I currently have Claude Desktop installed on a separate Mac mini M4 and control it with Dispatch. Is there a reason to do this method, it still seems the way I have it setup it has full control over the local account I gave it on the Mac mini.
Claude dispatch does things differently than this. Dispatch is very convenient for somethings (including connectors).
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’ve been doing something similar with an old m2. It isn’t powerful enough for local models, well sufficient local models but for openclaw and Claude it’s been perfect.
MacBook m1/m2 also are cheap enough now vs an Mac mini which I was surprised about, not too surprised but yeah..
I still don't understand what these freaks are doing running these agents 24/7 on machines. What are they doing? Managing a todo list? You mean crossing items off as you complete them? Research tasks? To do what?
Never really get good answers. There is no killer app. Just bikeshedding.
Let me guess -- in your day job you don't manage people. I have agents parsing messages, building out document sets, evaluating existing document sets, one is currently fixing a giant backlog of bugs and feature requests for a multi year personal coding project, one is exploring some ideas on speeding up inference at the edge..
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 just redid my homelab/media server (switched from an old NUC I couldn’t figure out how to stop overheating even with some decent modification work, now using an hp elitedesk with an i5 processor that is handling my stack nicely). Thinking about setting up a vm on the base ubuntu install for isolation to run Claude in. May play with dispatch, may just put raw Claude code then use Moshi app on my iPhone and iPad.
I run a lot of data science-type analyses that can take up to hours at a time to run, so Claude is « monitoring » tasks most of the time. I have it on remote-control so I get notified when a task is done or need clarification, but most importantly whenever I have a new idea, I can just ask Claude to queue it up. Most of the time my hardware is the bottleneck, not the subscription quotas.
It's less about 24/7. It's more about it can't work when your laptop is in your bag and in transit and there is something that you have set up and want to run.
I think the main use case for AI bros is to setup a goofy looking dashboard, name it Jarvis to cosplay being Tony stark, and display stats for all the generated videos they're posting to social media.
Generating leads for new work, if you are a freelance. Automatically answering customer support emails, if you own a SaaS. Monitoring competitors' socials, websites, etc for new features you have to compete with. Monitoring updates on software you depend on for breaking change / deprecation announcements.
I changed all smart speakers to retrofitted old radios with an amp and a pi. The hot word detection runs on the pi itself but whisper and LLM/task orchestrations goes over my local server with a 4080.
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.
The other day I used Claude Cowork to create a checklist for me so that I can safely re-install my laptop... It went through all ssh configuration, apps, downloads, documents etc... Once I had the checklist, I asked it to do the backup itself, along with instructions to re-install/setup everything once I had the laptop re-installed. This was something I was procrastinating for too long already...
I've been putting off learning Claude and this article had me strongly considering jumping in. Then I looked up Anthropic pricing and its 100x more convoluted than cloud services management. Its a goddamn full time job and independent skill set figuring out how to prevent going bankrupt from AI usage!
I think I'm gonna be a late adopter on this one until the industry figures out a less cumbersome pricing model.
Look at the subscriptions. That's how anyone using the stuff as an individual should be approaching it today if they are dealing directly with Anthropic or OpenAI.
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.
What's a good way to give a limited amount of money to the LLM, say like 2k or 5k or something. But keep it completely separate from my identity.
Like I want the LLM to have a bank account and he can do ANYTHING with that bank account that he wants. But he can't fuck anything up that has to so with me. He only has 2 - 5k
Any mechanism you find that can do this could also be used for money laundering, no? By way of identifying that money laundering in the US should not be possible (meaning without legal consequence), then this too should not be possible.
Yeah these guys will set up claude on their third pc after they realize their second pc keeps hallucinating out code nobody cares about or needs in hopes of staying relevant. I'll just keep coding by hand because I ACTUALLY ENJOY it. What a novel concept these days.
Though it doesn't get by all the hurdles mentioned, it is alternatively possible to run Mac OS in a VM on your Mac using UTM and install Claude Code within the UTM VM. UTM can be run under a non-admin Mac account. This can allow you to use most Mac-native tooling, at least. The interactive performance of using the Claude Code ui on the VM isn't great, however. I'm not sure if you can log into the VM via terminal on the host from the non-root admin account to avoid the ui performance issues.
Giving sudo permissions to an agent seems reckless. Claude gets his own unprivileged UNIX account, no more. I don't bother with containers or VMs however.
Outside of the article's mentioned graphics development, there is no reason to isolate an agent using actual hardware. I threw together this script[0] using libvirt to give claude its own graphical desktop env to be able to do user acceptance testing with Chrome. It has full root and can do what ever. If it makes a mess, I can dump and reinstall in seconds.
You mean you had claude throw together a script because this is heavily generated. Lost interest after about 250 lines, it's just tiresome reading through this incoherent amalgamation
Nice to give Claude their own blue bubble iMessage. Can be done in a VM of course if you have the capacity, but old Apple hardware seems to accumulate for many.
If I had one I would definitely try creating a separate VLAN for it to control, otherwise it's isolated from your files but still has access to your network and devices in it.
For me, it's mostly because I want whatever I'm running to stay on my own home network, with access to Home Assistant, my homelab, and so on. Beyond that, old laptops are hard to beat for this: I already have a few, plus spares, they sip power, the battery is a built-in UPS, and the screen and keyboard mean I have a console when something goes wrong — no hunting for a monitor. There are plenty of use cases for a cheap cloud VM or VPS too, of course.
In my case, most of my VMs live on a proxmox cluster of HP EliteDesk minis, with the laptop sitting outside that as the thing that manages the cluster and a few other odds and ends.
This is the paranoia talking, but given that Claude is going to be doing its own thing, I would put this box in its own VLAN or behind deny-all firewall rules to protect against network escapes.
I've done this before as a free replacement for my OpenClaw bot. It loses its connection sometimes and you need to redo the handoff with your phone. But otherwise, nice to have a use for my old Mac. It's also running my Home Bridge, which Claude can interact with. Pretty cool.
It's so strange to me that tech crowd uses macs for use cases that spend all their time idle or serve some light http request.
It's a glorified API gateway...it could run on a medium sized potato
Almost like an entire generation just grew up coding on macbooks as the obvious choice for coders and just can't conceptualize hardware outside of that walled garden
62 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 58.8 ms ] threadBut 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.
MacBook m1/m2 also are cheap enough now vs an Mac mini which I was surprised about, not too surprised but yeah..
Never really get good answers. There is no killer app. Just bikeshedding.
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 haven’t set up dispatch yet. I wonder what a Mac gets me over this set up if I don’t need iMessage
Please help: I wánt to need this!
(I wish I was joking)
Yes, surprisingly, this is something Google cannot do yet.
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.
I think I'm gonna be a late adopter on this one until the industry figures out a less cumbersome pricing model.
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.
Like I want the LLM to have a bank account and he can do ANYTHING with that bank account that he wants. But he can't fuck anything up that has to so with me. He only has 2 - 5k
Problem is I need the LLM to do this without an SS.
as one has
0: https://gist.github.com/smith153/04b4068b5a2d7b234f1c3d5992d...
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 ;)
Why not just use a VM in the cloud and just a CLI interface?
In my case, most of my VMs live on a proxmox cluster of HP EliteDesk minis, with the laptop sitting outside that as the thing that manages the cluster and a few other odds and ends.
It's a glorified API gateway...it could run on a medium sized potato
Almost like an entire generation just grew up coding on macbooks as the obvious choice for coders and just can't conceptualize hardware outside of that walled garden