pair-programmer

name	pair-programmer
description	AI pair programming with real-time screen and audio context. Use when the user wants to record their screen, start/stop recording, or get context from what they're doing.

VideoDB Pair Programmer

AI pair programming with real-time screen and audio context. Record your screen and audio, with AI-powered indexing that logs visual and audio events in real-time.

Commands

When user asks for a command, read the corresponding file for instructions:

Command	Description	Reference
/pair-programmer record	Start screen/audio recording	See commands/record.md
/pair-programmer stop	Stop the running recording	See commands/stop.md
/pair-programmer search	Search recording context (screen, mic, audio)	See commands/search.md
/pair-programmer act	Act on a spoken instruction from the mic	See commands/act.md
/pair-programmer what-happened	Summarize recent activity	See commands/what-happened.md
/pair-programmer setup	Install deps and configure API key	See commands/setup.md
/pair-programmer config	Change indexing and other settings	See commands/config.md

How It Works

1. User runs /pair-programmer setup to install dependencies and set VIDEO_DB_API_KEY environment variable
2. User runs /pair-programmer record to start recording
3. A picker UI appears to select screen and audio sources
4. Recording starts and events are logged to /tmp/videodb_pp_events.jsonl
5. User can stop recording from the tray icon (🔴 PP → Stop Recording)

Output Files

Path	Content
/tmp/videodb_pp_pid	Process ID of the recorder
/tmp/videodb_pp_events.jsonl	All WebSocket events (JSONL format)
/tmp/videodb_pp_info.json	Current session info (session_id, rtstream_ids)

Event File Format

Events are written as JSONL (one JSON object per line):

{"ts": "2026-03-05T10:15:30.123Z", "unix_ts": 1709374530.12, "channel": "visual_index", "data": {"text": "User is viewing VS Code with auth.ts open"}}
{"ts": "2026-03-05T10:15:31.456Z", "unix_ts": 1709374531.45, "channel": "transcript", "data": {"text": "Let me check the login flow", "is_final": true}}

Environment Variables

The recorder reads these from environment variables:

Variable	Required	Description
VIDEO_DB_API_KEY	Yes	VideoDB API key
VIDEO_DB_BASE_URL	No	API endpoint (default: https://api.videodb.io)

Reading Context

Events are in /tmp/videodb_pp_events.jsonl. Use CLI tools to filter — never read the whole file.

Channel	Content	Density
visual_index	Screen descriptions	Dense (~1 every 2s)
transcript	Mic speech	Sparse (sentences)
audio_index	System audio summaries	Sparse (sentences)

Channel filter — use grep to filter by channel, pipe to tail for recent events:

grep '"channel":"visual_index"' /tmp/videodb_pp_events.jsonl | tail -10

Keyword search — grep across all channels:

grep -i 'keyword' /tmp/videodb_pp_events.jsonl

Time-window filter — filter events from the last N minutes:

1. Get current epoch: $(date +%s)
2. Compute cutoff: epoch - N*60
3. Filter lines where the unix_ts JSON field exceeds the cutoff
4. Pipe through grep to narrow by channel

Generate the appropriate filtering command (grep, awk, python3, jq) based on complexity.

For semantic search across indexed content, use search-rtstream.js:

node search-rtstream.js --query="your query" --cwd=<PROJECT_ROOT>

<PROJECT_ROOT> is the absolute path to the user's project directory. This is NOT the skill directory — resolve it before running the command.

See commands/search.md for the full search strategy and CLI patterns.