Some developers are walking through airports, offices and ice rinks with their laptops left slightly open so background AI agents can keep running. The small gap is enough to keep the work moving, and enough to keep them from losing progress.
Geoff Chan, 39, head of product at Raven.AI, said he leaves his laptop ajar during his daughters' skating practices and told Business Insider, “I have to put it up on a shelf.” He is part of a growing group of users described in the report who carry or keep machines active in airports, school hallways and other public spaces to avoid interrupting the agent state.
The behavior reflects how these tools work. The agents run locally or depend on WiFi, and shutting or sleeping the laptop can break long-running processes. Business Insider points to OpenAI Codex as one example of the sort of tooling being folded into those sessions, where a laptop is no longer just a screen but a live workspace that can stall the moment it closes.
That creates the odd scene of people trying to stay mobile while also not letting their computers rest. The reported workaround is simple enough: keep the machine awake, keep it connected and keep it out of the way, even if that means balancing it on a shelf at a rink or walking with it half-open through an airport terminal.
The bigger question now is not whether the habit looks strange. It is whether developers will keep accepting that tradeoff as more AI agent tools move from novelty to everyday work. For now, the answer is already visible in the hallways and waiting areas where laptops stay cracked open just long enough to finish the job.
