use-cases / watch-your-agent-think-from-the-coffee-shop / hero

PIPE · TRACE · LIVE

Watch your agent think from the coffee shop

Your agent runs in a container at home. You're across town. The agent loop pipes each step into Hoody Pipe; you curl the same path from a phone tab. The trace lands character by character — no SSH, no dashboard, no upload.

Read the Pipe API

10:42

agent-pipe.…hoody.com/v1/pipe/trace

STREAMINGtail · no polling

# tail of /pipe/trace[think] user wants invoice CSV; check schema first[tool_use] sql.describe("invoices")[result] 14 cols · last_paid_at present[think] group by month, sum total[tool_use] sql.exec("SELECT …")[result] 12 rows · 41 ms[think] format as CSV, write to /out[tool_use] files.write("invoices.csv")

use-cases / watch-your-agent-think-from-the-coffee-shop / mechanism

Pipe each step out, curl it in

The agent's loop already emits structured events — think, tool_use, result. Pipe them into a path with PUT. From the phone, GET the same path. The pipe doesn't store the bytes; it streams them through to whoever is reading.

agent.loop · home container

PUT/api/v1/pipe/trace

# inside the agent loop$ echo "$step" | curl -T - \ https://agent-pipe.…hoody.com/api/v1/pipe/trace[INFO] Streaming to 1 receiver(s)...no buffer · backpressure on the agent itself

termux · café table

GET/api/v1/pipe/trace

# read from the same path$ curl -N \ https://agent-pipe.…hoody.com/api/v1/pipe/trace[think] check schema first…phone tab open · trace prints as it lands

Two HTTP connections, one path. The pipe holds the receiver's connection until the sender arrives — your phone can be open before the agent starts, or you can join mid-run. Hoody Pipe is the wire between them, never a database.

use-cases / watch-your-agent-think-from-the-coffee-shop / anatomy

Anatomy of a trace you can read

The agent emits four kinds of line. Each one tells you something a dashboard can't: not just what happened, but what the agent was thinking when it happened.

01 · BLUE

[think] — the reasoning step

The model's plan, in its own words. Why it picked this tool, what it expects back, where it might branch. Reading these is reading the agent's mind in real time.

[think] user wants invoice CSV…

02 · NEUTRAL

[tool_use] — the call

The exact function and arguments the agent decided to invoke. One line per call, in the order the loop fired them. No SDK abstraction; just the wire-level request.

[tool_use] sql.describe("invoices")

03 · GREEN

[result] — what came back

The tool's response, summarised to the line. Row counts, file sizes, status codes, error messages. The thing the next [think] line will reason about.

[result] 12 rows · 41 ms

04 · LIVE

Streaming, not polling

Every line lands as the agent emits it. No 5-second refresh, no "last updated 2 min ago". When the cursor blinks, the agent is between thoughts. You're tailing, not refreshing.

[tool_use] files.write("invoices.csv")

use-cases / watch-your-agent-think-from-the-coffee-shop / punchline

The agent ran for forty minutes. You read it like a book.

Forty minutes of reasoning, tool calls, and results — rendered as one continuous, color-coded text stream. You're not polling an endpoint. You're not reloading a dashboard. You're tailing the agent's mind from a café.

TRACE · LIVE TAIL00:00 → 40:12

00:00[think]reasoning step
00:14[tool_use]tool call
00:31[result]response back
06:02[think]reasoning step
12:48[tool_use]tool call
23:11[result]response back
31:55[think]reasoning step
40:12[result]response back

no dashboard
no polling
no upload
just curl

Read the Pipe API

use-cases / watch-your-agent-think-from-the-coffee-shop / replaces

What this replaces

Watching an agent has historically meant a SaaS, a dashboard, or a bespoke WebSocket app. None of that survives the question "what if I just curl it?".

AgentOps / LangSmith dashboardsA SaaS layer to read your own logs
Datadog APM for agent tracesBuilt for services, awkward for loops
Agent logging SaaSYour reasoning steps in someone else's database
Screen-share with yourselfVNC home from a café · battery murder
Polling /status every 5 secondsLatency you invented · cost you pay
Custom WebSocket dashboardA weekend project you maintain forever

use-cases / watch-your-agent-think-from-the-coffee-shop / cta

Pipe the loop, curl the path. The agent's thinking is now a tail you can read.

Read the Pipe API

use-cases / watch-your-agent-think-from-the-coffee-shop / related

Read the others

Sixty containers on one server

One bare-metal box runs dozens to hundreds of Hoody containers. KSM and BTRFS dedup make the marginal cost near zero.

Containers·Snapshots

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Snapshots·Containers·Terminal·Files

API endpoints that materialize on demand

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Exec·Agent·Code·Files

Branch computers like Git

Snapshot a running container — files, processes, memory. Restore in seconds. Fork via /copy. Branching, but for the entire machine.

