The bother of LLMs

One of my biggest really small annoyance with LLM-assisted development now that everything has turned agentic is how I can seemingly be "in the middle of something" all the time.

As a dad to two small kids, that isn't always the best. It felt like I was closing the lid on my laptop in the middle of a task every day!

Interupting something that basically is just an async workflow just to get home and resume felt bad.

I just wanted an agentic setup that either;

  • Feels very local
  • Feels very remote

The standard LLM coding setup is very dependant on both your local machine and its connection to the provider, which is just IMO the worst of two worlds!

Going fully remote

Finally, it felt like me being overly invested in my dotfiles and computer provisioning would be able to pay off! It's like a dream come true for a fiddling nerd!

The idea was simple:

Set up an SSH machine that I would carry out my work from!

I utilized a Beelink mini pc that we had lying around in the office and since I already had a pretty nice structure on my dotfiles using chezmoi I simply set it up exactly like my laptop is set up.

Using tmux and mosh I have an interuption-free SSH connection to my remote env, in which I simply work as usual!

Since my remote env is actually just a clone of my regular environment, but with permanent uptime (fingers crossed at least!) I can work from it while at the office without feeling lost or confused :)

The quirks

So far it hasn't been that bad to work over SSH. One quirk that came up quite fast that I really hadn't considered in the pre-claude era is pasting images to the remote..

I actually use it every now and then to help an agent see frontend issues for example, and it's a bit trickier than I had thought about before.

Thankfully internet still exists and I wasnt exactly alone thinking about this, so I found clipssh which with some aliasing and setup actually is OK. I have yet to give "screenshot -> clipssh" a keybind, but with that added I think it's close enough to local-feeling that I wouldn't even notice the friction!

So now my morning action is simply to open my laptop and the remote connection is just there, working, and even wrapped up any work I asked for while being closed.

Its quite nice actually.

Out!