Standby
A short story about why I built Standby.
Not smarter. Better informed.
Our coding agents don't lack intelligence. They lack the conversations where half our thinking happens.
In the last year, coding agents changed how I work. I hand Claude Code a task, and it reads the code, runs the tests and comes back with a change. I can't imagine working without it. For a lot of us it feels like a 10x.
But only at the desk. About half my working day is in meetings: design reviews, brainstorms, a quick call to sort something out. That's where much of the thinking happens, and Claude Code, the most capable colleague I've ever had, isn't in the room. The meetings run the way they did years ago. Afterwards, back at my desk, I retell what I remember in a few typed lines.
Smart enough, not informed enough
The newest models are remarkable, and for most of my work I don't think more intelligence is what's missing. What's missing is context. Everything Claude Code knows about my work reaches it through me: the prompt I write, the docs and skills I set up, the code. All of it was chosen and shortened by a person first. The conversations, where the reasons and the half-formed ideas live, never make it through.
They don't need shortening. Four hours of meetings is about 35,000 spoken words, around 50,000 tokens. A model takes that in at once, and it's small next to a codebase. Most of it won't matter, and that's fine: telling what's relevant from what isn't is what these models are good at, often better than our summaries.
What it needs
Two things. To be closer in time: in the meeting, while what it knows can still change the discussion, not just the notes afterwards. And all of it: everything that's said, as it's said, rather than my summary of it.
Why not the tools we already have
There are meeting tools with AI in them, and they didn't fit. Some send a bot into the call; others live inside one meeting app, each with its own assistant and its own slice of my history. None of them is the agent that knows my code.
And I didn't want one more app. We're all a little tired of AI tools piling up around us. I like Claude Code, and I want to stay in it, with one ear in front of it that hears whatever reaches me.
Why now
Building that used to mean building something beside Claude Code. Then Claude Code opened up, with plugins and mods, so an idea like this can live inside it instead. That's what unblocked me.
What I built
That's Standby. It lives inside the Claude Code you already use, the one that knows your code. It hears your meetings on your Mac, with no bot in the call, and you can call it and talk things through while it does the work.
It doesn't make Claude any smarter. It makes it better informed: not a better brain, but a seat in the room.
Thanks for reading.