For about a month, I did the dumbest thing in my dev career: I carried an open laptop around my apartment like a newborn.
I'd kick off a long Claude Code run — a refactor, a test suite, a migration — and then I couldn't close the lid. Close the lid, the machine sleeps, the session dies, the context is gone. So the laptop came with me. To the kitchen. To the couch. Balanced on the arm of a chair at dinner.
There had to be something better than "keep the MacBook awake forever." It turns out there wasn't — so I built it, and last week I made it source-available.
Remote control is not always-on
Anthropic recently shipped Remote Control for Claude Code, and it's genuinely good: kick off a task in your terminal, pick it up from your phone. If "I want to check on my session from the couch" is your problem, it's solved now.
But look at where the session lives. It still runs on YOUR machine. Remote control RECONNECTS you to a session — it can't keep the machine that session runs on awake. Laptop sleeps, session stops. RC just greets you when everything is back.
Remote control gives you access. What I kept needing was uptime.
What an always-on workspace actually changes
The fix is boring in the best way: move the session onto a machine that never sleeps, and make every device — laptop, desktop, phone — just a client.
- Close the lid mid-run: the run keeps going. Your build keeps building, your dev server keeps serving, background jobs keep running.
- Open the Claude app on your phone an hour later: the session is exactly where you left it. Not a paused screen — progress.
- The workspace persists: files, installed tools, running services. It's a real dev box, not a sandbox that evaporates.
You come back to results, not to a resume button.
Why I made it source-available
The #1 thing people told me while I was building this: "I'm not putting my coding agent AND my secrets in someone else's cloud."
Fair. So the whole thing is now source-available: one command installs it on hardware you control — a home server, a NUC, a $5 VPS. It auto-provisions HTTPS (even without a domain), and it runs the official Claude Code CLI on your existing Claude subscription. No API key, no token markup, and nothing leaves your box that you didn't send.
License honesty, because this crowd deserves it: it's BSL 1.1 — free to self-host, converts to Apache-2.0. I know BSL isn't OSI-approved open source. It's the compromise I could live with as a solo founder; happy to argue about it in the comments.
Try it, roast it
It's early alpha. The repo is github.com/Podbay-Cloud/podbay — the README has the one-command install.
If you've solved this differently — tmux on a VPS, a homelab k8s shrine, sheer stubbornness — I genuinely want to hear the setup. And if you try mine and it breaks, tell me how. That's the fastest way to make it good.
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