Who Paddock is for

Paddock happens to be built by a software engineer, and it works beautifully for code. But it is not only for code. At its heart Paddock is a way to give any project a persistent, capable agent you can reach from anywhere — and a project can be almost anything.

It’s a launchpad, not an IDE

A project is just a directory with Claude Code attached. Claude can read and write files, run commands, use tools, and hold a long, resumable conversation about the work. What the work is is up to you:

• Code — a repo-backed project where Claude builds, tests, and opens PRs.
• Research & notes — a notebook project where Claude gathers, summarizes, and drafts.
• Writing — outlines, edits, and long-running document work that survives across sessions.
• Home & ops — runbooks, scripted chores, “check on X and tell me,” scheduled tasks.

Because chats are persisted and resumable, you start something on your laptop and pick it up on your phone hours later — the agent is still there, with all its context.

The real power is composition

Paddock is most useful when it runs on an always-on machine and you give its agents the tools they need to do real work. On the author’s own setup that means a small, dedicated box that is on 24/7 and composes Paddock with:

• a gh CLI authenticated with a scoped GitHub token (so agents can open PRs — but only against what that box should touch),
• media tools like ffmpeg, plus whatever a given kind of work needs,
• a process manager so agents can spin up dev/preview servers you can open in a browser.

That composition — an isolated, always-on environment plus exactly the right tools — is what turns Paddock from “a chat UI” into “a place where work actually gets done.”

Where to go next

• Try it in one command — npx @edspencer/paddock, then let Discover pull in the directories you’ve already been using Claude Code in and see it running against your own history. Nothing to install.
• Deploying Paddock — the recommended always-on setup.
• Securing Paddock — read this before anyone else can reach it.
• A home-lab setup — how the author runs Paddock in production.