Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

  sudo useradd agent

  sudo su agent

It was also doing some kind of headless Chrome stuff in there. I don't know how that works, but it was taking screenshots iirc.

I did also set up VNC at some point but didn't find it worth using.

>If it makes a mess, I can dump and reinstall in seconds.

This is also true of a $3 VPS, where I found it very amusing to give my agent root. What's the worst that could happen ;)

I've been wanting to set up something exactly like this for my own use, but... You know, time is limited.

This is just enough scaffolding to have a little project for Monday morning!

Here is a real use case: you are are responsible for some alerting channel. You have datadog/ cloud logging/ github all connected. You see a bunch of alerts come through while you are out and about and you prompt CC to investigate - Claude triages and says “all of the sudden you are getting time outs from this bank API your company partners with, this started an hour ago. It’s happening on ~15% of requests”. So you ping the guy at your company who does vendor relationships and go back to your weekend.

This is a non hypothetical example. Obviously it would be better if your job had a real on call rotation and more robust alerting and you wouldn’t be getting slack alerts on the weekend… but I take the approach this job affords me a lot of nice flexibility so it’s ok

  - Fuzzing with the goal for it to apply domain-specific and source-informed knowledge to choose specific fuzzing approaches.
  - More generally, any optimization problem that benefits from domain-specific or source informed knowledge.
  - Running Microsoft's SkillOpt [0].

1/ Using GUI software. My agents are using headful Google Chrome and Figma. It helps a lot to have separate environment, which is not interfering my main machine.

2/ Running long processes (1h+), so I can leave main machine closed.

3/ Running intensive processes. I use Gemma, Whisper and Qwen, which could burn main machine CPU and resources.

Yes, surprisingly, this is something Google cannot do yet.

(I wish I was joking)

I’d love to just have Claude use my machine as a sandbox host instead of having to run RC on each host session. (In case you are listening Boris ;) ).

In the meantime I have a janky master RC session that creates new tmux windows and Claude RC sessions for each new code trajectory that I want to run.

The other benefit here is you can drop down and use termux to use Code directly if you hit a RC bug, I found permissions UX to be a bit flaky in the iOS UI.

But increasingly it seems like dispatch was slapped on top of cowork incrementally, when there was not an integrated and cohesive strategy across cowork between mobile/desktop/laptop. This is kind of what many of us get/got to learn in our 20's.

I haven’t set up dispatch yet. I wonder what a Mac gets me over this set up if I don’t need iMessage

With the $200 Claude subscription I was able to get around $13-15k of API equivalent usage in one month (note: this was during the "+50% usage" promotion that they have kept extending since May). When you hit your usage limit for a given time period you get cut off until the time period resets; don't bother paying for additional usage credits, you will be disappointed.

Maybe I should have the agent also do a background check.

PS: This is a joke, but feel free to steal this idea.

There's lots of news about the billions AI companies spend on data center construction, but it feels like it's not even a fraction of the money they're spending on endless nonstop blogs about how great their app is at doing... things. Things that will never be defined.

Why would I need an LLM to do this for me? That’s 5 minutes of work max, and doing it gets me in the flow of work again, to see what’s going on and needs to be done.

If you put yourself in a position where you need more leverage (technical or operating) I think you might find you get some value.

I’m actually very time-poor, so figured it could help be clawed back time doing… what exactly?

- scanning logs for errors and

- opening issues which are then auto-triaged and

- PRs are opened for them and auto-reviewed and

- merged (and deployed).

This workflow alone is immensely powerful, and takes alot of burden off the team.