Your Laptop Is Just a Portal

My laptop is a four-year-old Dell XPS 15 with 16 gigs of RAM. Fine for normal work. Not fine for running Windows, WSL, a real codebase, a Claude session, and a browser at the same time. It came to a head over Thanksgiving last year, when I was accidentally on the road for three weeks and couldn't get serious work done. WSL on 16 gigs just exploded.

The first fix was offloading development to an EC2 instance. That worked, but the monthly bill kept climbing and the hardware was still anemic for what I actually needed. So I bought a remote dev box for the home lab and moved everything off the EC2.

That's the boring origin story. The interesting part is what the setup unlocked.