[hmottestad]

I went the complete opposite of you. I enjoy being able run everything on my laptop, be it at home, at a cafe, at work or on the train. So I’ve maxed out a MacBook Pro instead. It doesn’t have 96 cores, but it’ll go head to head with your dev workstation and even let me play around with LLMs locally. Fans as usually silent, except when using the GPU for LLMs.

One thing that I could do with your rig though would be to start benchmarks to check for performance regressions, and then just put my laptop in my backpack.

[whalesalad]

Tailscale helps here. I run all my stuff remotely and just reconnect my shell with tmux, and vscode reconnects automatically. The only area this hurts is on an airplane. I was in Germany recently and still developed remotely using my workstation as the compute. It was super quick with no discernible latency. My laptop is essentially a dumb terminal. It could get stolen or run over by a truck and I’d be back in business after installing tmux and Tailscale.

I’ve replayed this pattern with other targets, too. For instance a system I maintain relies on a whitelisted IP in our VPC to interact with certain API’s at a vendor. I could proxy to that node and use that IP, but I’ve found it much easier to hack on that project (running on a dedicated EC2 node) by just vscode attaching there, using it live, and committing the changes from the end server running the system.

Being able to kill my laptop and know everything is still running remotely is nice. I rely on tmux heavily.