Close Your MacBook Lid Without Killing Your AI Agents (Open-Source macOS Keep-Awake)
Every time you close your MacBook lid on battery or unplug your display to walk to a meeting, macOS enters clamshell sleep. Your SSH sessions drop, your Docker builds freeze, and your background AI coding agents die mid-run. caffeinate -dims only prevents idle sleep while the lid is open. To keep a
Posted on Nov 3 • Originally published at il.ly
Every time you close your MacBook lid on battery or unplug your display to walk to a meeting, macOS enters clamshell sleep. Your SSH sessions drop, your Docker builds freeze, and your background AI coding agents die mid-run.
caffeinate -dims only prevents idle sleep while the lid is open. To keep a MacBook running with the lid closed, macOS requires toggling pmset -a disablesleep 1 at the kernel power management layer—which is risky if you forget it on and throw your laptop into a backpack.
So I built and open-sourced Awake ( il.ly/awake ) — a tiny native macOS 26 Control Center widget, Menu Bar timer, and CLI ( awake / asleep ) that keeps your MacBook running with the lid closed, locks the screen the instant the lid shuts, and automatically re-enables sleep if the battery temp hits 40°C or drops to 10%.