The laptop did the work while the server sat idle
RuleAsk where heavy work runs before it starts.
Over two days in August 2026 I regenerated a large training dataset: 30 equipment families, 11.8 billion rows and about 96 GB, followed by 60 model trainings.
It ran on my laptop with 16 to 20 worker processes at once. The machine sat at a load average of 15 and was useless for anything else. Partway through, I deleted finished datasets so the disk would not fill.
A server on the same private network had several times the memory, a GPU and hundreds of gigabytes of free disk. Its load average for those two days was 0.01.
Nobody chose the laptop. It was the terminal that happened to be open, so the agents started there, and nothing asked where the work belonged.
The GPU was not the reason to move. Most of that job was array arithmetic that a GPU does nothing for. The reasons were disk space, memory and a laptop I could still use.
The rule now
- Before a job that will run for more than a few minutes or write more than a few GB, the agent asks where it should run. The default answer is the server.
- The laptop is for editing, tests and short checks.
- Code reaches the server through git: push from the laptop, pull on the server. Nothing gets copied across by hand.
- A job moves for the GPU only when it can use one.