Podbay — your coding agent shouldn't die when your laptop sleeps

For about a month, I did the dumbest thing in my dev career: I carried an open laptop around my apartment like a newborn.

I'd kick off a long Claude Code run — a refactor, a migration — and then I couldn't close the lid. Close it, the machine sleeps, the session dies, the context is gone. So the laptop came everywhere. The kitchen. The couch. The arm of a chair at dinner.

There had to be something better than "keep the MacBook awake forever." There wasn't. So I built it.

Remote control isn't always-on. Anthropic shipped Remote Control for Claude Code, and it's good — check your session from your phone. But the session still runs on your machine. Laptop sleeps, session stops; RC just greets you when it's back.

Remote control gives you access. What I kept needing was uptime.

So Podbay flips it: the session lives on a machine that never sleeps, and every device — laptop, phone — is just a client. Close the lid mid-run, it keeps going. Open the Claude app an hour later, it's exactly where you left it. Not a paused screen — progress.

The #1 thing people told me while building this: "I'm not putting my agent and my secrets in someone else's cloud." Fair. So it's source-available and self-hostable — one command, your own box, your own keys, your existing Claude subscription. Nothing leaves your machine you didn't send.

It's early alpha and free right now. I'm a solo founder and I'd genuinely rather hear "here's what's broken" than a nice word. If you've solved this differently — tmux on a VPS, a homelab shrine, pure stubbornness — I want to hear the setup.

github.com/Podbay-Cloud/podbay · podbay.cloud