Now the fun part. I take a piece of work that is semi-complete, or not isolated properly, or just too heavy for my laptop. (Yes, too heavy does happen often, I have drained my MacBook Pro's battery 100% to 3% within just ~1.5 hours several times, and I do not like how warm it gets.) Then I tell my laptop agent — let's say it's Cursor because it often is — "This should be done on that machine, in a different harness. Go there, open a tmux session, copy whatever you need to make it happen. Create the environment from the one in this repository; it's .gitignore-d because it is machine-local, not because it is secret, so you are allowed to share it. Run it there, and tell me how to check on it later."

And it does. The laptop agent SSHes in, sets up the session, launches the agent on the remote box inside tmux, and disconnects. tmux is what makes this work: the remote session outlives the connection, and it turns out remote agents can drive tmux perfectly well via send-keys, so I am just a happy observer here. There is no live laptop session to keep alive and no babysitting. I can close the laptop, reboot it, come back the next day, and ask the agent to check on the work and clean up. It does not drain my battery. It is practically free for the laptop.

What I get out of it: real isolation from my laptop and from my sensitive credentials, because the remote user has none of them. And a setup that is cheap to recreate. Once the work is done, I ask the agent on either machine to document everything and commit it. Then I create a NEW user on that box and repeat the whole thing from scratch, to prove it actually reproduces.

Also, a shameless plug: my Scoped Skills Helper, scsh, is what I use on that remote machine to orchestrate swarms of agents that are run under different harnesses. Different parts of the work are done by different model providers, and I have a complete asciinema recording of every single process, with annotated timestamps of what happened when, and how many tokens each invocation took.

Ain't this cool?