Diagram showing a laptop connecting over Tailscale to a persistent dev VM running T3 Code and Claude Code

How I Turned My Laptop Into a Dumb Terminal With a Tailscale Dev VM, T3 Code, and Claude Code

For about as long as I’ve been doing this, my laptop has been the computer: the IDE, the Docker daemon, forty browser tabs, all of it running locally, all of it dying the second the battery does or the lid has to close for a meeting. That model finally broke this year - not because of some clever trick, but because I moved the actual computer off the laptop entirely. The laptop’s job now is to open a window onto a machine that never sleeps, never loses its state, and honestly doesn’t care what OS it’s running. ...

24 September 2026 · 9 min · Tom