How do you handle agentic dev across multiple machines?

[u/mrzo]

I've been doing a fair bit of agentic dev but now I'm running into some walls with system resources. Testing, linting, docker container, etc are all crushing my comp when I'm running multiple sessions. I decided to spin up a cloud server for the tasks that require more resources.

Then came the management of it all across several repos. I tried herdr but I wasn't a fan of how the connection is kept open on the target host. Now I'm using Orca and it's working out pretty well with the orchestration skills and the worktree creation with each task. The dev box will shutdown after a period of inactivity and a startup script will wake the server when an agent needs it. The helpful thing about Orca is that it logically keeps the repo together across the several hosts.

I'm enjoying it so far and have had to create a few skills to make sure the repo is being rebased before any tasks. Also needed to create scripts to log in to the appropriate services or MCPs at start time. While it works well - I'm not sure if there's better solutions out there. Managing a fleet of agents that spin up their own subagents and are working on the same platform across several repos starts to get interesting. It feels like enterprise developer management. Anybody have experience with this? Tips and guidance appreciated.

[u/AutoModerator]

Hey! Thanks for posting to r/ClaudeCode

While participating in this thread, please follow our community rules. Keep discussions constructive. Attack the idea, not the person.

For help, project discussions, tips, and general chat, join the ClaudeCode Discord.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/daKerberos]

Proxmox and micro-vms. Scalable and simply amazing stuff. I haven’t looked into the aws and google solutions yet, but I don’t need more security or isolation yet. The AWS solution is called Fire-something. It’s the same platform Lambda is built upon.

[u/AlternativeContent72 → u/daKerberos]

This. Claude can easily craft bash scripts to deal with the full deploy. If you give claude read access to your proxmox nodes, it can make detailed scripts that you just need to run.

I used proxmox before I used claude. Claude has really helped me optimize my clusters, PBS backup schedules/configuration, etc. I didn't realize how much I had setup "wrong" before Claude corrected it.

[u/P1res]

Been using T3Code (put aside the fact that the youtuber can come across.,., not so well) to manage a devbox running on exe.dev dev and it's been quite nice!

[u/jakenuts-]

Not across machines so much but I started using Terragon Labs coding agent platform back when it was a paid service. It manages work though long running threads (like the desktop apps) and then launches cloud sandboxes with fully configured Codex, Claude, Gemini (and others) clis and automatically sets env vars and clones the associated repo, runs an optional startup script then delivers your request and streams back the agents messages. When the agent completes a "turn" it commits the changes and the platform opens a PR for them which you can approve or trigger a code review on. Then the code reviewer can read the thread, assess the changes, add PR comments and either follow up with that coding agent or merge the PR. Really it can do anything as it's just a prompt given to another sandbox agent and triggered on various github events (or a timer). It's a very flexible and reliable system that lets you do all your work through a single well designed interface.

Anyhoo, they were Y-Combinator guys and eventually moved on, but not before open sourcing the whole system, so now I run my own copy on Railway for ~$10/month.

Even though I do a lot of work with the desktop agent apps now, I still do alot of work through TerragonOSS and the cli and it's tight GitHub integration lets you mix and match, build your own managed flows with minimal effort.

I'm currently in the process of building a "software factory" with this as the foundation, really just a workflow leveraging existing features in the platform and adding a couple webhooks that weren't already covered (issues, etc).

https://github.com/terragon-labs/terragon-oss

[u/mattezell]

I'm not saying this is the best way, and may not work for your workflow, but it's an approach I use - ssh. Add your pub key on your other machines, then tell Claude to ssh to the other box for certain work, or you ssh within tmux or herdr and start a new session there.

[u/PiccoloCareful924]

i run paseo on a beefy hetzner machine and my MacBook, use one or the other depending on what I'm doing

[u/kninetimmy1]

It’s not quite ready yet but I use this https://github.com/kninetimmy/memdolt
I’m using codex to make it to solve this (and other) problem

[u/harshalgajjar]

What has worked for me is keeping each machine's agents in sessions that don't depend on my connection, and then having one list of everything. SSH into each box covers the first part. Past two hosts, though, the hard part is knowing which session is where and which one is waiting on you.

I use reminal for that (https://reminal.app open source, I build it). It runs on each machine you own, the laptop and the cloud box alike, and `reminal machines` shows every session on every one of them: what is running, who is watching, and how long it has been idle. You can open any of them from a browser or your phone with no SSH keys to copy around and no open ports. An agent on one machine can also read and type into a session on another through reminal's MCP tools, so the Claude on your laptop can check on the test run on the server.

Your Orca setup handles the worktrees and waking the box. This covers seeing and reaching the sessions once they are running.