Steinberger says skip the Mac mini, rent a VPS instead
A four line reply turns an always-on agent setup from a hardware purchase into a hosting decision.
Simon B. Stovring said he was ready to buy a Mac mini and go all-in on remote agents running on self-hosted hardware. His reasoning was short and it travelled. Agents that stop the moment you shut your laptop lid are a 2025 problem, and he does not want to carry it forward.
Peter Steinberger's reply was four lines long and skipped the shopping trip entirely. You do not need a Mini, he said. Host it on a VPS (a rented virtual server), put it on Tailscale so your devices see it as if it were on your own network, and connect your machine when the agent needs to do computer use.
You don鈥檛 need a Mini for that. Host it on a VPS, tailscale it and connect your machine for computer use.
The actual disagreement
Nobody here is arguing about whether always-on agents are worth having. Both founders take that as settled. The split is about where the always-on part lives, and that is a much smaller decision than it looks from the outside.
Stovring's version is a box on a desk that he owns, with no monthly bill and no dependency on anyone else's uptime. Steinberger's version is a rented server that costs money every month and can be destroyed and rebuilt whenever the setup goes wrong. One is a purchase you have to justify, the other is a subscription you can cancel on a bad week.
Stovring also framed his own plan as conditional. He said he would go ahead unless OpenAI gave him a compelling reason not to on Tuesday, which he thought was very likely. So the Mini was never the point. The persistence was.
The business read
If you have been putting off an agent that runs while you sleep because you did not want to buy hardware for it, that was never the blocker. The rented path is reversible, which matters more than it sounds when the tooling is changing this fast and the thing you buy today may be the wrong shape in three months.
The wider shift is already showing up in the products. Claude's Cowork work carried on after you close the laptop too.
We all need to leave agents stopping when you close your laptop in 2026.