How to Be a Beast
The tour of Cole Tebou's whole setup, from the phone in a pocket to agents running on AWS servers, and the handful of habits that make one person work like a team.
f. 1rThe LibraryCapitula · contents
Being a beast, in Cole’s sense, is not about typing faster. It is a setup in which one person directs a team of agents across several machines, from a desk or from a phone, with every repetitive step automated, every result checked, and nothing important kept only in someone’s head. This page is the tour. Every stop has its own folio, and the Pinakes lists them all.
The shape of it
Picture one long working day. Cole sits at the Mac mini with a mechanical keyboard and an MX Master, in Ghostty. Everything lives in tmux, one session per project, so nothing dies when a window closes, and tm, a fuzzy session picker, jumps back to whatever was touched last. In the tmux windows run agents: Claude Code, started with yu, and Codex beside it. Some of them run on AWS Servers for hours, where a closed laptop lid cannot stop them.
When Cole steps away, the work does not. From the phone, Termius opens the same tmux sessions over SSH on a Tailscale network, and the Alt bindings were chosen so they work from a phone keyboard. Drover shows which agents are working, which are idle, and which are waiting on a decision. Dictation turns a walk into a brief.
StudiumThe agent fleet
Choose a view, step through it, or click any part to see what it does.
The fleet
The machines, the agents on them, and what ties them together. Pick a view above, or step through the tour.
Seven habits
These are the ideas the rest of the wiki keeps coming back to.
- Everything in tmux, everywhere the same. One set of Dotfiles on every machine, installed by one bootstrap script with a Brewfile, so a shell, a key binding or a hook behaves identically on the Mac and on a server. The status line, the prompt and the Claude Code status line say where you are and what is running at a glance.
- Agents are the workforce; you are the owner. Cole decides and approves; coordinators split work into briefs; workers own one slice each. The The Agent Fleet page has the roles and the rules that keep a dozen agents from stepping on each other.
- Parallel by default, isolated by design. Independent work runs side by side: subagents for research and review, and parallel worktrees when writers would touch the same files. Each worktree gets the env files it needs and its own Docker Compose project.
- Write it down where the next agent will look. Hooks capture the exact words of every request, file reflections before compaction, and hand long sessions to fresh successors through handoff chains. Messages between agents are recorded. The shared brain holds what every agent on every machine should know. Idle sessions are parked, not left to eat memory.
- Every change is checked by a machine first. Tests, oxlint and type checks run locally and in GitHub Actions; the package manager is chosen on purpose; two different engines review the same commit. This wiki follows the same rule: every edit is a pull request with four required checks.
- Infrastructure is code, and the front door is locked. OpenTofu describes the Cloudflare zones, Vercel projects, GitHub settings and the Tailscale policy; changes are planned on a pull request and applied on merge. Requests reach servers through the Cloudflare front door and a tunnel, never an open port. The new Cloudflare CLI and email routing cover the rest of the edge.
- Watch everything, pay for what matters. Traces and their cost go to Langfuse, errors to Sentry, host health to Datadog, and the long-term record to S3 and Glacier, all along one observability path. Free tiers carry most of it; the paid plans are the ones that earn their keep, and What It Costs adds them up.
Building things
The work itself is mostly software: web apps on Vercel, bots and services on AWS, and apps for Apple’s platforms. iOS development starts with a choice between Capacitor, Expo and native Swift, runs through Xcode and App Store Connect, ships betas through TestFlight, and can push a build straight to your phone. The same toolkit makes Mac and menu bar apps, Apple Watch apps, Safari extensions and Chrome extensions, and Windows has its own path in Windows Apps and WSL.
Underneath it all are a few plain tools worth knowing well: git habits that keep history clean, ripgrep for finding anything, caffeinate and htop, POSIX as the reason macOS and Linux feel alike, PGP for signing and encrypting, language servers, CLIs, MCP servers and skills that give agents their tools, and Screens for reaching the Mac’s own screen from anywhere.
Money and privacy
Cole also keeps a table on money that is not a bank’s: what Bitcoin does and does not keep private, small home miners like the Bitaxe, wallets such as Sparrow and Cake Wallet, and why Monero is the one Cole calls really private.
Where to start
- New to the terminal? Read Ghostty, tmux, tm, the Session Picker and SSH, in that order, then Dotfiles.
- Running agents already? Start at The Agent Fleet, then Hooks, Handoff Chains and Parallel Worktrees.
- Deploying things? Servers, OpenTofu, Cloudflare, Vercel, then The Observability Path.
- Deciding what to pay for? What It Costs, with the Domains page if you are about to buy a name.
- An agent reading this? The wiki has its own MCP server: search it, and propose an edit when something here is wrong.
About this wiki explains how the site is built and why it looks like a page from Leonardo’s notebooks filed in the Library of Alexandria.