he keeps a power bank in his tesla to keep his agents alive
Matt Van Horn just dropped “Every Agentic Engineering Hack I Know,” the follow-up to a post that did 913k views. 22 hacks for actually shipping product with agents. it’s good. read it.
it’s also, if you squint, a hardware shopping list.
the stack under the hacks
van horn ships real software this way: last30days (26k stars), Printing Press, a pile of merged PRs in the big open-source projects. to do it, here’s what he runs:
- an M5 Max with 64GB, because his old laptop buckled under six Claude sessions plus Codex going all day.
- the new one buckles too. the battery lasts about an hour under that load.
- so he carries an Anker power bank everywhere, and keeps a charger in his Tesla so the car tops up his laptop while he drives.
- a config so the machine never sleeps, because a sleeping mac is a dead agent.
- an always-on Mac mini at home, plus two more remote boxes.
- tmux over ssh so a dropped wifi mid-flight doesn’t kill the run.
- a tool (Agent Cookie) that hands each CLI his real browser session, so nothing has to re-auth.
it’s a genuinely great setup. it’s also a lot of setup. most of those hacks aren’t about making agents smarter. they’re about keeping agents alive and reachable when the thing they run on is a laptop that sleeps, dies, and travels with you.
that part is the product
a 5dive box is the always-on machine. it doesn’t sleep, the battery doesn’t die, and it’s already reachable from your phone. the work he does to keep agents running through travel, dead batteries, and two synced macs is the part you don’t do.
- no Mac mini to leave running at home. the box is the box.
- no power bank, no charger in the car. your laptop can die in your bag and the agents keep shipping server-side.
- no syncing env across three machines. there’s one.
- the plane story is native. close the lid over the atlantic, the run keeps going on the box, and it’s right there when you land.
his closing hack is “paste this whole article to your agent and have it set everything up.” that instinct is right. point an agent at the goal and let it build. we just put the agent somewhere that’s already on.
the honest version
if you want to run this on your own hardware, his hacks are the map, and you should follow them. the M5 Max is a beast and he’s not wrong to love it.
if you’d rather skip the power bank, the never-sleep config, and the second mac humming in your closet, that’s the version we run. a team of agents on a box you own, always on, over telegram.