We gave AI agents a mobile dev environment

Why we picked it · the editor's summary

Shopify's River agent works from Slack on Linux, so it could edit Swift but never build or run the app it changed, and three or four parallel sessions maxed out a developer's laptop. Remote Dev gives each session its own Mac, with Android's emulator on a Linux VM over SSH because macOS lacks nested virtualization; a pool of warm Macs with the monorepo built cut a 30-minute cold setup to a few minutes. River's share of merged mobile pull requests rose from 6% to 61%, which the team credits partly to internal campaigns and a loop that mines failed conversations. It also forgot the remote Mac and went quiet on long tasks. If your agents write code they cannot run, copy the warm pool and the skill that makes them prove the change.