Isolated Environments Should Be Borrowed, Never Owned

Our laptops carry far more agents than they could ever run at once. It took two changes to get there, and neither was a bigger machine.

The trouble started as a queue I hadn't expected, and I wasn't the one in it. The agents were, stopped and finished and idle, because my environment was busy showing me the last change.

We each had exactly one, which was plenty back when you could only work on one thing at a time. So we built more, and that helped right up until the laptop ran out.

Let them sleep

An untouched environment parks itself. The process exits, the memory comes back, and its address still works, so the next request wakes it.

Most are asleep at any moment, so the laptop is only paying for the ones actually in use.

Stop letting anyone own one

The other half of the problem wasn't running out of room. An environment belonged to one piece of work, so it could sit empty for days waiting on something you'd given up on, while the agent you actually cared about had nowhere to run.

Now they're a pool. Ask, and you get whichever is free. Nothing is ever taken from an agent that's still working, so the only thing you can lose is a slot you weren't using.

Renting isn't the escape hatch

The obvious answer is to rent them in the cloud and stop worrying about how many fit. It isn't that simple.

Our agents do their looking through Claude in Chrome, so the browser has to be signed in to our Claude account, and to everything else it needs to reach. That runs in the cloud fine, but now you're keeping a signed-in browser session alive per container, which is a different job from starting a machine on demand.

The laptops are already paid for, so staying local suits us for now. But the wall we hit next is a browser session, not a bill.