Couch: A Sneak Peek

This is post “2.5” of a 5-post series on the AI-native development stack I built over the last 5 months:#

1. the 5-month journey of building the workflow that created Parley.
2. reflection on how to leverage AI in software product development.
   1. a sneak peek of couch. (this post)
3. couch and pair, the coding environment I use daily. (TKTK)
4. ariadne, the skills and binaries that supported my workflow. (TKTK)
5. and lastly, where to go from here. (TKTK)

I decided to write a brief 2.5 post, as I got excited about how well agentic coding is working in the land of couch. couch is similar to a terminal multiplexer/switcher, but is custom-built for working with coding agents, think cmux, but with “agentic software development process” built into it.#

As an illustration of the workflow, I got the idea it would be nice to be able to broadcast couch to many recipients, for example, for pair programming, or just to help other users using couch. A viewer-only version was created within several hours. Then some touch-ups, such as a mode where a viewer can point at things, for example, to bring attention during a live pair session. There were also interesting and subtle rendering issues between Unicode, emoji, different fonts, the difference between how terminals and different web browsers draw stuff. I didn’t know those intricacies, but was able to learn from AI (hot take 1). In less than two days, we have a pretty robust feature so a live couch session can be viewed from anywhere on the internet, and viewers having a laser pointer to ask questions of things they see on the screen.#

A video from the terminal:#

And a video from the browser on an iPad:#