Coding on an indoor trainer

A good agent session runs for twenty minutes without you. That's about the length of a warm-up. The obvious question: can you keep three agents busy while you ride, and not come back to a pile of questions an hour later?

What doesn't work

• Reading code on the bars. At threshold power you can't review a diff, and you shouldn't try.
• Typing. Obviously. Even a phone keyboard is too much.
• Push-to-talk. Holding a key or a button every time you speak gets old fast, and sweaty hands miss.
• Walls of text. A transcript of what the agent did is useless mid-interval.

What does

• Short spoken questions and short answers. "Is the migration done?" "Yes, tests pass, one warning about a deprecated flag."
• Planning. Describing the next piece of work out loud is easier than writing it. The agent turns it into a plan; you say yes.
• Big, glanceable status. What's running, what's waiting on you. Nothing to scroll.
• A confirmation step. The agent repeats what it's about to do before it starts. Mishearings happen with a fan blowing in your face.
• Leaving the risky stuff for later. Pushes and deploys wait until you're back at a screen.

The setup

OpenMimir runs on the Mac at the desk. An iPad on the handlebars shows trainer mode: the conversation in large type, live captions of what it heard, how many sessions are running, which ones need you, and huge approve and reject buttons. Earbuds carry the voice. The same setup works on a treadmill or a walking pad.

1. Install OpenMimir and run mimir init.
2. Make it reachable over HTTPS on your network (Tailscale Serve is the easiest) and run mimir pair.
3. Open the link on the iPad, switch to Trainer, and start talking.

Other people doing this

We're not alone. Developers already dictate GitHub issues from Zwift sessions, pair walking pads with voice dictation into Claude Code, or use Remote Control to check on sessions at the gym. The common lesson matches ours: talk during the workout, review at the desk.

What's next

Outdoors is the next step: a screenless mode that reads back what it heard, and phone calls so it works on a run or a ride without a screen at all.