We gave AI agents a mobile dev environment

We built agentic workflows to tackle mobile development tasks in parallel, but quickly hit the limits of our development machines. Just three or four workflows were enough to max out a laptop, with compilers, simulators, and emulators competing for resources. And we had to keep it awake. If someone accidentally closed a laptop lid, the work stopped.

Our web and backend teams were already using River (our AI agent in Slack) to work without tying up their development machines. We needed the same thing for mobile. But River ran on Linux: it could edit Swift, but building and testing the iOS app still meant going back to the same laptops we’d already maxed out.

Our ability to delegate work had outgrown our ability to run it. So we built Remote Dev.