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 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

• 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.