AI coders are carrying half-open laptops through airports, offices, ice rinks | Hacker News Reader

AI coders are carrying half-open laptops through airports, offices, ice rinks

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30 pointstaubek40 comments

Engineers solving "my agent stops when I close my lid" by physically holding the lid open is the funniest possible local optimum. Amphetamine app fixes the lid problem. Claude's /remote-control command also helps. The two together cost zero dollars and one minute of setup.

The article explicitly says "AI coders". Not engineers. Not hackers. Not a mere accident I suppose.

one's a head of product, didn't read beyond that..

These aren't engineers they're influencers. And your solution doesn't convey any status. I promise you that this either already is or soon will be understood even by the normies as a status signal.

It also costs the slightest bit of ambition and independent problem solving.

We should have foreseen that were breeding a population that can't independently solve problems when it became so ubiquitous for people to ask questions online that could be answered instantly with even the compromised 2020s state of search engines.

Dependence on LLMs could be the natural extension of that culture.

There are people who go YEARS with smoke alarms chirping every 5 minutes, I stopped being impress at what people are willing to put up with, even if a 30s google search would solve their problem, the sky is the limit

I literally have a custom built command

lid-toggle on lid-toggle off lid-toggle toggle

that allows me to switch the behaviour for laptop lid close , to behave the way i want it to,

So i can close my laptop, keep it in my bag, with my headphones on and talk to claude code while its coding stuff , albeit it runs a bit warm inside my bag, but it works just fine.

I run a custom setup on linux to make it all happen

Why would someone risk breaking their laptop by keeping it half open like this , instead of just quickly building a toggle to change the suspend on lid close behaviour ?

dude you can stop using the computer sometimes. its gonna be ok. take a break.

No, Cant Stop. Wont Stop.

You dont need to worry about them

The irony that finding a solution is way easier than carrying the half-open laptop must really say something about modern day vibecoding.

I guess these people are not coders at all. Maybe they should ask claude to temporarily change the „lid close action“ in the power settings? ;)

I immediately thought of SSH but you're right. That's far too complicated for the next crop of AI synergy experts.

You joke, but even 8-9yrs ago, I had at least one new junior join my team who couldn't even tell or fathom the difference between whether they were on their own laptop or on the server when using the terminal. It was a constant problem where they were trying to run commands on the wrong computer.

I don't have much hope anything has improved since then.

The Debian package molly-guard was first released in 2006. 20 years ago!

You don't need to be a "coder", just a vaguely competent computer user. It's really sad you've got people who just don't feel in control of their computers at all and would resort to not closing the lid.

Or they just dont want to spend time figuring out how to do that because they are busy with something else

Naah, they are probably dumb as hell!

To be fair, they are almost certainly dumb as hell regardless of if they spend time figuring this out or not.

I'm confused, if AI told are making these people more efficient, why do they need to use them to do "work" every waking moment?

The AI Bros definition of efficiency is about how efficiently you burn tokens to make number go up.

Lots of comments on here about turning off the lid close behavior but, last time I tried that on Windows, a long time ago, because I was using vnc from my main desktop, the thing ran horribly slow because it did some other "power saving" junk on the video card. Is that still an issue?

I currently have 3 laptops opened all the way flat, and standing in a folder rack (because they take up an awkward amount of space open the normal way), that i remote into for various jobs. Can I close them these days without a major hit to basic performance? Of course i'd have to open them to turn them on anyway, so that'd be annoying.

It usually only takes a few minutes to pull the bezel and remove the magnet that interrupts the hall sensor.

To all the clever "AI" engineers reading this: don't ever leave a laptop running in your bag (or anywhere without adequate ventilation).

I guess they never asked Claude to explain tmux to them.

Do you think that they might even know what tmux is? I bet a lot of them might not even know about it if they are carrying half open laptops through airports, smh

Have they tried using remotely hosted servers instead?

There is no cloud it's just someone else's computer. Some else will have to keep the lid open.

You can keep my computer's lid open for the low price of $25/mo

I'll need access to your webcam. I don't really believe in "The Cloud".

Hey, if there's a market for people watching me sit at my desk and stare at my screens for $25/month, you're welcome to. It will be very boring.

Have you heard of http://twitch.tv?

> Twitch made an estimated $1.8 billion revenue in 2024 and had an average of 2.37 million concurrent viewers.

Somehow I doubt I'd make much. I may have an ego, but not one big enough to think enough people would watch me ignore them... But maybe I should try.

They don't what a "server" is.

Just buy a cheap 7$/yr vps if they are so invested, or simply change it so that lid can be turned off without turning off the computer.

I don't understand what they get with this chicanery of half open though :-/

> ice rinks

Is there an advanced ice water facial method that I don't have the appropriate grindset to comprehend, and does anyone know an ice rink that opens at 3:30am?

The next version of MacOS should have a choice to "keep alive while the screen is closed" lol

Aren't there a few utilities for that, like caffeinate, etc?

`caffeinate` is primarily designed to prevent sleeping due to inactivity. It doesn't prevent sleeping due to lid closure while on battery.

`sudo pmset -b disablesleep 1` (0 to revert) works, although it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

The modern version of “I’m busy” is walking around with a half-open MacBook and an AI tab running.

The irony? A person who is capable of running the same /usr/bin/claude in screen on a remote linux server will look much less busy despite burning way more tokens this way.

"I'm like, 'I got agents running,'" Jain said. "I've got to keep shipping software."

Or...what?

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