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by skybrian 15 days ago
If the agent is running on your machine, it will suspend when you put your laptop asleep. I prefer using a remote Linux VM to let the coding agent keep working.

I’m quite happy with exe.dev for this. My laptop is asleep upstairs but I have an agent coding away in a browser tab on the tablet I’m using. I could also check on it from my phone.

But it might also be nice if a setup similar to exe.dev were available for self-hosting. I have a Mac Mini that I don’t really use much.
4 comments
nzoschke 15 days ago
Another +1 to cloud sandboxes (and exe.dev) vs laptop sandbox.

Runs 24/7 completely air gapped from your laptop.

You also want a service proxy so the sandbox can access GitHub or Stripe without keys accessible to the agent. I haven't seen many of the laptop sandbox tools do this, where exe.dev does it out of the box with their "integrations".

I usually drop my own binary agent coding toolkit inside the sandbox so I have things like a code browsing and review right there in every sandbox too.

https://github.com/housecat-inc/scratch

Like you I also have a Mac Mini I've thought about making into my own 24/7 dev box, but building this vs buying 50 VMs from exe.dev for $20/mo doesn't add up for me.

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trencedamp 15 days ago
> but building this vs buying 50 VMs from exe.dev for $20/mo doesn't add up for me.

Assuming they never raise their prices (which they almost certainly will), you'll pay $240 per year for this. For that price you could pick up a second hand Mac mini today, though not bleeding edge I guess.

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matheusmoreira 15 days ago
> it will suspend when you put your laptop asleep

It is possible to simply not do that. Laptops work just fine as servers. They even have a builtin monitor and UPS.

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skybrian 15 days ago
Yeah but I ‘d rather run it remotely and not run agents on my laptop at all.
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celrenheit 15 days ago
Local first is also a feature, for work you often can't run company code on a remote VM that isn't company owned. Remote dev envs are on the roadmap though, that's one of the reasons why I designed the declarative clawk.mod manifest
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mswphd 15 days ago
https://paseo.sh/ supports self-hosting, though I've only used it a mild amount tbh.
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skybrian 15 days ago
It looks like they have the right idea but their workspaces are based on GitHub worktrees rather than separate VM’s.
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