How I run autonomous coding agents from my phone with OpenAI Symphony + Linear | Alessio Fanelli (Kernel Labs)

July 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Alessio Fanelli runs a card shop called Merlin Games in San Carlos, California, and he also builds software. He has found that the most practical way to use AI for coding is to stop being an "agent prompter" and start being an "agent manager." Instead of sitting at a terminal and feeding instructions to a local agent, he runs his coding agents on a cloud VPS and directs them through Linear, a project management tool he can access from his phone. The result is a system where he creates a task, moves it to "To Do," and the agent plans, implements, and opens a pull request without him watching the trace. He only steps in to review the output or send it back for rework.

The shift from local to cloud-based agent management

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Small Business AI & Physical World Intersection** - Alessio introduces his favorite AI use case: using AI to automate inventory and pricing for his physical trading card store, Merlin Games.
2 (02:23) **From Agent Prompter to Agent Manager** - Alessio explains his shift from local, human-in-the-loop agent prompting to managing autonomous agents in the cloud.
3 (04:31) **The Setup: Zill, VPS, and OpenAI Symphony** - Alessio walks through his infrastructure: a VPS (Zill) with 32GB RAM, pre-logged-in coding agents, and OpenAI Symphony.
4 (05:25) **The Linear + Symphony Workflow in Action** - A live demo of how a task moves from "To Do" to "Human Review" to "Rework" to "Done" using Linear as the control plane.
5 (07:43) **Token Cost Tracking as a Diagnostic Tool** - Symphony's dashboard shows token usage per task, which helps estimate costs and identify inefficient runs.
6 (10:42) **How to Set Up Symphony Yourself** - Alessio explains the practical steps to implement the open-source Symphony framework.
7 (13:10) **The Power of a Simple Markdown Spec** - Claire and Alessio discuss how a single, detailed markdown file (`workflow.md`) can define the entire agent orchestration workflow.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Alessio Fanelli, founder of Kernel Labs and co-host of Latent Space podcast, walks us through two very different AI workflows: (1) a fully autonomous coding setup using OpenAI Symphony + Linear, where Linear acts as a state machine and Symphony manages agents through the whole dev lifecycle with zero babysitting; (2) Codex with browser access searching eBay for underpriced Pokémon cards—autonomously browsing, extracting PSA certificate numbers, and flagging deals on $10K–$20K cards for his San Carlos card shop, Merlin Games.

What you’ll learn:

Why “agent manager” is a better mental model than “agent prompter”
Why local Mac Minis don’t scale, and what a cloud VPS unlocks
How to wire Symphony and Linear together as an agent state machine
How to track token costs per task (and what 221 million tokens buys you)
What Glimpse does, and why better agent senses extend autonomous runs
Why your CLAUDE.md probably needs a full purge, not more instructions
How Codex scouts underpriced $10K Pokémon cards on eBay at scale
The new category of small business that AI just made possible

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Brought to you by:

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Jira Product Discovery—Prioritize with insights, build with confidence

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Intro

(02:24) Prompter vs. agent manager

(04:31) Live demo: Symphony + Linear

(09:31) Setting up Symphony

(14:15) Purging your skills files

(18:06) The benefits of this system

(19:10) Demo: Using Codex to hunt for Pokémon cards

(24:17) The benefit of AI for small businesses

(28:23) Lightning round

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Tools referenced:

• OpenAI Codex: https://openai.com/codex

• OpenAI Symphony (open-source framework): https://github.com/openai/symphony

• Linear (project management/agent state machine): https://linear.app

• PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) grading: https://www.psacard.com

• TCGplayer (card pricing): https://www.tcgplayer.com

• eBay (used for card price scouting):