounts and burn a few more tokens. And

if you do want to throw some of those

tokens our way to make some real

improvements to T3 code, we'll probably

ignore them, but we might merge them.

So, consider it. Oh, yeah. I did have

this DM back and forth with Maria. I

could probably scroll and find it, but I