Howdy and welcome back. It’s time for another update from Crouton Creations.

Agent Angst

I’ve noticed something new that maybe you can relate to if you’re building with AI - this awesome feeling of productivity unleashed by working with agents has a bit of an impact on my attitude towards work. These agents are powerful, and I feel the constant need to keep them running all the time. There’s a low-grade background anxiety when they’re not working that I’ve started to call Agent Angst. It’s that nagging feeling that you know you could be getting more done if you could just kick off another agent, or run another cycle on the batch you’ve already got going. It’s a compulsion to keep these things moving constantly to maximize my productivity. I am the bottleneck.

Most of the people I talk to find that AI isn’t reducing the amount of work they're doing, it’s actually increasing it. The leverage it gives you makes you take on more. The agents are available 24/7 and you can have as many as you can afford to keep feeding tokens.

On the flip side, though, I feel like my work is more flexible than ever in many ways too. I’m no longer locked into meetings all day, only productive at my desktop, and limited to when my coworkers happen to be around to be most productive. I can now keep things spinning at my desk, when I have a down moment waiting in line, or when I’m outside sitting at the park. The moments I used to spend doom scrolling, I now spend pushing agents forward.

My Development Workflow and DevX

DevX is the development toolkit I’ve evolved for myself to wrap around the various AI harnesses (Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, Amp, etc). It basically pulls together tmux, caddy, git worktrees and a bunch of orchestration to let me quickly spin up new worktrees with a full environment. Each instance finds an available port for each service, spins up the service with a file watcher to auto restart, sets up hostnames with Caddy and Cloudflare tunnels, and then spins up my harness(es) of choice. This lets me quickly create new environments that are super lightweight and allows for easy parallel workstreams. I commonly will be running 10 or so active sessions with 5 or more AI agents working in parallel.

Probably the biggest change in how I work in the last month or so, though, is that I developed a mobile / web interface for DevX. Essentially each session now gets a ttyd server that lets me access the tmux sessions over the web, through a web friendly UI. With some extra wrappers, I’m also able to have a soft keyboard for common controls like my tmux control button (ctrl+b), the agent control keys for running in the background, viewing output, etc, and convenience keys like the arrow keys. This is what has really let me decouple from my primary workstation while still being productive.

Now I’m able to work from my lighter Macbook Air when I’m away from my home office. I can check in on the work all the agents are doing from my phone. And I can easily access all the dev environments through Cloudflare tunnels over my Tailnet. I can even paste screenshots or images into the terminal and have a command to let the agents share files and screenshots with me over the web interface. It’s really allowed me a whole new level of flexibility in how and where I work.

The latest addition ties in a bunch of Android tooling (adb, gradle, emulator wrappers, and custom MCP servers) to give my agents full access to Android apps. We’ve been working on something new (more below) and letting my agents have the tools to browse around the UI and give UI/UX feedback has been mind blowing. Letting them have a “closed loop” to be able to validate their work makes the process so much faster and the AI dramatically more effective. It’s new, but already been a game changer. I recently asked my agents to walk through the onboarding flow, and they were able to navigate through the app and tell me what’s off. Wild.

DevX is free and open source, so if any of this sounds interesting feel free to give it a spin and let me know what you think.

Our Next Product

ToneClone is still cooking and if you haven’t checked it out, you really should. Crouton Creations was never meant to be a one product company, though, and we’ve been working on something new.

I don’t know about you, but I hate typing on my phone. In general, if I have to do more than a quick few word reply I usually just leave it until I can get back to a full size keyboard to write something. Given my recent move to more and more of my work on my phone, though, I wanted to change that. Partially inspired by Raycast, I’ve been building a new productivity tool I’m calling Nibit.

Nibit gives you snippets, smart clipboard history, quick links, AI transforms, voice dictation, and a way to push content between your phone and other devices, all accessible right from any app. We are using the “secondary keyboard” model and it’s a custom IME (it shows up as a secondary keyboard you can switch to) that gives you quick access to all these features in any app. Just tap the keyboard switch icon, get your content into the app, and it can automatically switch back to your standard keyboard. You can also use triggers like “,sig” to expand snippets inline without switching. And access all of it through a convenient app or quick tile if you prefer.

We’re just putting the finishing touches on it, so if you’d be interested in being an early tester (or know someone who might) just reply to the email and we’ll give you a full account to play with in exchange for feedback and/or bug reports.

What I'm checking out

A few things on my radar lately:

• Mobile MCP - MCP tools that let AI agents access and control Android and iPhone devices (sims and real phones).

• Exe.dev - super simple, stateful app hosting. Great for quick spun up apps to share with a friend.

• FFF MCP - a blazing fast fuzzy file finder built as an MCP tool. Uses frecency-based memory so your agents waste fewer tokens finding the right files.

Thanks for your support

All replies go straight to my inbox, so reach out if any of this was helpful or interesting. And if you know someone who might dig this, forward it or have them sign up themselves at https://croutoncreations.com/#newsletter.

Thanks for reading!

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Jon Fox