# How to run agents on a bigger remote machine over SSH with orca

Repo: [stablyai/orca](https://github.com/stablyai/orca) | Difficulty: Advanced | Time: 1 hour | Basis: Seen in the wild

Point Orca at a beefy remote box and run agents there with full editing, git and terminals from your laptop.

**Who it is for:** Developer whose laptop is too slow or too small to run several agents and their builds at once

**The problem:** Parallel agents plus test runs overwhelm a laptop, but plain SSH sessions are fiddly to keep alive.

**The outcome:** Agents work in worktrees on the remote machine while you edit, review and use terminals locally, with reconnects handled for you.

## Steps

1. Make sure you can SSH into the remote machine and that your agent CLI is installed there.
2. Add the remote host as an SSH worktree in Orca by following the SSH docs.
3. Start an agent in a remote worktree and watch it from the Orca window.
4. Use port forwarding to preview any dev server the agent starts.

## Prompt to paste into your agent

```text
Using stablyai/orca, help me set up an SSH worktree for <user@host> and repo <path on remote>. Tell me how to confirm auto-reconnect works after I drop the connection.
```

## Caveat

One HN user reported trouble installing on a headless server and fell back to a machine with a desktop, so a pure headless box may need extra effort.

## Seen in the wild

- X (Oct 2026): https://x.com/i/web/status/2112067084913942686
- Hacker News (Sep 2026): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606598

Disclaimer: Third-party repos we don't own or vouch for. AI-generated use cases can be wrong: review everything and run at your own risk. Full text: https://dedupedai.com/disclaimer/

URL: https://dedupedai.com/use-cases/stablyai-orca/run-agents-on-remote-ssh-box/