AI agents eat RAM and battery. An 8 GB laptop running five parallel Claude sessions sounds great in theory. In practice you get thermal throttling, a fan that doubles as a hair dryer, and ninety minutes of battery life. The work belongs on a machine built for it.
your laptop is a window
The Pane UI stays on your laptop. Worktrees, terminals, and agents run on a remote host. You see the same interface, use the same keyboard shortcuts, review the same diffs. The only difference is which machine does the heavy lifting.
set up from settings
Install Pane on the machine that should do the work, open Settings > Remote Pane, and create a connection code. Paste that code into your laptop's Pane app or the browser app at runpane.com/app. Headless server setup is still available when you need it, but the normal path is in the app.
before and after
Local: 2 sessions, fans screaming, 1.5 hours of battery. Remote: 8 sessions, laptop silent, 5+ hours of battery. Same work, different machine doing the compute.
close the lid, agents keep working
Agents run on the remote host, not your laptop. Kick off a task, close your laptop, go for a walk or commute. When you open Pane again, the output replays and your sessions are exactly where they left off. The work never stops because you disconnected.
ideal setups
Laptop + home server. Laptop + cloud VM. Laptop + office workstation. Any combination where one machine has more RAM, more cores, or a power cable that never runs out.
Your laptop is for reading, reviewing, and steering. The remote host is for running agents. Pane connects the two with a single command and keeps the experience identical.
See also: Pane Remote vs Alternatives for a comparison of remote development approaches.