The second machine is somewhere you send work, not somewhere you go

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One machine runs out before you do. A long build blocks everything else, the fans never stop, or you want agents working overnight on a spare desktop while the laptop travels with you. The instinct is to set the second computer up and then remote into it. That works, and it gives you two desks instead of one.

The better version is that you never sit at the second machine at all. It becomes somewhere you send work.

What is shared, and what is not

A DevThrottle fleet is one Gateway plus every Director that reports to it. Before you add a computer, it helps to know which things come along for free and which do not.

• On the Gateway, so it follows you. What every session in the fleet is doing, your model choices, voice settings, snooze lengths, language and dictionary, and your conversation history. It is also what your phone talks to.
• Kept by each machine. The Director itself, and settings that describe that computer rather than you, such as whether it starts on boot.
• Your job. Any repository you want the new machine to work on needs its own clone there. This is the one copying step in the whole story.

Joining takes one sign-in

Install DevThrottle on the second machine as you did the first. On the hosted Gateway, sign in to the setup wizard with the same account. When the wizard shows Connected, the two machines are one fleet.

There is no port to forward. On a normal install nothing on your machine listens: Directors dial out to the Gateway and never talk to each other. Running your own Gateway is the one exception, because that machine must listen on a port and be reachable at its address.

Then send it something

The new machine appears on the Fleet Map with its own sessions. Now start work on it from wherever you are:

• From the Fleet Map. Grouped by machine, each machine has + New session while it can take one.
• From your phone. The New session screen lists every machine. Pick one, then pick a repository.
• From a terminal or an agent. cc-devthrottle session spawn <repo> --machine <name>. If no Director is running there, the Gateway asks that machine's launcher to start one, and if the machine cannot be reached you get a clear error rather than a session quietly starting somewhere else.

That last one means an agent on your laptop can hand a heavy job to the desktop under the stairs without you touching either.

Decide about sleep before you rely on it

A machine that goes to sleep does not fall out of the fleet. It stays on the map, dimmed and dated, with its sessions still listed. What it cannot do is accept work until it wakes. If you want overnight runs, the spare desktop has to stay awake, and that is worth settling on day one. A logged-in machine can take a session even when its Director is not running yet, because its launcher starts when you log in.

One note on terms: two machines are not two sessions sharing a checkout. Each works on its own clone. Several sessions in one repository on one machine is a different problem, and worktrees solve that one.

The walk-through is your agents on more than one machine, and the setup detail is on Running more than one machine.