// open source · macOS · for agent runners

PACK YOUR AGENTS.

Your coding agents keep working — lid closed, in the bag, on your phone's hotspot — while you keep steering from the Codex or Claude app in your hand. Rucksack runs every check before you walk out the door, then watches the link while you move and pings your phone if anything breaks.

Native remote control steers the agent. Rucksack keeps the host alive and reachable while you move — the other half.

curl -fsSL https://rucksack.sh/install | bash

Install Read the run ↓

MACOS ✓ POWER TOOLS ✓ BATTERY ✓ HOTSPOT ✓ INTERNET ✓ TAILNET ✓ REMOTES ✓ — PACK · LID CLOSED · WATCHDOG LIVE · BATTERY FLOOR · THERMAL WATCH · PHONE ALERTS ARMED — MACOS ✓ POWER TOOLS ✓ BATTERY ✓ HOTSPOT ✓ INTERNET ✓ TAILNET ✓ REMOTES ✓ — PACK · LID CLOSED · WATCHDOG LIVE · BATTERY FLOOR · THERMAL WATCH · PHONE ALERTS ARMED —

Comic panel: a hacker at a desk of glowing terminals glances at the clock, rucksack hanging empty on the chair — 01 · DEADLINE 19:42. The agents are mid-refactor. You have to leave.

Comic panel: hands slide a glowing laptop into a canvas rucksack while a phone shows five green checks — 02 · PACK `rucksack pack --lid-closed --yes --watch` — every check green. Zip it.

Comic panel: the hacker strides through a neon subway, glowing rucksack on their back, watching logs stream on their phone — 03 · TRANSIT Hotspot drops? The watchdog rejoins and pings your phone.

Comic panel: at a dawn-lit café counter the laptop reopens to a finished task list, rucksack slumped beside the stool — 04 · ARRIVAL Arrive. Unpack. The work never stopped.

Comic panel: on a night bus, the hacker reviews an agent's diff on their phone and taps a glowing APPROVE button, rucksack on their lap — 05 · COCKPIT Diff reviewed. APPROVE tapped. Next task queued — from seat 23A.

▸ STEER

Keep driving the run from the Codex app or claude.ai on your phone — review diffs, approve tools, redirect the agent mid-transit. Outbound-only: the Mac never needs inbound access.

▸ WATCH

The watchdog posts to your private ntfy.sh topic — link lost, link restored, process revived. Subscribe on your phone and know within seconds.

▸ REACH

Want a real terminal into the bag? Optional Tailscale plus any ssh client gives you a shell from anywhere. Strictly optional — steering and alerts work without it.

$ rucksack doctor

Nine readiness checks: battery, hotspot SSID, real internet (captive-portal probe), Tailscale if you have it, your agent remotes.

$ rucksack pack --lid-closed --yes

Backpack mode. sudo pmset disablesleep with the previous value saved, verified, and restored on stop. The bag run, done properly.

$ rucksack pack --watch

A watchdog rides along: rejoins the hotspot when Wi-Fi drops, restarts the keep-awake process if it dies, and restores normal sleep if the CPU starts thermal-throttling in the bag. All logged, with a phone alert.

$ rucksack pack --warn-battery 20 --sleep-battery 10

Battery guardrails for a sealed laptop. At 20% your phone pings; at the 10% floor Rucksack restores normal sleep so the Mac sleeps and saves your work instead of running the battery flat.

$ rucksack notify test

Point --notify-url at an ntfy.sh topic. Link lost, link restored, process revived — your phone knows in seconds. Pack with --expose 3000 and your dev server's phone-tappable URL lands on the same topic.

$ rucksack hotspot connect "My iPhone"

Joins your phone's hotspot from the Keychain-saved password and verifies the association — even when macOS redacts the SSID.

$ rucksack unpack

Kills the watchdog, stops keep-awake, restores your saved previous sleep setting, cleans up state. No trace left behind.

$ rucksack recover

The reassurance button. If a run was interrupted — crash, force-quit, killed watchdog — recover kills leftovers and restores the saved sleep setting, so a tool that touches global power config never strands your Mac awake.

$ curl -fsSL https://rucksack.sh/install | bash

  ▞▚ rucksack · checking macOS ............ OK
  ▞▚ rucksack · checking node >= 20 ....... OK
  ▞▚ rucksack · installing CLI ............ OK

  packed. try:  rucksack init --hotspot "My iPhone"

$ # prefer to read it first? same script, no pipe:

$ curl -fsSL https://rucksack.sh/install -o install.sh && less install.sh

$ # it runs sudo — pin a reviewed release instead of tracking main:

$ curl -fsSL https://rucksack.sh/install | RUCKSACK_REF=v0.2.0 bash

Tagged releases, a changelog, and CI on macOS + Linux — because this tool runs sudo and changes power settings. Secrets in ~/.rucksack are written 0600; the notify URL never rides in the watchdog's process arguments.

Lid-closed mode is the real backpack mode. On battery, caffeinate alone can't survive a lid close — that's physics of macOS, not marketing. Rucksack uses sudo pmset and restores your saved previous disablesleep value.
A laptop in a bag is a laptop in a bag. Agent reasoning is network-bound, but the commands agents run — test suites, builds, Docker, browsers, local databases, local models — can peg the CPU. Test your actual workload before carrying a closed laptop, keep vents unobstructed, and don't charge it inside a closed bag. Lid-closed mode automatically runs the watchdog; if macOS reports thermal throttling, it restores normal sleep and pings your phone — but it can't bend thermodynamics.
Alerts ride the same link. If the hotspot is fully dead, the "it's dead" ping queues until something routes. A heartbeat dead-man's switch is on the roadmap.
Tailscale is optional. Agent remote surfaces are outbound-only — your phone never needs to reach the Mac. A tailnet only matters if you want direct ssh.
macOS first; Windows rides in the WSL sidecar. On a Mac the core is pmset and caffeinate. On a Windows laptop, Rucksack now runs inside WSL2 (experimental): SetThreadExecutionState holds the machine awake, and lid-closed mode flips the Windows lid-close action with one elevated powercfg write — a single UAC prompt, your previous setting restored on unpack. The watchdog hasn't crossed over yet.

PACK YOUR AGENTS.

THE RUN

KEEP WORKING FROM YOUR POCKET

LOADOUT

INSTALL

STRAIGHT TALK