💻 I came across OpenClaude-Portable and I like the idea mostly because it reduces repeated setup.
It packages an AI coding agent into a self-contained folder and supports 9 providers, including Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama and LM Studio.
Settings, API keys and sessions stay inside the project directory.
Cloud providers still need internet, but with Ollama or another local provider the coding workflow can stay local once configured.
It supports Windows, Linux and macOS. 💾
To me, the interesting part is not “coding from a flash drive”. It is being able to move the whole agent environment between machines.
Has anyone here tried doing this from a USB SSD in a real workflow?
I went the other direction on this and made the runner something you host instead of making the agent portable. That’s a project I’m working on, TaskHandoff (https://docs.thandoff.com/), so flagging it as self-promo up front.
The reasoning: with a portable folder the environment moves, but the machine you’re sitting at still has to trust whatever the agent does there. With a self-hosted workbench you register your machines as workspaces once, then dispatch a task from the web UI and the session runs on the box you picked - local or remote. Sessions, credentials and task history stay on your side, and “moving between machines” becomes opening the UI from any of them rather than carrying the folder.
It doesn’t replace the offline USB-stick case, that one still has no good answer. But for “same agent environment on three machines” the registered-workspace model is what actually stuck for me.
Out of curiosity - did you hit provider key sync issues when moving between machines? That was our other pain point, and it’s part of why we kept credentials in one place.