Spotify for Backstage

Here's a glimpse at this week's Xirp releases (v0.26 through v0.31), headlined by a command-line tool and browser panel annotations. → CLI tool — `xirp` now installs alongside the desktop app. Import sessions from your preferred agents, list running sessions, send messages, and upload transcripts, all from a terminal or from inside a coding agent. → Browser panel annotations — click elements on a page to highlight them, leave comments, and send all annotations to the coding agent in one prompt. Great for UI review workflows. → Cost alerts — set a daily spend threshold under Usage & Costs. Xirp warns you when a session approaches or crosses it, so runaway agents don't surprise you at the end of the week. → Mermaid diagrams — Markdown files with Mermaid code blocks now render the diagram in the file viewer instead of showing raw text. → Portal connection banner — sessions started before Portal was linked now offer a one-click restart to pick up Portal tools. → Interrupted session recovery — sessions lost to infrastructure failures (crashed terminal server, machine reboot) are now marked as interrupted instead of silently shown as completed, and can be resumed. Check out the full changelog ⤵️ https://hubs.li/Q04xgMHD0 Try Xirp free ⤵️ https://hubs.li/Q04xgMJT0

I kept reading five files to answer a question about one method. Generating tests identical to the twenty next to them. Thousands of tokens on work a frontier model is overkill for. Built two AiKA Modes in Portal by Spotify (bulk-reader and code-writer on Gemini Flash) and a Claude Code plugin called shunt that auto-routes to them via hooks. Claude keeps the reasoning. The cheap model handles I/O. 90% token savings on bulk reads. Modes are public, plugin is open source. What doesn't work: editing (worker summaries lack reliable line numbers), deep reasoning (worker missed a thread-safety bug Claude caught instantly), small files (network overhead exceeds savings). https://lnkd.in/dhUZSCEw

A Claude Code plugin called shunt and two declarative agents running on Portal by Spotify. That's all it took to stop burning frontier model tokens on file reads and boilerplate generation. The grunt work routes to a cheaper worker model. The frontier model only handles problems worth its price. 90% token reduction on bulk reads. No new infra. The agents are public and the plugin is open source. https://hubs.li/Q04wGXlY0

A few weeks in, we’ve already shipped eight beta releases for @Xirp, so here’s a quick update on what’s changed. One of the problems we talked about at launch was coordination: engineers running multiple coding agents across different projects, branches, and repos, each with its own setup and context. Since then, we’ve been hearing from engineers and technical leads using Xirp in their own workflows, and we’ve been closing some of those gaps they’ve flagged. We’ve recently added Cursor alongside Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini. Sessions can be grouped by worktree, so it’s easier to see which project and branch each one belongs to. And when a session spans multiple projects, each agent now looks for the correct instruction files for its own project. Agent setup and context are more consistent now, too. Codex gets the same launch context as Claude sessions, and Codex sessions launched from Portal now receive the workspace tools and project context they were previously missing. Claude Code and Codex now use their vendors’ official installers, and the new Doctor page checks your coding agents, tmux, and agent hooks, then shows you what failed and how to fix it. We’ve also fixed issues around sessions starting in the wrong directory, Codex sending false waiting notifications, startup failures, and other reliability gaps that get in the way when you’re running multiple agents in parallel. All of these changes are focused on the same problem: When you’re running more agents across more projects and tools, Xirp should make it easier to know where each session is running, what context it has, and when it actually needs your attention. That’s what we’re continuing to work on with every change we ship for Xirp. Keep the feedback coming. See all the changes here: https://lnkd.in/dcCQysAh

Nine releases hit the Xirp changelog this week! 🚀 Here's what changed across v0.14 through v0.19: - Cursor joins Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and Gemini as a supported agent - Usage and cost tracking shows your token usage and spend broken down by session and by day - Saved prompts — create, edit, and reuse prompts from a palette (Cmd+Shift+;). Prompts can be global or scoped to a project. - Workflow status — session cards can now show lifecycle status (backlog, in progress, in review, done) with grouping and sorting to match. - Session grouping by worktree — the sidebar and project page can group sessions by worktree, showing the branch across projects. - Terminal file links — Cmd+click a file path in the terminal to open it in Xirp's built-in editor at the right line and column. On the fixes side: coding agents now install via each vendor's official installer (no http://Node.js required), a worktree deletion bug that could remove an entire repo is fixed, and Codex sessions now receive the same Portal workspace context as Claude sessions. Full changelog → https://hubs.li/Q04vHntx0 Try Xirp for yourself → https://hubs.li/Q04vHj9y0