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.
one-command setup
Run pane --remote-setup --label "My Server" on the remote machine. It prints a connection code. Paste that code into your laptop's Pane app. Done. No port forwarding, no SSH config files, no VPN setup.
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.