Snapshots·Containers

Real VS Code on your phone

The Code Orchestrator spawns a VS Code instance on the container and serves the editor over a normal HTTPS URL. Any device with a browser can open it. The work lives in the container, not on the device.

Display·Terminal·Files·Containers+1

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One sandbox per customer, automatically

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Containers·Snapshots·Exec·Files

Wake up to a finished prototype

Hand the agent a paragraph at midnight. It spawns its own containers, snapshots before risky steps, and posts to your notification webhook at sunrise.

Agent·Snapshots·Containers·Browser+2

Emergency production fix from your phone

PagerDuty wakes you. Open the terminal URL on your phone. PATCH the snapshot from before the bad deploy. Production is back. No bastion, no VPN, no laptop.

Terminal·Snapshots·Network

Tail production logs to a URL anyone can curl

One pipe URL. Up to 256 readers. Three engineers tail the same incident at once with no bastion, no Datadog seat, no log forwarder.

Pipe

Push one build to thirty CI workers at once

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Pipe

Move 200GB between clouds with two curls

pg_dump | gzip | curl from Frankfurt. curl | gunzip | psql in Singapore. Bytes flow through the pipe with zero disk in the middle.

Pipe

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pg_dump streams straight into their psql. No file uploaded, no link shared, no download. The pipe routes the bytes through.

Pipe

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Step 3 streams tokens with curl -T -. Step 4 curls the same path. Tokens move generator to consumer at line speed. No SSE plumbing, no broker.

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A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

Append ?progress to the pipe URL. Anyone who opens it gets a live HTML dashboard — bytes, speed, ETA, state. Up to fifty spectators, none consuming a receiver slot, none touching the stream.

Pipe

The webhook fan-out you didn't have to build

Stripe POSTs to a pipe path with ?n=12. Twelve subscribers curl the receiver URL with ?n=12. The pipe holds the event until everyone is connected.

Pipe·Exec

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tar | zstd | curl puts node_modules into a pipe. Twenty downstream jobs curl | zstd -d | tar x. No S3 bucket, no cache action, no egress bill.

Pipe·Containers

Drag-drop uploads into your script

hoody-pipe serves a web upload form at every path. Drag a file onto the page, your script reads the bytes from stdin. Zero upload code, no S3 bucket, no presigned URLs.

Pipe·Exec

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

ffmpeg streams your screen to a pipe path with ?n=200. Each attendee curls the URL into a browser tab. No platform, no logins, no upload.

Pipe

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Container A writes to a pipe path. Container B reads from the same path. Backpressure is the connection. No Redis, no queue, no broker.

Pipe·Containers

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

The agent streams its trace to a pipe path you can curl from your phone. When it finishes, its last act hits hoody-notifications and your phone buzzes. Two URLs and a buzz — no SDK, no client app, no dashboard.

Pipe·Agent·Notifications

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

ffmpeg captures the mic, pipes to a URL. The other end curls and plays the audio. No Zoom, no SDK, no signaling server.

Pipe

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

A panel of five models reviews the same input. Each runs in its own container and streams its verdict to its own pipe path. A judge process curls all five in parallel and tallies the result.

Pipe·Agent·Containers

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

Snapshot the incident-time logs in hoody-files. Replay them through a Hoody Pipe URL with ?n=8. Eight engineers curl the same path and watch the cascade fire in lockstep — the post-mortem is a synchronized stream, not a Confluence doc.

Pipe·Files

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

A teammate pings for a 4 GB dump. Slack rejects it, Drive needs a share request. You type curl -T file …; they type curl … > file. The bytes move directly between disks — no upload bar, no link to share.

Pipe

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

One GPU runs llama.cpp. Its tokens stream into a pipe path with ?n=50. Fifty containers curl the same URL and split the stream.

Pipe·Daemon

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

Each container's monitoring loop curls a metric to a pipe URL. The dashboard curls the same URL with ?progress and renders the SSE stream.

Pipe

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

POST a managed cron entry with expires_at set 48 hours out. The job runs on schedule, then removes itself — no reminder, no cleanup PR, no stale entry.

Cron

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A hoody-cron entry that fires at 02:55 UTC, curls the snapshots URL, and names the artifact pre-migration-2026-05-04. Five minutes later the migration runs. If it succeeds, the snapshot sits idle and costs nothing. If it fails, you restore in 30 seconds with a single PATCH.

Cron·Snapshots

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Each tenant gets their own container and their own hoody-cron service. Customer A's 9am digest fires on time even when customer B's job hangs for 40 minutes, because they aren't on the same crontab.

Cron·Containers

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

A nightly cron POSTs a spawn request, the agent does its hour of work, then a second cron tears the container down. The agent exists only when there is work for it to do.

