1023: Mosh, Caddy & Tailscale: A Remote Dev Deep Dive

**Wes Bos** (0:00)
Everybody is building tools for agents. Nobody is building actual products.

**Scott Tolinski** (0:04)
Once I got TMUX and I was like, oh, I get it that I need these long running sessions, then Herdr for me was kind of like a, oh, this just works.

**Wes Bos** (0:12)
Let me tell you, the amount of times I've had to reboot my computer in the last six months. Unbelievable.
I also don't know why I'm still in the terminal.

**Scott Tolinski** (0:24)
Yes.

**Wes Bos** (0:26)
I hate the terminal, but I can't get out of it.

**Scott Tolinski** (0:37)
Are you going to be running your entire dev process on a remote server somewhere? Well, we're going to be talking all about the flows for that, the tools for that, the pros and cons, and if you should be doing it locally or in the Cloud, all of that good stuff today on Syntax.
My name is Scott Tolinski and with me as always is Wes Bos. What's up, Wes?

**Wes Bos** (0:59)
I still talk about this. I think the whole remote workflow, as well as not just having a thousand terminal tabs open, there's so many products in this space of how do you get a better UI? Now that it's not just everything in an IDE, but you need some nice UI for managing all of your agents and all of your folders and whatnot, and there's a bazillion products and they all slightly overlap each other. So I'm excited to dig in and talk about all of these.

**Scott Tolinski** (1:30)
Yeah, me too. I've been running this setup now for quite a bit, and I'll talk about my setup. We can talk about some of the tools, the flows, why you might even want to do this. And then again, we're going to be getting into maybe some of the pitfalls.
Maybe if you have solutions to these pitfalls, you can leave comments below or tell us how you are using these types of tools. So let's talk about first and foremost, like what this means, why you would do it, and really what it is, is that you'd be running your dev process on a machine that is maybe not your main machine or your laptop. And this is something that is going to become more popular. It's already becoming popular. You see memes about people not shutting their laptops. You see software that is written to specifically prevent your computer from going to sleep when you close it. Because we end up having these work processes that are now detached from when we are interacting with it. Like you prompt an agent to do something. You want to be able to close your laptop and have that continue working, right?
So one, you can now close your laptop. Process can be running the whole time while you are not necessarily at your machine. So that's a pro here. Two, better battery life because you are not running 8,000 different things on your laptop at all times.

**Wes Bos** (2:58)
Let me tell you, the amount of times I have had to reboot my computer in the last like six months. Unbelievable. It's just all these little tattered ends, installing endless new apps to try. Things are running in the background.
I'm ready just to start over, but a lot of it is due to having all these agents running my computer and they have just child processes that go rogue.

**Scott Tolinski** (3:22)
Yeah. Actually, what's so funny here is that you think Apple isn't paying attention? The latest version of Mac OS West, the beta has a checkbox in settings that is reboot after a power fault. If there's a power fault and you're away from your remote machine, it can reboot itself, which it can do before.
It could maybe back in the day, but they took it out at some point. Specifically, I would be so annoyed if I was on a trip or something, and even before I ran my dev process on this other computer, I've ran my Plex server, and so we'd be out of the country and trying to access the Plex server, and it would be down, you'd be like, oh, come on.

**Wes Bos** (4:01)
That wasn't a thing before. If you had a power fault, then it would just not reboot, physically press the button.

**Scott Tolinski** (4:10)
Yes. Very obnoxious. Yes. Unbelievable indeed.
So better battery life, you can close your laptop actually. Another one is you can access these processes from any machine. And in this case, we'll be talking about using Tailscale to do so. But it depends on how you host your stuff. But it really is awesome to be able to throw up your dev process on your phone, your laptop, your iPad, any computer on the network and just be able to access that stuff for testing or whatever.