Blog
Notes from building Pintail, a Mac app that reads coding agents’ replies out loud: what it costs, what broke, and what I measured.
Writing for the ear: turning long agent replies into something you can listen to
The prompt rules I use to turn long coding-agent replies into short spoken summaries, with the four lengths, and which models followed them.
What it costs to hear your coding agent (measured, September 2026)
Real OpenRouter prices for text to speech and for the short summary before it, measured in September 2026. About half a cent to 2 cents a reply.
What broke when a TTS model read my agents' long replies
Babble on single words, a 96-second cap, 13 dB between voices, captions that drift. What went wrong reading coding-agent replies with Voxtral, and the fixes.
Voice coding on a Mac in 2026: dictate in, listen back
Voice coding has two halves. The tools for dictating prompts to Claude Code on a Mac, the tools for hearing the replies, and what each costs, checked in September 2026.