| 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:
How It Works
- User runs
/pair-programmer setup to install dependencies and set VIDEO_DB_API_KEY environment variable
- User runs
/pair-programmer record to start recording
- A picker UI appears to select screen and audio sources
- Recording starts and events are logged to
/tmp/videodb_pp_events.jsonl
- 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:
- Get current epoch:
$(date +%s)
- Compute cutoff:
epoch - N*60
- Filter lines where the
unix_ts JSON field exceeds the cutoff
- 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.
