Why I Switched from Local Claude Code to ShellPod

I love Claude Code. It changed how I build software. But running it on my laptop? That was slowly killing my productivity — and my hardware.

Here is the honest truth about running Claude Code locally, and why I eventually moved everything to a persistent cloud environment.

The laptop drain is real

Claude Code is not a lightweight process. It spawns subprocesses, runs shell commands, reads and writes files constantly, and maintains a large context window. On my M2 MacBook Pro, a single Claude Code session would push CPU usage to 40-60% sustained. Two sessions? The fans would spin up and battery life would crater to under two hours.

I tried plugging in at coffee shops. I tried closing every other app. I even bought a cooling pad. None of it solved the fundamental problem: my laptop was not designed to be a server running AI workloads all day.

Lost sessions, lost context

The second problem was persistence. I would get Claude Code deep into a complex refactoring task — it understood my codebase, had context on what we were building, was halfway through a multi-file change — and then my laptop would sleep. Or I would close the lid to commute home. Or macOS would decide it was time for a kernel panic.

Every time, I had to start over. Re-explain the context. Re-navigate to the right files. Re-establish the plan. It felt like having a brilliant pair programmer who got amnesia every time you took a bathroom break.

The setup tax on every machine

I work across two machines — a desktop at home and a laptop on the go. Keeping Claude Code configured identically on both was a constant friction. SSH keys, environment variables, MCP server configs, project-specific Claude settings — all of it had to be mirrored. And when something drifted, I would spend 20 minutes debugging why Claude could not push to GitHub from my laptop even though it worked fine from my desktop.

What I actually wanted

I wanted Claude Code running somewhere that was always on, always connected, and accessible from any device with a browser. I wanted to start a task in the morning, commute to the office, and pick it up right where I left it. I wanted to kick off a long-running migration and check on it from my phone.

That is exactly what ShellPod gives me.

The cloud difference

With ShellPod, Claude Code runs on a dedicated cloud VPS — a Hetzner CX33 with 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM. My laptop is now just a thin client. I open a browser tab, connect to my terminal, and Claude Code is right where I left it. The session never dies because the machine never sleeps.

The performance difference is night and day. Commands execute faster because the VPS has a symmetric gigabit connection. Git operations are near-instant because the server is close to GitHub's infrastructure. And my laptop battery lasts all day because all it is doing is rendering a terminal in a browser tab.

The workflow that changed everything

My typical day now looks like this: I wake up, open ShellPod on my phone to check if the overnight task finished. At my desk, I open my laptop browser and I am immediately in my session. Claude Code has the full context from yesterday. I describe what to build next, and it starts working while I review PRs in another tab. When I leave for lunch, I just close the lid. When I come back, everything is still running.

No lost context. No fan noise. No battery anxiety. Just a persistent AI coding partner that is always ready to go.

The bottom line

If you are running Claude Code locally and it works great for you, that is awesome — keep doing it. But if you are hitting the same pain points I was — laptop drain, lost sessions, setup friction across machines — a persistent cloud environment is a genuine quality-of-life upgrade. I am never going back to local.