Cron·Agent·Containers

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

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Cron·SQLite·Exec

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

Your repo checks in `.hoody/crontab`. The deploy script PUTs that file to the new container's Cron API. Each branch gets its container, its filesystem, its schedule.

Cron·Containers

On-call escalation that ages out with the shift

POST a cron entry with expires_at = shift end. When the shift ends, the entry deletes itself. The next on-call posts their own.

Cron·Notifications

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Three lines in one crontab: hourly browser scrape into SQLite, daily exec digest, weekly archive to files. Flat-rate server, three rhythms, no scheduler service.

Cron·Browser·SQLite·Files

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

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Cron·Containers

Schedule the agent, not the script

A 5-field cron entry curls hoody-agent with a prompt instead of running a fixed script. Today is the last day of the month — the agent figures it out. The data shape changed — the agent figures it out.

Cron·Agent

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Each cron run POSTs a heartbeat to a notifications endpoint. A second cron checks last-heartbeat and pages on silence. Silence is the alert.

Cron·Notifications

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

An hourly cron POSTs a snapshot named with the hour. After 24 hours each new snapshot overwrites yesterday's at the same hour. The 24-floor time machine.

Cron·Snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

You captured 30 minutes of real Stripe traffic into a hoody-files folder. One cron entry replays it against staging at 9am every weekday — same volume, same payloads, same time-of-day pressure.

Cron·Files·Exec

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

Open the cron URL on your phone in the gate area. Tap a row, change a single field of the cron expression, hit Save. PATCH lands. The job fires tonight on the new schedule. No SSH session, no jump box, no laptop.

Cron·Terminal

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Cron at 9am POSTs to an exec script that builds the digest and curls a pipe URL with ?n=200. Two hundred recipients hit the same URL once.

Cron·Exec·Pipe

Mute the flaky job without losing it

PATCH /entries/[id] [ enabled: false ]. The job stays in your crontab waiting to be fixed. No deletion, no rewrite, no lost context.

Cron

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

A nightly cron POSTs to the supervisor agent with yesterday's agent traces from SQLite. The supervisor scores each one. Cron is the supervisor.

Cron·Agent·SQLite

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

The cleanup script checks if there's anything left to clean. When the directory is empty, it DELETEs its own cron entry. Job's done, job's gone.

Cron·Files

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

Cron weekly: POST to an exec script that runs certbot, posts the new cert to the proxy via PATCH. No shell session, no key, no jump host.

Cron·Exec

A weekly canary that tries to break production

Sunday 7am cron wakes a Hoody Agent in a fresh container against a snapshot of prod. It runs the OWASP top twenty, fuzzes the API, and writes a findings report to a URL by 9am. Container retires.

Cron·Agent·Browser·Snapshots

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

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Containers

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Each open PR gets its own clone of a snapshot. The container wakes when reviewers click the link; idle PRs cost nothing.

Containers·Snapshots

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

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Containers

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Containers·Snapshots

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

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Containers·Workspaces

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

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Containers·Agent·Exec

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Staging used to die because it was expensive to keep around. When idle is free, staging gets to live — even the one a teammate touched 90 days ago.

Containers·Snapshots

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

Eight hundred isolated customers on three bare-metal servers — one flat-rate monthly bill, no per-tenant meter. Each tenant gets a real container with its own kernel namespace, filesystem, and URL. Idle containers cost nothing on top of the server you already pay for.

Containers·Snapshots·Exec

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Cache files live in /files on the box you already rent. Workers PUT and GET tarballs over HTTP. No S3 bucket, no egress, no third vendor — the bytes never leave the box.

Files·Containers

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls

Each prospect gets a real, isolated copy of your product seeded with their data. Cloned from a snapshot. Theirs to keep for a week.

Containers·Snapshots

Watch your agent think from the coffee shop

Pipe each step out, curl it in

Anatomy of a trace you can read

[think] — the reasoning step

[tool_use] — the call

[result] — what came back

Streaming, not polling

What this replaces

Read the others

Sixty containers on one server

Onboard a developer with one link

API endpoints that materialize on demand

Branch computers like Git

Real VS Code on your phone

AI agents that spawn other AI agents

One sandbox per customer, automatically

Wake up to a finished prototype

Emergency production fix from your phone

Tail production logs to a URL anyone can curl

Push one build to thirty CI workers at once

Share your screen with a URL, not a meeting invite

Move 200GB between clouds with two curls

Send a teammate a database state in one line

Stream LLM tokens to anything that reads HTTP

A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

The webhook fan-out you didn't have to build

A CI cache that's just two curl commands

Drag-drop uploads into your script

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

On-call escalation that ages out with the shift

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

Schedule the agent, not the script

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Mute the flaky job without losing it

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

A weekly canary that tries to break production

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

Kill the staging-server tax

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls