How Clawdeck works
Clawdeck is a chat window with a real computer behind it. You ask for something, an assistant does it on an actual Linux machine in the cloud, and anything it saves lands in your files. Nothing to install.
The three panes
Each project is its own folder and its own machine. Switching projects switches both.
Where you ask for things. The assistant replies here and reports what it did.
What the machine has. These are tabs in one pane — the terminal opens here too.
On a phone the three become bottom tabs: Projects, Chat, Files.
Turning on a computer
- ▶ Start learning
- One click. Picks the first lab of the course, works out which GPU that lab needs, boots that machine and clones the course onto it. You don't choose hardware.
- ▾ Advanced
- Opens the two dropdowns — which lab to start in, and which machine. Picking a lab re-derives the machine automatically, so the two never disagree.
- ⚡ Turn on compute
- Boots a plain machine with no course attached — for when you just want a Linux box and a terminal.
- needs 2 GPUs · 24GB each
- What the selected lab requires. You never have to act on this — it's shown so the machine choice above it makes sense.
The machine itself boots in about 30 seconds. Setting it up — cloning the course and downloading the shared GPU dependencies (~6GB, once per machine) — takes anywhere from a few seconds on a recycled machine to a few minutes on a fresh one. The panel shows a timer so you can see it working, and you don't have to wait: start a run and it begins automatically the moment setup finishes.
Moving between files, labs and the terminal
This trips people up once and then never again: the terminal is not a separate window. It opens in the right-hand pane, on top of your files.
- Files — everything the machine made. Click to preview, or download.
- Lab — the things you can run, grouped by whether this machine can run them.
- Terminal — opens automatically when compute starts, or via the ⌨ Terminal button. To go back, press ← Files at the top of the terminal. It returns you to the pane you came from; it does not shut the machine down.
Turning the machine off is a separate button, Turn off, and your files are saved before it stops.
Not every lab writes a file. About half of them — including the first few — report their results in the terminal and save nothing to disk, so an empty Files list after a run is usually correct rather than a bug. To keep what you saw, use 💾 Save to project at the bottom of the terminal.
The Lab tab
Labs are grouped by what your current machine can actually do:
- ⚡ Runs now — no GPU needed — finishes in seconds. Good while the rest installs.
- ✅ Ready on this machine — press Run and watch it in the terminal.
- 🔒 Needs a different machine — shows the cheapest machine that would run it, and switches for you in one click. Your files are saved first.
A lab is locked when it needs more GPUs than you have — not to upsell you. Distributed training jobs are launched with an exact GPU count, and running one on the wrong-sized machine stops immediately rather than running slowly.
Free hours
Clawdeck is free and there is nothing to pay for. Machine time is capped so it can be shared around: 2 hours of GPU time and 2 hours of desktop time, counted separately.
An idle machine pauses itself after 15 minutes, so you don't burn hours by leaving a tab open. When you run out, a form appears — tell us what you're working on and we'll top you up. Your files are never affected.
The course
The DeepSpeed course checkbox clones a full distributed-training course onto your machine at boot — 26 labs, from a small neural net through LLM fine-tuning. The course keeps its own documentation: