Summarizer

While I don't use the AI part I have a very similar scheme and it is one of the reasons I encourage people to live in the terminal. The idea is to create a modern "terminal"[0] My main computer is a Macbook Air, which I carry around with me. It's purpose is for: internet, using Microsoft products when I'm forced to, Zoom/meetings, and SSH (or Mosh). Most of my work is not done on this Macbook, instead I use it mostly as a terminal. I have a desktop that's sitting behind my TV so that it can be my TV and gaming system (yeah I know Monitor > TV. I'm a filthy casual and I don't care). I have a mouse connected to that computer and instead of using a keyboard I use ydotool (Wayland xdotool) with a shortcut on my iPhone or a script on my android phone or from my Macbook. I don't have to get up from the couch and I don't need a clunky wireless keyboard to clutter my livingroom. Additionally I have a few pis and an old android phone with Tailscale installed on them. That's come in handy before as a machine's been disconnected and so I couldn't ssh from outside. Also makes it really easy to do a jump if you want to keep a machine off Tailscale or you don't have full control (like my 3D printer). This setup is very natural feeling if you live in the terminal. I actually started doing this when I started doing HPC work. In a setting like that you're never sitting in front of the computer you're doing most of your work on so it kinda clicked "why was I restricting myself outside work?" Plus there's the side benefits of I always have access to my media, tools, and other stuff. You can do exactly the same thing with a phone but I like having a keyboard and the air is very lightweight and has a long battery life. Any netbook would have done the job tbh. [0] There's a reason they're called "terminal emulator s" rather than just "terminals".

Yeah thin clients [0] make a lot of sense with this kind of workflow. If you only really need text, living in the terminal and browser, it might make sense to use eink for eye comfiness and outdoor readability, something like this hack: https://maxogden.com/kindleberry-wireless . Or one of those eink android tablets. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client

Has the refresh rate on eink devices reached like 30-60fps? It definitely looks cool and I might give it a try, but I do love my dark mode and color syntax. My understanding is that color on eink is pretty limited. It also isn't worth it to me if I'm going to be spending $500+ on a "monitor". But I'd definitely love if things moved in that direction. Honestly if Apple wasn't so insistent on making the iPad not a general purpose computer I'd use that as my thin client.

> ... I encourage people to live in the terminal. I've done this for decades. screen or tmux (although I still confuse the keybindings between the two). When coding on the move (mostly when I had a long commute or was away from the office visit clients) I'd use the Linux console (Ctrl+Alt+F1-F6) rather than X. Even in the office I had an old amber/green terminal that connected to my Linux desktop via a serial port. Nowadays I have a 14" USB-C monitor (ASUS Zenscreen) that sits beneath my main monitors which runs a terminal full screen.

Similar, except I use a 10 year old surface pro 3. But I have to have a mechanical keyboard, so it's not exactly portable, but I can work from anywhere I have no interest in LLM, or vibe code. Even though I miss the capabilities of intellij, nvim can fill the roll in the terminal very nicely, except rust analyzer filling up storage fast, I also have a spare mobile, which I use to wake the computer up. And I have a python script running on it, to shutdown the computer in case of power failure. After initial hiccups it working pretty well, except cats turning off the router, well how many can use the excuse that I couldn't finish the work because cat controls your network. LoL

Things are trending this way. I call it the PC counter-revolution.

Well the beauty is the logic lives on the server. The client is just a client. If it disconnects you just reload the page. It can work just fine in the background because it’s not running on your phone. Just like you can refresh the ChatGPT website, but OpenCode lives on your pc at home, not OpenAI servers.

Historically I had thought there was a pendulum swing between using local computing resources vs. having a dumb terminal to access something remotely. But now instead of swinging back to local resources, apparently we're proposing to add a second layer of remote access (phone -> computer -> Claude servers).

In the last 5 years I pretty much fully migrated to my laptop being a terminal for other machines. I more use it like a local machine in HPC: web browsing, word processing, scripting. Anything serious is done remotely. But I also live in the terminal and so realistically what's the difference? 99% of the time the result is that I get to use a "big" computer without having to carry it around. FWIW, I'm not a big fan of AI coding. I use AI (including LLMs) and I am an AI researcher, but the vibe coding just hasn't clicked despite constant efforts. I guess it can make more sense to do it if you're programming from your phone because while normally typing isn't the bottleneck it definitely is on the phone (or at least far less comfortable)

Same setup as mine, I have an OpenVPN server running in my router, and my main PC has wake-on-lan and a KVM as a backup to turn it on and off. I have an old used Dell Latitude that I use as a pseudo thin client. I ssh into my PC, and everything just works. I really like this setup because I only have one environment, so everything is there, and I don't have to install anything in the laptop

> I really like this setup because I only have one environment, so everything is there, and I don't have to install anything in the laptop Yeah that's one of my favorite parts. Same about living in the terminal. I can be effective anywhere nearly instantly. I carry everything around in my dotfiles and keep it small (keep the .git folder small and don't add anything except text files)[0]. On that note, one thing I highly recommend to people is to add some visual clues to tell you which machine you're on. I use starship and have a few indicators but I also have some PS1 exports that I've used in the past or use in new tmp instances (I HIGHLY recommend also doing this for when you're using the root account). It can get confusing when you have different tabs on different machines and it is easy to mistake which one you're on. [0] I also recommend keeping notes there if you like writing in markdown. Files are so tiny that it's worth having them. It's benefited me more times than I can count.

I mean the power of the work machine really depends on what your needs are. Definitely should adapt to whatever your needs are. > And there's no way this thing would handle a useful local model So if you have a setup like mine then it is fairly trivial to incorporate that (or anything else). Either way you'll need a machine that can do the local AI though. Either that is on your "work machine" or you run the AI on a separate machine. You could even rent a machine and as long as you add it to your Tailscale network then you're connected. I strongly suggest having a workhorse machine and then let other devices be your terminal into it. Your terminals can be very cheap (or an old machine) or as suggested, your phone.

Maybe in the future we'll all have a "hub" in our homes that contains our data, but we'll shell out to the local datacenter for AI compute, while our actual interface will be a VR headset or tablet located with us, anywhere in the world.

We need to take this idea further. Instead of "remote first", I'm waiting for the first company that will bodly declare "you can do all your work on your phone". I'm tired of lugging my laptop around. Let me work from the beach with my phone and ar glasses.

I feel like there’s something special about connecting to a server to build and deploying on the same server. Claude Code on the web lets you connect to a repo, test the code, and deploy it, but then you have to host the app and data somewhere else to take it live. IMO the ideal is doing everything in one place and it seems like a lot of dev tools are going in that direction too (v0, val town, deno deploy).

I'm just as baffled. I went to the comments to better understand but I still don't get it. I've coded on my phone on several occasions. If you use Android, you don't even need a server or a home computer since Termux works really well as it is. It can run node.js and a bunch of other development tools easily. Or you can just ssh into a server with a development environment and do your stuff their (AI or not).

This can be done not just with Claude but also with codex and gemeni cli. Well technically anything that has a cli interface. I run both gemeni (fee) and codex (paid), with tmux thrown in to switch between phone and laptop. Laptop runs vscode with ssh to my server but I could also use the web version of vscode.

but also dont try coding on a laptop. use a proper desktop, or better yet, get time on a mainframe. the problem has been solved forever, juat do work from the workplace at a dedicated terminal, built for doing that work at.