When work is a chat box, the desk becomes optional

A few months ago I wrote about building BrakeChat, my own private ChatGPT clone, and one line from that post has stuck with me:

"the jobs they handle best are usually the ones I need while I'm away from the laptop and on my phone."

That was about chatting with a model. The thing I didn't see coming is that the same is now true for writing software.

I noticed it in my own behavior before I noticed it as an idea. I'd kick off a task at my desk, walk away to make coffee, and find myself pulling out my phone to check on it, not because I had to, but because that's where the conversation was happening. The work had quietly stopped being tied to the chair I was sitting in.

I got sandal tan lines way earlier this year

Usually it takes mid-summer before I notice the tan lines on my feet from my constant wearing of Teva sandals. This year, June hit and I already had some deep tan lines... It's when I started to realize that I may be spending more time outside than I ever have as a working adult.

Here's a normal day for me:

I describe what I want by typing or dictating into Claude Code or Pi.dev. The agent goes off and reads the code, drafts a plan, makes edits, runs the tests. My job has shifted from typing every line to steering: pointing it at the right problem, reading what it proposes, approving the parts that matter, and saying "no, try it this other way" or "sorry, I actually meant it that way, look at this example".

That kind of work is mostly reading and a flood of small decisions. And reading and small decisions are things I can do anywhere. A test fails while I'm out walking the dog. Someone files a bug right as I'm leaving the house for swim lessons with my toddler. None of those used to be actionable until I was back at a keyboard. Now they mostly are.

Some of my best ideas, though, show up when I'm nowhere near a computer. I do a lot of my thinking on the bike. There's a stretch of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail I like to ride from Millvale, along the Allegheny, down into the city for a coffee at La Prima in the Strip District. Something about the motion and the river shakes loose whatever I'd been stuck on at my desk.

The difference now is what happens after the idea hits. Instead of holding it in my head and hoping it survives the ride home, I can pull over at the coffee shop, open my phone, and hand it to an agent while it's still fresh. By the time I've finished my Paulie's blend dark roast, there's an MVP waiting for me to react to.

The mental model that finally clicked for me: the laptop is no longer the thing doing the work. The agent is. The laptop is just one of the places I can watch it and weigh in. Once you believe that, sitting at a desk to "be working" starts to feel a little arbitrary.

Where AoE comes in

The tool I use to hold all of this together is Agent of Empires (aoe). It runs my coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, and a long list of others) and lets me jump between them from a terminal or from a browser, including the browser on my phone.

The detail that makes it work for the away-from-desk case: the sessions live on my own machine, not in the browser tab. So I can start something at my desk, close my laptop (so long as you set your laptop to stay running while the lid is closed), glance at it from my phone an hour later, and it's all still running right where I left it. The phone is a window into the work, not a fragile copy of it.

I'm being deliberately light on the mechanics here, because the setup is one command and the docs cover it better than I would here.

AoE 1.11.2: the web dashboard is out of beta

With 1.11.2, the aoe web dashboard graduates out of beta! I used to use aoe from my phone by using iOS terminal apps to ssh into my machine, but now it's not necessary, you can securely access it from a web browser. It's been the experimental part of the project for a while, the thing I'd recommend with a small asterisk. The asterisk is gone.

If you want to try it:

brew install aoe

Then start it, hit 'R' to open the server widget, point your phone at the QR code it gives you, and put it on your home screen. The project site and the repo have everything else.

It's not all sunshine and roses

When work fits in your pocket and the agent is always one tap from another task, the hard part stops being getting work done and starts being stopping. Steve Yegge wrote about this in The AI Vampire: the new overwork isn't a boss demanding more hours, it's the agent asking "anything else you'd like me to do?" and you saying yes, again and again, because it's fun and it's productive and it never gets tired. You're the one who runs out of blood.

I've felt the pull. A free ten minutes turns into kicking off "just one more" task in line at the store, and suddenly the boundary between a walk and a work session is gone. The same property that makes this great, that the work follows you anywhere, is the property that can quietly eat your evenings, your weekends, and your rest.

So the skill that matters most in this new setup isn't prompting. It's self-control. Being able to look at a phone that could spin up three more agents and choosing to put it down. Letting the dog walk be a dog walk. Letting the light roast at La Prima be about the coffee sometimes, not always the next ticket. The tools removed the friction that used to force me to stop; now I have to supply that friction myself, on purpose. Get that wrong and you don't get a superpower, you get a vampire.