Coding From Split: A Villa, a Pool, and a Cat Who Kept Letting Himself In
I just finished a month working remotely from Croatia. Specifically Kastela - the little string of seaside towns (Kaštel Gomilica and Kaštel Kambelovac, in my case) tucked between Split and Trogir. Most people who do this trip stay in Split itself. I'd recommend not doing that. The villages are quieter, the water is cleaner, and the rent gets you a lot more space.
This one came after Lisbon in March and Rome in April. By the time I landed in Croatia at the end of April I had a pretty settled rhythm for these months. Split is the trip where that rhythm started to feel like it had a ceiling - and I started thinking about what the next version of it looks like.
The Setup
I managed to land a private villa for the month. Modern, three floors, a small private pool out the back and a roof terrace looking out toward the sea. For nearly the entire month, that roof terrace was my office. Coffee in the morning, laptop open, the sound of cicadas and the occasional church bell from the village. On rainy days I worked inside on the middle floor, but rain was the exception.
Wifi was genuinely good. The villa had multiple APs spread across the floors so I never had a dead zone. My GL.iNet travel router came with me as always - I'd be lost without it now - but for once it wasn't doing heavy lifting. It mostly just sat there providing a consistent local network and VPN for the few moments I needed it. After Lisbon's Spaces drama and Rome's evening wifi dips, this was a relief.
No cafes this trip. No co-working. The villa was so comfortable, and the surroundings so quiet, that the question of where to work answered itself every morning.
What I Shipped
The big one was my ambient AI life coach agent - the eleven-day Raspberry Pi project I wrote about separately. That happened in Kastela, on the roof terrace, in stretches between swims. The constraints of the place - the calm, the lack of distractions, the fact that you can step away from the keyboard and be in the sea in under three minutes - turned out to be very good conditions for the kind of long-running, exploratory work that project needed.
I also kept the usual side projects ticking - the investment-watch dashboard, a couple of personal experiments, and a few research spikes on a SaaS idea I'm planning to build during a focus week later this year. None of it required anything heroic. The AI-first manager pattern continued to do its job: I orchestrate, the agents implement, I review and redirect. Three trips in, this workflow is no longer remarkable to me, which is itself remarkable.
The Half-Month Off
This wasn't a 28-day shipping marathon like Lisbon. My parents came out to visit for a chunk of the trip, and I took roughly two and a half weeks off across the month. That changed the shape of things - more days on Brač, in Trogir, exploring Split's old town, eating long lunches - and less of the rigid morning-work, evening-walk routine I'd developed in Portugal.
What surprised me is how easy that was to do. The work that needed shipping shipped. The agents kept running. The trip got space to breathe. I think the lesson - and it's one I'm still working out - is that the AI-first workflow makes part-time shipping a much more viable mode than it used to be. You don't need eight focused hours to make meaningful progress anymore. You need one or two good orchestration sessions a day, and the rest can be lunch and a swim.
The Idea That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone
The single biggest thing I'm taking away from Kastela isn't a place or a meal. It's an itch.
Sitting on the roof terrace with a laptop is great. Sitting next to the actual sea with a laptop is harder - too much glare, too much sand, too much risk of dropping a £3000 machine into salt water. But the agents don't care where I'm running the conversation from. They just need a prompt and a way to report back.
So I spent a lot of this month thinking about how to drive my agents from my phone and watch. Voice in, voice or text out, tasks dispatched from a beach chair instead of a desk chair. Right now my mobile setup is a compromise - the official Claude apps are good but they're not the multi-agent orchestration cockpit I've built locally. There's a real piece of work to do there, somewhere between "voice memos that become PRs" and "ambient assistant I can talk to while I'm in the water."
I don't have an answer yet. But every morning on that terrace, looking out at the Adriatic, the question got louder. The next iteration of this lifestyle isn't a nicer office on the road. It's no office.
The Best Thing About Kastela
It is genuinely, unbelievably calm. There's a particular feeling I had repeatedly walking down to the water in the evening - a kind of nothing else in the world matters right now dystopian quiet. The villages are tiny. The tourists are mostly Croatian families. The pace is glacial. After a year of context-switching between client work, side projects, and a dashboard that tells me whether the Strait of Hormuz is open, dropping into this place was a system reset I didn't know I needed.
The water is also obscenely clear. You can see your shadow on the sea floor in eight feet of water. After a few weeks of it, every other coastline feels slightly grey.
The Worst Things
Two real complaints.
The supermarkets clocked me immediately. I'd put four items on the belt and somehow walk out paying for six. It happened so consistently across so many different shops that I stopped assuming malice and started assuming policy. By the end of the month I was watching the screen during every scan. Bring receipts. Check them. This is not the place to be relaxed about your change.
Getting around is a tax on your time and money. Kastela's public transport to Split is fine but infrequent. Uber works but adds up fast when you're using it every other day. I looked at renting a car and the prices were eye-watering - genuinely more than I expected for a country at this price point. The villa was perfect, but it was also a 25 minute drive from anything resembling a city, and that distance got expensive.
The Cat
Some context for anyone who's stayed in a Mediterranean villa: there are cats. Lots of cats. And one of them, over the course of the month, decided that my villa was acceptable second housing. He'd let himself in through the back door whenever it was propped open, walk past me on the sofa without acknowledging my existence, and either nap on a chair for an hour or stroll out the front. Sometimes he'd come up to the roof terrace and sit a polite three metres away while I worked. He never asked for food. He never knocked anything off a table. He was, I think, the calmest creature I have ever shared a building with, and at some point during week three I stopped finding it weird.
I miss him.
Food
An honest assessment: Croatian food, at least the version of it served in tourist-adjacent Kastela, wasn't quite to my taste. Portugal blew me away. Rome blew me away. Croatia was fine. The seafood is good if you like seafood (I'm picky). The pizza scene is solid - Pizzeria Laguna nearby was a reliable go-to, not amazing but consistently good. The grilled meat dishes are well done. But I didn't find a place I'd cross a city for, and I didn't have a single meal that lodged in my memory the way Donatella in Lisbon or the trattorias in Quadraro did. Possibly user error. Possibly I just need to come back and look harder.
Would I Do This Trip Again?
Yes - but I'd change the shape of it.
Next time I'd stay longer - two months in this same villa, not one - and I'd drive here from the UK so I have my own car the entire time. Solving the transport problem at the source would unlock everything I felt I was short on. More boat trips, more islands - Hvar, Vis, Korčula are all within reach and all worth a proper day each - and the freedom to drive up the coast on a whim instead of pricing out another Uber.
And next time I'd come with a working mobile-driven workflow. Because if I'd been able to ship code from a beach chair on Brač with a voice prompt and a glance at my watch, this trip would have been close to a perfect month.
I fly back to Manchester on Thursday for the summer. Split was the gentlest of the three trips so far, and probably the one that gave me the most to think about for what comes next.