Intro
At some point I looked up and I had three Macs.
There's a clear reason they multiplied: trying to do everything on one machine fell apart. Run a few AI jobs in the background — Claude Code and friends — and they eat memory by the fistful, and the actual work I'm supposed to be doing starts to stutter. Editor lags, browser lags, and I end up in this backwards place where "running AI stops my own work." So I split it up: the heavy AI stuff runs on a separate Mac that I ssh into, while my main machine stays free for the actual work. Offload the AI to the Mac next to me. That's how the number of Macs crept up.
So now there's the main one on my desk, a MacBook I carry around, and the box that runs the AI — and the moment you want Claude Code to behave the same on all of them, the annoying part — the part that quietly eats your time — is dealing with tokens. Running the MCP servers for Notion, Linear, and GitHub needs API tokens. Write those straight into .mcp.json and you've got plaintext sitting in a config file. Copy-paste them across three machines by hand and, well, that's its own kind of misery.
"Where the hell do I actually put this token?" I went back and forth on that for a while, and eventually landed on 1Password, which I already use every day. The short version: keep every secret in one place — 1Password — and sync it to each Mac with the 1Password CLI (op). That killed both "plaintext scattered everywhere" and "paste it N times for N machines" in one shot.
