Recently, I was sitting in a restaurant with my MacBook Air powered off inside my backpack. I opened Codex on my Android phone and asked it to make a change to an Expo app I was working on. I use Codex as a coding agent connected to a development workspace running on another machine.
The repository wasn't on the phone. It wasn't on the MacBook either. It lived on an old gaming PC running Ubuntu at home, along with the coding agent, the backend, the database, Metro, and the Android build tools.
When the change was ready, I switched from Codex to the app on the same phone and saw the result there.
I had originally built this setup because I wanted to use the hardware I already owned more efficiently. The restaurant was when I realized I had changed something more important.
If my laptop was off, where was “local development” actually happening?
