Build and ship web apps from a 4 GB Chromebook with a cloud coding agent

Earl Grey, who runs court operations for a California county and does not write code, used an HP Chromebook 11a with 4 GB of memory and nothing installed. Working from the Claude app, they described each project in the chat and approved Claude Code's access to one empty GitHub repository. Claude Code cloned the repo in its cloud workspace, wrote the files, took screenshots to check its own work, committed and pushed. The author turned on GitHub Pages by hand. Over five rounds they shipped a phone page of big buttons that texts a pre-written request, a 3D papel picado scene in three.js, an animated diagram of the workflow revised six times in about twenty minutes, and a demo video that Claude recorded with Playwright and encoded with ffmpeg. They also had Claude break a Pages deploy on purpose to time the fix.

Every project went live. The Chromebook's CPU sat at 5% during builds and peaked at 15% while drawing the 3D scene at 60 frames per second, with about 1.4 to 1.7 GB of memory free. The deliberately broken deploy failed on GitHub in 31 seconds, the live site kept serving the last good version, and after the author typed "fix it" the deploy was green 44 seconds later. The heaviest thing on the laptop was the Claude chat tab itself, at about 283 MB.

Claude could not switch on GitHub Pages or reach the live github.io site from its workspace, so those steps and the final check stay manual. Nothing works offline. The author was on the $100 Max plan and has not tested whether this much work fits in Pro's limits. The fix timing is a best case, since Claude knew what it had broken. Each number is a single reading, not a benchmark.