Shop notes: Cube Computer
Hi there!
For those who are new here: welcome.
Back in March, I was testing a bunch of new ideas for products that our brave new agentic era would need. One of these, quite unexpectedly, took off on Twitter. Collaborator was a 2D infinite canvas where you could double-click anywhere and instantly get a Claude Code session.
This core conceit didn’t have the depth I felt necessary for defensibility or monetisability. But Collaborator’s popularity clued me into a very interesting market opportunity: AI-pilled developers hungry for better surfaces for working with coding agents. Even in such a crowded market, there apparently remain important unsolved problems.
I joined forces with Paul Rony (prev. Kosmik) to see what we could build in this space. We spent June and July iterating on prototypes and talking to developers.
We tried and discarded many ideas. In the process, we started noticing something: as agents get more capable, the tasks that developers hand them are getting longer, pricier, and higher stakes. We spoke to technical founders spending nearly $20k a week on agents that run for a dozen or more hours, building complex features that directly impact revenue.
To quote one such founder, “The opportunity cost of not having agents running is high, and getting higher.”
To address this problem, many first-party agents and agentic development tools have been rolling out cloud agent features. However, we still came across developers who prefer to manually provision a cloud VM (e.g. Hetzner), set it up just so, and SSH into it to kick off long-running Claude Code tasks. Many have a Mac mini running in a closet somewhere.
Why do they go to all this trouble? It turns out the reason is control.
Some developers want their repos organized on disk a certain way so that their agents can work across them without converting everything to a monorepo. Other devs need specific tools and dependencies installed. Yet others want to keep using terminal-based agents for the pro-grade power and flexibility they offer.
For a million different reasons, they want a real computer for running coding agents. But they don’t want those agents to stop if the screen is closed, or the battery dies, or the in-flight wifi cuts out. The status quo solution is to roll your own cloud agentic dev machine.
But setting up a cloud VM for running agents is cumbersome and brittle. Nothing about the workflow is delightful. Only those devs with the most to gain will put up with the friction. We believe there’s a much larger group of agent-pilled developers who would greatly benefit from such a dev setup. They just need someone to make it easy and joyful.
So we’re building Cube Computer.
Cube Computer is a zero-setup cloud computer for running terminal-based coding agents. We built a great desktop Agentic Development Environment app which automatically provisions and connects to a dedicated Fly.io cloud virtual machine.
Our priority is to make Claude Code or Codex CLI on the Cube cloud machine feel as close as possible to running them locally. But unlike local agents, when you shut your laptop to jump in an Uber, or the battery dies, or the in-flight wifi cuts out, your agents keep building.
We’ll be launching Cube on X tomorrow, but we wanted to give you an insider’s sneak peek the day before we go public.
From the women who helped NASA win the space race, to the first microcomputers, to the iPhone, the very concept of the computer has never stopped evolving. As we enter the agentic era, we can’t help but believe that a new type of computer will become commonplace: the personal cloud computer. Cube is a first step into that future.
Oh—there’s one more thing: Back in March, Collaborator caught the attention of some investors in X as well. One thing led to another, and Paul and I joined a16z Speedrun batch 007. We couldn’t be more excited to build Cube Computer with the incredible support of the Speedrun team, including Troy, Seeam, Macy, Tab, Lester, and all the others helping us go from zero to 100 in record time.
Send any thoughts or questions my way. We’d love to hear from you. You can also easily book a call with me here: cal.com/yiliu.
Until the next one,
Yiliu & Paul
co-founders, Cube Computer
Update, 27 Aug 2026: Thank you so much for the warm response to yesterday’s shop note! Today is our public launch day and we have just announced Cube on Twitter: Yiliu’s tweet · Paul’s tweet