As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.

I built my own web tmux type thing running on a beefy metal box (for rust builds) that I access over tailscale. I was using HAPI, but I wanted to simplify and use rust for the back end and my own elm-like front-end to improve performance. I haven't published it since it's pretty specific to my workflow (I ruthlessly keep it as simple as possible), but you can think of it like a Herdr type thing in the browser. It also has a phone interface and I generally use speech instead of typing as a lot of my compositions can be stream of thought.

I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...

I built a mobile client for agents called Cosyra. For this use case I'd say use chat to prompt an agent because it will queue the message for when you have internet and sends it as an https request so it's pretty lightweight. You can check it out here: cosyra.com

Yeah I just remote access my agent via cloud relay. There is no need in my experience for the laptop to have any oomph at all.

So any cuck-coding machine serves the purpose?