Stop Buying a Mac Mini for Your AI Agent — There's a Better Way

After a year of AI-assisted coding — 9+ months on Claude Code, the last 2 months running a Claude Code + Codex hybrid workflow — I barely write code by hand anymore. But I've gotten much better at driving AI to ship results. I've been a developer and open-source contributor for nearly 10 years, and this past year completely changed how I work. Here's what I learned along the way — and where the whole experience led me. In March 2026, I burned through 17.6 billion tokens across Claude Code and Codex on my Ubuntu workstation alone. Add my MacBook on top, and my daily average was easily over 600 million tokens. I didn't take a single day off in March. Along the way I ran into every pitfall you can think of, pulled more all-nighters than I'd care to admit, and learned some hard lessons. Here's the problem that shaped everything: Every AI agent running on a personal machine today faces the same lose-lose trade-off. If you use Claude Code or Codex, you know the drill: the agent is midway thr