Moving Away From Localhost

The way I work has been changing and is continuing to change. It was just over a year ago when I was using Neovim with Supermaven to write code. I then started to use Claude Code and Zed to let AI write more of my code. Then came December and I almost entirely stopped using Zed and the only interface to code was the terminal. I still used Zed occasionally if there was a specific piece of logic that I cared was implemented correctly. I also still use Xcode for iOS development to view interfaces. I used to run my dev servers in a separate terminal but now I tell my coding agent to run them for me. In the past few weeks this has changed again.

I’m increasingly questioning why I run my coding agents on my laptop at all. Part of it is that I keep wanting them when I’m not at my laptop. Either I’m in the middle of something and have to leave my house to travel somewhere and it’d be nice to continue working, or I’ll be out and have an idea about a feature or a bug fix or similar and want to start a coding agent to work on it asynchronously. This has made me explore hosting options and there I found exe.dev (founded by the founder of Tailscale btw). A subscription pricing model and I get access to 50 VMs which all access the same underlying hardware. This is perfect for the agent use case because agents are inherently idle. After trying out this product, I moved a pre-existing Hermes Agent to a VM that I was hosting on AWS for my girlfriend’s business, and I set up my own dev box as another VM.

The only dev work that I still use my laptop for is iOS development, for projects like AntiRot. Besides that, working from a remote dev box doesn’t feel all that different from when I was working from my laptop. I still access everything through my terminal. My initial thought was that I’d connect to my dev box on my phone and trigger coding agents that way. I downloaded Termius and set up my ssh key. That’s it. I mean, that’s literally it. I never used it. I opened it up a few times on my phone but never ran a command. I think it was because it’s a bit overwhelming using a terminal from your phone when I’m used to all the commands and shortcuts on my laptop. Having to run a tmux session, start Claude Code, view diffs, was all a bit too difficult to do via a terminal UI.

This is as far as my personal setup has gone. I’m now thinking about where this is headed. Yesterday I tried Amp and the UX was incredible. Similarly to OpenCode, you can run it as a process on a VM and attach to it anywhere. What Amp has done that is impressive is that it’s made the integration between platforms seamless. Syncing every session feels super good. This feels like where my own development setup is naturally going. Coding agents can run from anywhere. The next pieces are infrastructure and UX.

Infrastructure that is pre-configured, quick to start up and shutdown, and cheap. Companies like exe.dev, Modal, Daytona, Sprites Fly.io, and probably many more are already doing this. UX that makes all of this “just work”. It’s hard to say what this looks like, but Amp is the closest I’ve seen.