I brought my VR headset to the office yesterday so people could try vibe coding in virtual reality. It was fun. People got to experience what it's like to code while floating in a digital space, the whole ridiculous novelty of it.
But then something interesting happened.
One of the younger guys tried it out, took the headset off after a few minutes, and then decided to mess with my desktop. He dragged some files around, figured maybe it would sync up to "the cloud" somehow and he could mess with what was happening in the VR space. Or maybe it was just random curiosity. But the looks he gave me afterward — yeah, I'm pretty sure I got in trouble with People & Culture.
Here's what I think was happening in his head: he thought Claude Code was running locally on my machine. He didn't quite understand that the VR experience was coming from a remote system, that the agent doing the work was somewhere else entirely, that my desktop was just a window into something much bigger.
It's a perfectly natural assumption from someone seeing it for the first time. The VR headset is on your head, you're interacting with code, it feels local and present and real. Of course it must be running on this machine, right?
But that's the future of work staring us in the face.
The compute is not where you think it is. The tools you're using aren't necessarily installed locally. The agent helping you code might be running on a VPS in another country. The boundaries between local and remote, between your machine and "the cloud," are becoming increasingly blurry.
We're moving toward a world where the physical device you're holding — whether it's a VR headset, a laptop, or a phone — is just an interface. The actual work happens somewhere else. And that's genuinely disorienting for people who grew up thinking their computer was a thing.
So on Monday when we have that conversation about what happened with my desktop, I'm curious to explain it without sounding like I'm lecturing. Because he's not wrong to be confused. We're all still figuring out what it means to work in a world where your workspace isn't where your workspace is.
It's a good problem to have.
Part of the #100DaysToOffload documenting agentic development in 2026