The Mini PC That's Quietly Running All My Agents Now

I finally decided to pull the trigger and set up a little local Linux box to run my agents on. The reason why I did this is that my MacBook Pro was completely dying under the strain of agents.
I got Asus NUC 15 Pro, Ultra 7 255H CPU, 96GB of RAM, 2TB SSD. The whole thing was about $3000, but you can do it way cheaper too. My boy math is that it a Mac Studio could be as much as $10,000, so I'm practically making money.
Codex has great Remote support for this set up, much smoother than I thought - I can create new tasks from my Codex mac app or from my phone - all feels pretty similar to how local tasks work. Then I use Tailscale to move any files around too, delightful. I'll leave it next to my router hidden away, no extra clutter around the house.
Set up took a couple of hours, it took a bit of back & forth, but agents are pretty good at holding your hand during the setup.
Inspired by a Theo YouTube video about moving to Linux, really not as scary as I thought.
Sticker art by a wonderful London based artist Natalia Shaloshvili.

This is mostly a personal use-case story, so most of it isn't independently checkable, but a few concrete claims are worth verifying.

• "Asus NUC 15 Pro, Ultra 7 255H CPU, 96GB RAM, 2TB SSD, ~$3000" — accurate on the hardware. The NUC 15 Pro with the Core Ultra 7 255H is a real, current product, and Asus confirms it officially supports up to 96GB of DDR5 memory. The barebones unit alone starts around $699, so once you add 96GB RAM and a 2TB SSD, landing around $3,000 total is a believable price for that configuration.
• "A comparable Mac Studio could be as much as $10,000" — this is an overstatement, worth flagging even though it reads as a joking "boy math" aside rather than a serious claim. Current Mac Studio pricing starts at roughly $2,499 for the base M4 Max, or $5,299 for the M3 Ultra tier that actually ships with 96GB RAM standard. A 96GB/2TB comparable config would likely land somewhere in the $5,500–$6,500 range, not $10,000 — you'd need to stack much higher GPU core counts or storage to approach that number. The core point (a Mac Studio comparable in memory is meaningfully more expensive than the NUC) still holds, just not by quite that much.
• "Codex has great Remote support, can create tasks from Mac app or phone" — accurate and matches OpenAI's actual current feature set. OpenAI's Codex now supports Remote SSH connections to any development machine, plus a Remote experience in the ChatGPT mobile app that lets you start, monitor, and approve tasks running on a connected host from your phone — this is a real, officially documented capability, not an exaggeration.
• Using Tailscale to move files between machines — plausible and consistent with normal Tailscale usage (it's a real mesh VPN tool commonly used for exactly this kind of file access between personal devices).