Remote-first development

# Your laptop is a window, not the workstation.

PI WEB is built around a simple shift: AI-driven development should live where the work can persist, not where your current keyboard happens to be. You supervise the work; you do not have to host it.

## Developer tools assumed the work lived locally

Editors and terminals were built around a simple assumption: the work lives with you, on your device, inside your session. That made sense when one human drove every keystroke from one machine.

AI agents break that assumption. The work can outlive the laptop session, and agents need stable repositories, shells, tools, secrets, build caches, and time to keep running.

When all of that is tied to a laptop, the laptop becomes the bottleneck: close the lid, change devices, lose network, reboot, or run out of battery, and the work environment is interrupted.

## Persistence should not be a workaround

Terminals are ephemeral by default. You can patch around that with tmux, screen, background processes, and remote shells, but persistence is still something you bolt on after the fact.

PI WEB treats persistence as the foundation. Agent sessions live in a long-running runtime, workspaces stay on the machine that runs the tools, and browser disconnects do not end the work.

If AI is doing the work, the work should not be tied to your laptop.

## Remote AI-driven development unlocks persistent work

Run the environment on a machine that stays on: a dev box, home server, cloud VM, workstation, or private network host. Keep agents and worktrees there. Connect from whatever screen you have.

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### Always available

Sessions keep existing after browser disconnects and can be resumed later.

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### Parallel by default

Use worktrees and persistent sessions to let multiple agent streams progress independently.

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### One real environment

Dependencies, caches, credentials, and repository state stay where the agents run.

## The browser becomes your Pi web UI

Your device should not have to be the editor, terminal, build server, and agent runtime. In PI WEB, the browser is the cockpit: supervise sessions, redirect agents, inspect transcripts, and review progress while the development environment stays remote and stable. Under the hood, PI WEB still coordinates the running work like a browser-based control plane.

Laptop, phone, tablet, desktop: they are just windows into the same running work. You remain in control, but you are no longer the machine carrying the work.

## The human role becomes direction, judgment, and review

Remote-first does not remove the human. It moves the human away from carrying the whole development environment and toward higher-leverage work: choosing direction, setting constraints, reviewing changes, and deciding what ships.

You do not carry the work. You guide it.

## Recommended shape

PI WEB works locally, but it shines on a machine that stays on and is reachable through a private path: SSH tunnel, VPN, private LAN, or an authenticated reverse proxy.

Use the laptop when you want convenience. Use a server or always-on workstation when you want agents to keep working even when the laptop is gone.
Install PI WEB Laptop or server FAQ