Running PAI Across Multiple Machines - How Do You Handle It?

[vichong]

First off - huge thanks to Daniel for creating PAI. I've been using it daily and it's become central to how I work. Really appreciate the thought that's gone into the architecture.

My Setup

I run PAI across several machines:

• WSL on my desktop
• WSL on my laptop
• A macOS laptop
• An Ubuntu VM I can remote into (handy from an iPad)

This brought up a challenge: how do I make PAI "machine-aware" so it knows where things are on each system?

The Problem

Different machines have different paths:

• Obsidian vault lives in different locations on each machine
• Home directories differ (/home/user vs /Users/user)
• Hardcoded paths in configs break when you switch machines
• API keys and MCP configs need to sync securely
• Some services run differently (e.g., voice server setup differs between macOS and WSL)

My Approach (High Level)

I've ended up with a few key patterns:

1. Session Environment Capture

A hook runs at session start and captures the current machine context into a JSON file:

{
  "hostname": "DESKTOP-WSL",
  "obsidian_vault": "/mnt/d/Obsidian/vault",
  "pai_dir": "/home/user/projects/PAI",
  "platform": "linux"
}

Skills and commands read this file instead of relying on environment variables (which Claude Code's sandbox doesn't always inherit).

2. Machine-Agnostic Hooks

Using relative paths in settings.json (like .claude/hooks/run-hook.sh) works because Claude Code runs hooks from the project root. The hook scripts themselves derive PAI_DIR dynamically from their own script location using dirname - so they don't rely on any hardcoded paths or environment variables to find the PAI directory.

3. Chezmoi for Config Sync

I use chezmoi to manage configurations across machines:

• Shell configs, Claude settings, MCP configurations
• Age encryption for sensitive files (API keys stay safe in git)
• Platform-aware templates where needed
• Simple dotsync push / dotsync pull commands

4. Platform-Specific Services

Some things have slightly different setup per platform. For example, I have a voice notification server (ElevenLabs TTS) that needs to run on both macOS and WSL - the service management differs (LaunchAgent vs shell profile auto-start), and each platform uses its native audio player. Same server code works on both, just different install steps.

5. Machine Tags in Commits

My /sync command adds the hostname to commits like "Update configs [DESKTOP-WSL]" - makes it easy to track which machine made which changes.

Key Lessons

• Don't trust env vars in Claude Code sandbox - capture them at session start to a file
• Relative paths work because Claude Code runs from project root
• Encrypt sensitive configs with chezmoi + age
• Document your machine paths somewhere - future you will thank present you

Questions for the Community

• How are others handling multi-machine PAI setups? Curious if there are different approaches.
• Would patterns like this be useful to upstream? Happy to share more details or contribute if there's interest.
• Any gotchas I might be missing? Always looking to improve the setup.

---

Happy to elaborate on any part of this. Just wanted to start a conversation since I imagine others might be running PAI across multiple machines too.

[eeeschwartz]

Thanks for sharing. As a portability test I got PAI running in a GitHub codespace recently. It was automatically installed alongside a separate project repo so that PAI could govern the development process there.

One wrinkle I solved: it was tricky to make updates to PAI and push them to github when installed alongside another repo.

One wrinkle I didn't solve: having the codespace launch and control the chrome-devtools mcp on my local machine. I made progress with tunneling but it got more involved and less portable than I wanted. (eg windows tunneling was different than macOs).

[danielmiessler]

Hey, thank you so much for this submission. We're about to change the project significantly to solve a number of core issues. Once we do that, let's revisit if it makes sense.