I haven't opened my laptop since this morning. It's been working the whole time.
It sits at home, switched on, running an agent I talk to from my phone. It drives a browser that's already signed in, so the small jobs on my personal projects move along without me being anywhere near them. I read what it did, tell it what's wrong, and get on with my day.
The part I didn't expect is how much of it is refusals. It asks before anything goes public. Twice this week it was stopped from saving work because an automatic check thought the text might contain sensitive information, which is a thing I'm strict about. When something needs a judgement that isn't mine to hand over, it stops and waits.
When I do need to overrule one of my own rules, I connect to the machine from my phone, do that bit by hand, and hand it back. That's ten seconds, and it's ten seconds of me actually deciding rather than a rule I quietly removed six months ago and forgot about.
None of this works because the tooling got clever. It works because the things that stop it are real, and because I am still the one they stop.
The laptop hasn't become less useful. It's just stopped being where the work happens. It's the biggest screen I own.