I usually run coding agents somewhere in a VM or on a remote host, so I don’t have to think about what my laptop is doing.

But sometimes, especially for bigger tasks, I need to run an agent locally on my Mac.
And then there is one annoying problem: macOS may go to sleep while the agent is still working.

Apparently, caffeinate is a very simple way to prevent that.

Keep the Mac awake for a specific amount of time:

This keeps it awake for 1 hour (3600 seconds).

For a quick test:

And if you want to prevent pretty much all kinds of idle sleep while the command is running:

Simple, built into macOS, and surprisingly useful when running long AI agent tasks, builds, migrations, or anything else you don’t want interrupted by sleep.