I didn’t expect working on a remote Windows PC to feel this smooth.
I can have several terminals, development environments and AI coding agents running on a separate machine, while my MacBook Air stays cool, quiet and responsive. I’m looking at a Windows desktop through RDP, yet I barely notice any latency. Most of the time it hardly feels like working remotely at all.
Then there’s the part that feels almost unfair: I can close the MacBook, walk away, and leave tasks running on the Windows PC. The laptop doesn’t need to stay involved.
I hadn’t set out to build a remote development environment. I wanted to revisit Tales of Pirates, an old MMORPG I spent countless hours playing growing up. Its current development environment still depends on Windows, and I already had a powerful gaming PC at home. So I tried running that PC headless and reaching it from the Mac.
That turned into a way of working I now use for far more than the game.
How it fits together
The setup has two machines: my everyday MacBook Air M5, and BORZ, a Windows 11 Pro gaming PC that runs headless, meaning nobody sits in front of it. Tailscale connects them over a private network, whether I’m at home or away. Windows App, Microsoft’s remote desktop app, connects to BORZ using RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and shows its Windows desktop in a window on the Mac. Everything the project needs lives on BORZ: Visual Studio, terminals, WSL2 and AI coding agents such as Claude Code.
MacBook Air M5
+---------------------------+
| Windows App window: |
| screen, keyboard, mouse |
+---------------------------+
^
| RDP over Tailscale
v
BORZ (Windows 11 Pro)
+---------------------------+
| Windows desktop |
| Visual Studio, terminals, |
| WSL2, Claude Code |
+---------------------------+
|
| internet
v
+---------------------------+
| Cloud-hosted AI models |
| (Anthropic, DeepSeek) |
+---------------------------+RDP streams the remote desktop to the Mac and relays my keyboard and mouse input back, while the development tools and builds run on BORZ. Because the connection goes through Tailscale, BORZ doesn’t need an RDP port open to the public internet.
The AI models are a separate matter. The agents on BORZ send their requests to cloud-hosted models, and those models do their own inference on someone else’s servers. The workspace and the tools are local to BORZ. The models are not.
The work keeps going without the laptop
I start a coding or investigation task through an agent on BORZ, disconnect, and come back later to see how it went. That is the part that feels most like cheating.
It only holds under some conditions, so it’s worth being precise about them. Disconnecting from RDP ends the connection, not the Windows session. By default the session stays logged in and its programs keep running. Signing out is what closes them, and some configurations also end disconnected sessions after a set time.
Even with the session alive, whether a given agent or terminal carries on depends on the program. An agent that stops to ask for approval waits until I come back. One that loses its internet connection to its model stops making progress. And Windows has to stay awake, because a sleeping PC runs nothing. It’s worth testing a tool with something small before trusting it with a long task.
A debugging task between sets
One moment made all of this feel real. I was at the gym, between sets, and I opened Windows App on my iPhone and connected to BORZ, my headless Windows 11 Pro PC at home. Through the remote desktop I gave DeepSeek V4.1 Flash a debugging instruction related to Tales of Pirates.
As part of its debugging work, the coding agent opened Windows Sandbox on BORZ. Windows Sandbox is a disposable, isolated Windows environment that runs inside Windows, so there were three layers: my phone at the gym, BORZ at home, and a sandbox inside BORZ that the agent was interacting with. The sandbox ran on BORZ, not on the phone.
What surprised me was how responsive and smooth it felt. I haven’t measured it, and I hadn’t planned for any of this. It’s still the clearest example I have of why the title says cheating: the Windows-specific work happened on BORZ, and all I needed from the gym was my phone and an instruction.
The MacBook barely notices
In my experience the MacBook has very little to do. It draws the remote desktop, BORZ does the execution, and the cloud models do the inference. That is what I’ve observed, not a measurement. I haven’t benchmarked it, the laptop still has to decode and display the remote screen, and other workloads or slower networks may feel different.
Hardware I already had
A gaming PC that isn’t running a game is a powerful computer doing nothing. Here it became a development machine, the MacBook became the portable way in, and even a phone is enough to open a session and give an agent a task, as I did between sets. I didn’t need a new cloud VM or a workstation subscription.
It does cost something:
- Both ends need a working network connection. If the internet at home goes down, BORZ is out of reach.
- Responsiveness depends on the connection. Typing and scrolling through a remote desktop can lag on a poor one.
- BORZ has to stay on to be reachable, so it uses power. I made a rough estimate, below.
- Windows has to be set up to stay awake, and that setting is easy to forget.
The power question mattered to me. A machine that is meant to be reachable whenever I need it stays on for long stretches, so a gaming PC only makes sense for this if its draw is reasonable. On 31 October I compared the household’s power use with BORZ switched off and switched on. BORZ has a Ryzen 7 5700X3D and a Radeon RX 6700 XT. With it off, the household drew 605 W. With it on, monitors off, and Cursor and RDP active, the average was 670.2 W. The difference suggested an additional draw of roughly 65 W during light remote use.
That is an estimate from household totals, not a controlled measurement at the PC’s power socket, and it doesn’t tell me BORZ’s true idle consumption. The measurement windows and other loads in the house could also affect its accuracy. A dedicated meter would give a better answer.
If you have an old PC
If you have an old PC at home, especially one built for games, the pieces are few: a Windows edition that accepts incoming RDP connections (Pro does, Home doesn’t), a private way to reach it such as Tailscale, and something you want to work on. For me that was a game.