AI coding agents changed the shape of my development day. A session with Claude Code isn't a burst of typing anymore — it's a long-running conversation where the agent researches, implements, runs tests, and iterates while I check in. And that exposed the weakest link in my setup: the laptop. Close the lid, lose the session. Spotty café Wi-Fi, lose the session. Want the agent grinding through a migration overnight? The laptop stays open on the kitchen counter.
The fix is old and boring: do the work on a server, keep the sessions in tmux, connect from wherever you are. What was missing was the setup cost — a fresh VPS is a bare shell, and provisioning zsh, Neovim, Node, Rust, Docker, and the whole AI toolchain by hand is half a day of yak-shaving before the first prompt.
So I made it one command. This post is about the developer profile in ubuntu-server-dotfiles (v1.3.0): what it installs, how the AI layer gets set up, and the actual 24/7 working pattern it enables. I covered the underlying GNU Stow + idempotent-bash machinery in an earlier post — this one is about what it's for.
The one command
On any fresh Ubuntu 24.04 server, as a non-root user with sudo:
