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Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

ykdojo.github.io

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Re: Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

#41

Post by _puk »

hahajk wrote: post #4
addajones wrote: post #2

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.

Dispatch/Cowork is basically claude code in a container. The section "Why not run it in a container?" would address your question in the post. One example I run into is that Cowork won't download and fill out or read pdfs or other files due to container permissions. Vanilla claude code has no problem using curl and wget.

Cowork gets tangled with git as well. Fails, and then can't delete lock files.

Running a helper from the terminal, making Claude work in a working directory, and then create a .commit file has been my workaround for this for a while now.

Imagine there's a better solution nowadays, but this allows me to use dispatch building on Vercel, so I can check it out from wherever, without too much pain.

Re: Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

#42

Post by hamdingers »

catoc wrote: post #24

I just cannot come up with a good AI-is-actually-24/7-helping-me-out use case. Please help: I wánt to need this!

They help folks on fixed rate plans consistently hit their usage limits which provides them the feeling of getting their money's worth.

Re: Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

#44

Post by voidingw »

catoc wrote: post #24

I just cannot come up with a good AI-is-actually-24/7-helping-me-out use case. Please help: I wánt to need this!

I've used it for the following when I've had tokens to burn:

  - Fuzzing with the goal for it to apply domain-specific and source-informed knowledge to choose specific fuzzing approaches.
  - More generally, any optimization problem that benefits from domain-specific or source informed knowledge.
  - Running Microsoft's SkillOpt [0].
[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/SkillOpt

Re: Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

#46

Post by esaym »

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.

0: https://gist.github.com/smith153/04b4068b5a2d7b234f1c3d5992d...

Re: Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

#47

Post by booi »

somewhatrandom9 wrote: post #38

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 t…

An argument against this method is UTM doesn't support graphics acceleration so browser support will be hobbled. Even if you don't need the acceleration, I've found browsers in UTM virtualized OS's can't get past some modern captchas and other browser fingerprinting checkpoints :\. It's terrible but that's the way it is.

Re: Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

#48

Post by ianm218 »

catoc wrote: post #24

I just cannot come up with a good AI-is-actually-24/7-helping-me-out use case. Please help: I wánt to need this!

Many Claude Code power users don’t really use IDEs anymore, so the only purpose of them working from their laptop instead of a phone is because that is the normal way to do it.

Here is a real use case: you are are responsible for some alerting channel. You have datadog/ cloud logging/ github all connected. You see a bunch of alerts come through while you are out and about and you prompt CC to investigate - Claude triages and says “all of the sudden you are getting time outs from this bank API your company partners with, this started an hour ago. It’s happening on ~15% of requests”. So you ping the guy at your company who does vendor relationships and go back to your weekend.

This is a non hypothetical example. Obviously it would be better if your job had a real on call rotation and more robust alerting and you wouldn’t be getting slack alerts on the weekend… but I take the approach this job affords me a lot of nice flexibility so it’s ok

Re: Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

#49

Post by mmh0000 »

esaym wrote: post #46

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. 0: https://gist.github.com/smith153/04b4068b5a2d7b234f1c3d59…

This is neat, and thank you for sharing!

I've been wanting to set up something exactly like this for my own use, but... You know, time is limited.

This is just enough scaffolding to have a little project for Monday morning!

Re: Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

#50

Post by 20k »

artisinal wrote: post #14
deadbabe wrote: post #8

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.

Swiping Tinder. It takes about 5000 matches to get a date. It’s easier to just automate it. It automatically adds dates to my calendar, all I have to do is show up. I get a summary of our chat history (well, what the agent wrote to her) in the notes section of the calendar entry and some pointers and talking points for the date. Maybe I should have the agent also do a background check. PS: This is a joke, but feel fr…

The future is agents chatting to each other on tinder and automating the initial getting to know you part. I can imagine that while that's going on, we could add like a little text chat box for the humans to chit chat with each other a bit and pass the time, before they can go on a date
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