Actual link to article: https://www.businessinsider.com/coders-keep-laptops-open-in-public-ai-agent-2026-5
Redirect links are tracking links and should be banned imo.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
140 points (85.0% liked)
Technology
84569 readers
3846 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yea I feel like a fool for not catching it, I've updated the post. I thought I'd opened the proper page and just copy and pasted.
Thank you, I was about to edit my comment to add it.
Imagine leaving skate practice and your father cannot stop his AI gooning to pay attention to you
I walk with my screen open at the office sometimes. I prefer my computer does go to sleep when I close the lid, but if I’m just grabbing a quiet room for a meeting, I don’t want to wait for the network to come back up when I open it again. Been using computers since the 80’s, but still a noob somehow.
Why would you not just ssh to a server at your house or office and only wake from sleep when you get a notification saying whatever process is done running? That just seems like screen addiction to me.
In the before times we had to VPN into machines and run large data processing jobs that took hours. It was pretty normal for everyone to leave their laptop half-open on their desks during lunch.
No, it was not a good idea. Yes, we fucked with each other and changed people's backgrounds or chat usernames or email signatures.
Anyways, if you're on Mac you can run caffeinate -i claude and your computer won't go to sleep until you close your Claude Code instance. You can also attach it to a PID. Then you can close your computer's lid and it'll still run.
Share.google 😬
Thanks for pointing that out, I wasn't paying attention and thought I'd copied the direct link. I've fixed it.
Can't you just disable sleep on close?
~~Most modern laptops have their air intake in the keyboard, which would cause them to overheat on a matter of minutes.~~
Edit: I may have been confidently incorrect here. I know I’ve seen this done before, but I guess it’s not common like I thought
Most? With the amount of people running laptop docked I would say that is not the case for most business laptops for sure.
I really don't think it's a thing, or maybe just for some high end gaming laptops? Which, yeah, most things on expensive gaming laptops don't actually make sense. They just throw shit on there to justify prices
Decent ones dropped this practice a while ago. Some pull in the sides, some crappy ones use the bottom. My coworker actually got much better performance out of his dell by closing the lid and flipping it over. With it positioned normally it would overheat and throttle the cpu.
The vast majority take in from the bottom and blow out the hinge. That's how you can fit the larger blower fans.
Right, Those are the terrible ones. Put it on your lap (which, let's be honest, is basically the whole point) or a slightly soft surface and it just gets starved of air.
That's why they stopped calling them "laptops" for a while, and instead "notebooks".
But I actually just went and checked Dell, HP, and Lenovo and they do call them laptops again.
Do you have an example?
I tried to find something, but the only mention was five years old saying Alienware might try it.
It sounds stupid but with people using laptops on beds I could see the idea behind it.
If they increased the size of those little rubber feet to keep the screen and keyboard separate, then that would completely solve the issue.
I want to see if no one's thought of that yet since it seemed so obvious, but I just can't find any real example of keyboard cold air intakes. Are you talking about actual vents? Going between the keys may just be an urban legend from what I'm seeing.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Even if there was an intake in the keyboard it wouldn't dramatically affect anything. My P1 does partially intake through the keyboard and closing the lid has no appreciable performance impact. I only leave the lid open so the display doesn't get baked by the i9 using 70+ watts.
Just install Amphetamine on your Mac, duh
Shoutout amphetamine, awesome little app.
load more comments
(2 replies)
No it totally doesn't turn my brain into goop
Can’t you just disable sleep on close?
i could, but closing the lid turned off radios (wifi + bt) at some low level in a way that i haven't figured out
What OS are you using?
lmde on a seven year old laptop five years ago, i was already accustomed to wifi on linux being dogshit. energy management was even worse and for some time hibernation was not a thing
Ah, yeah, was there any particular reason you were using LMDE? Because I'm not sure what parts of systemd it uses (especially back then), but I always just edited /etc/systemd/logind.conf to have HandleLidSwitch=ignore and have had zero issues. Pretty sure there is a gnome GUI for changing this same setting, gnome-tweaks.
I would assume the bad WiFi support was due to it being Debian and Debian being notoriously behind in terms of updates for the sake of stability.
to get wifi working properly in the first place i had to find a missing binary that wasn't packaged in any normal way and was only hosted on some dudes github so my expectations were low already. it got a lot better over the years tbh
I've been running Ubuntu on laptops for a lot longer than five years and the last time I had real WiFi issues was over a decade ago. That's why I think it may be debian related or based on your description, possibly a closed source driver issue. There's actually quite a lot of WiFi devices that use chipsets that we don't have proper Linux drivers for at all, and what exists are sort of hacked together projects that live on github. I've had to do this with every netgear dongle I ever had, the downloading and compiling drivers for it from github.
could be, there was more of these weird things that i had to do that i don't remember already because motherboard of that one cracked like three years ago. i also remember that stock driver for tplink dongle was limited and the actual useful one had to be gotten from github
even the crappy old bobcat-based (slow af amd apu) laptops i have here run with lid closed (they run piholes and what-not).
This article is so confusing because it seems like everyone they're talking to is just using online models and the use of local models is mentioned but it's not clear how many of the people being interviewed are using local models since it's all about laptops. Even the one lady who you can see her screen is a CLI, it's not clear that she's not just using the CLI version of Claude.
I have a mid-range desktop and doing local LLM can be pretty darn slow on it especially with an AMD card and ROCm as opposed to Nvidia and CUDA. I have a relatively nice laptop, but it's specs are well below my desktop and I just can't imagine actually running a local LLM on a laptop.
If they're not using a local model, then they wouldn't need to worry about overheating with the lid closed. Easy to make it so it doesn't hibernate when the lid is closed via CLI (at least in Linux anyway). Because if they're offloading all the work to a remote model, their PC can essentially be relatively idle and draw less power/produce less heat.
Article also seems strangely focused on Macs? All it's mentions of how to make it so you can close the lid are Mac-focused. Did I miss something about the new Apple Silicon being really efficient for local LLMs? Maybe that's what I'm missing here.
It just seems almost weirdly narcissistic, like they want people to ask them about it so they can talk about it. Certainly it seems that way with the kid with a startup business that he runs during classes with tokens paid for by his parents.
Anyway, the whole thing seems odd to me. Either the article is about people who aren't actually super savvy coders or techies, or they would... just switch it so they can close their fucking laptop... or something about making a show of what they're doing is part of it. I dunno, weird. Anyway.
All the real developers are using Macs. BRO, do you even code?