Ben Vinegar
@benv
Co-founder modem.dev. Before: founding engineer then VPE at @sentry.io. Organizes Devtools Toronto. 🇨🇦 More: benv.ca
👋 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 ⬇️
🎙️ 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...
🛠️ 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
🎨 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
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.
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
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...
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
Montreal's Metro is the 4th-busiest rapid transit system in North America But for brutalist vibes, it's unmatched
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
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
🇨🇦 Devtools Toronto #6 – the version where we just hang out – returns Tuesday, Feb 17th at Mascot Brewing 👇 RSVP below
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 📸
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)
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.
🇨🇦 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
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)
🆕 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.
