Amphetamine is what I use. It has a robust set of triggers, like if you ip address changes to a certain subnet (like private IPs on a work network)

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12

This is great. Will check it.

Recently I bought a usb-c empty external monitor card to prevent mac from going to sleep. There are many of these external monitor simulators on Amazon.

I still see the laptop go to sleep many times with the external monitor simulator.

This is the one I bought.

4K 60Hz USB-C Type-C Virtual Display Adapter DDC EDID Dummy Plug Headless Ghost Display Emulator 2K 60hz1080P@120Hz

Does it also make my Mac irritable?

I have been using the builtin macOS `caffeinate` command for this.

For example:

caffeinate -dimsu

That keeps the Mac awake so I can use Claude remotely from phone.

You can also wrap your command as well, but I rarely use it.

caffeinate -dimsu your-agent-command

What's old is new again, but I welcome this.

I used to do this 15 years ago to keep listening to music from my laptop (one of the white chiclet ones) in my backpack, can't remember the name of the app I used then.

One caveat, your laptop cannot cool inside a backpack, it will overheat and shut down anyway. This happened to me several times.

Thank goodness. I can’t leave my laptop for a second unattended because my cat loves nothing more than to dance on the keyboard. I’ve need something like this.

But Amphetamine has an option to end when an app closes. I’m just so confused why everyone using ai is reinventing solutions that already exist.

For MacOS, keep awake with:

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1

Reset back:

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0

Interesting. Kind of similar in purpose, but I created a simple app to schedule and type the "continue" word in my terminal after X time has passed, since I have to wait for my usage to be restored. =)

At some point, if you closed the lid and didn't have an external monitor plugged in, macos would put the GPU in power save mode, which would tank local llm performance. Is that not the case any more? There were even small singles you could get which would trick the ps into thinking an external monitor was plugged in

I’ve often wondered about the thermal performance or running a MacBook with the lid closed. One argument is that the reduced surface area from a closed lid increases temperature. Others argue that not running & rendering the display (and thus GPU) generates less heat. I’m not sure who to believe.

Does closing the M-series laptop lid no longer throttle the CPU like it did on the Intel ones?

Finally a smart tool to keep laptops awake, i have frained my battery several times with caffeinated. Thanks

15k loc for this? holy cow

How does this differ from https://github.com/samber/cc-caffeine?

Um so it is

    sudo bash -c 'touch KEEP_RUNNING; pmset -b sleep 0; pmset -b disablesleep 1; while [ -e KEEP_RUNNING ]; do sleep 1; done; pmset -b sleep 5; pmset -b disablesleep 0'

    Agent, when you're done do `rm KEEP_RUNNING`, kthxbye.

(personally I have Ruby scripts that check activity on "tmux capture-output" for that)

It would be great if adrafinil can also track the battery and token usage while agents are working

Adrafinil never seemed to work for me. I tried it a few times when I worked an overnight shift.

I am always baffled how many people does not know about Amphetamine.

Codex recently built this in - "Prevent sleep while running" toggle

> month ago there was a wave of posts and tweets about engineers walking around cafes and parks with their MacBooks propped half-open, as fully closing the lid forces sleep that stops their AI agents

Why don’t they just ask the agents to code up something to prevent the Mac sleeping.. and that will auto enable/disable depending on if they have the agent running or not

I mean, agents makes human devs redundant, right? This seems like a trivial little problem for an agent to fix

So now we're naming apps after obscure Modafinil derivatives?

you can run opencode inside a docker container and expose it's webui.

`sudo pmset -a sleep 0`

honestly this is the kind of boring tool that matters once agents run for hours. laptop sleep has killed more useful runs than bad prompts for me.

We need people to rediscover remote development desperately, lol.

reminds me of ye old caffeinate

Ridiculous bloat.