This is a pretty sophisticated setup. I particularly like how it uses Tailscale.
I've been using the simpler but not as flexible alternative: I'm running Claude Code for web (Anthropic's version of Codex Cloud) via the Claude iPhone app, with an environment I created called "Everything" which allows all network access.
(This is moderately unsafe if you're working with private source code or environment variables containing API keys and other secrets, but most of my stuff is either open source or personal such that I don't care if the source code leaks.)
Anthropic run multiple ~21GB VMs for me on-demand to handle sessions that I start via the app. They don't charge anything extra for VM time which is nice.
I frequently have 2-3 separate Claude Code for web sessions running at once, often prompted from my phone, some of them started while I'm out walking the dog. Works really well!
I haven't missed planning mode myself. I tend to tell it "write a detailed plan first in a file called spec.md for me to review", then use that as the ongoing plan.
I like that it ends up in the repo as it means it survives compaction or lets me start a fresh session entirely.
The lack of Plan Mode is puzzling, I'm sure they must get to it at some point. But until then it CAN still plan, you just have to ask it to write a plan and not write code yet.
Not sure if this works in claude code web, but running non-interactive claude code I can still get it to use plan mode by simply asking it. It's just a tool call.
Can you not use PAL MCP for this? Have one top agent as controller etc? It's not ideal but it feels like the space of multi agent stuff is evolving ... I notice that there are a lot of posts on hn about these things so we are trying to do the same thing really.
I'm surprised to see people getting value from "web sandbox"-type setups, where you don't actually have access to the source code. Are folks really _that_ confident in LLMs as to entirely give up the ability to inspect the source code, or to interact with a running local instance of the service? Certainly that would be the ideal, but I'm surprised that confidence is currently running that high.
I still get the full source code back at the end, I tell it to include code it wrote in the PR.
I also wrote my own tool to extract and format the complete transcript, it gives me back things like this where I can see everything it did including files and scripts it didn't commit. Here's an example: https://gistpreview.github.io/?3a76a868095c989d159c226b7622b...
Right - I’m missing how you get the source code in the OP. It says you tmux in with ssh agent forwarding for GH. But you can’t do that on your iOS device? So you have to set up all your repos in the morning before leaving the house, then collect and push all your branches when you return home?
I could imagine this working for a small number of branches/changes.
The output from Jules is a PR. And then it's a toss-up between "spot on, let's merge" and "nah, needs more work, I will check out the branch and fix it properly when I am the keyboard". And you see the current diff on the webpage while the agent is working.
Claude Code on the web, ChatGPT Codex and Google Jules are not the same as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. They are entire apps where you authorize Github access and they work via PRs.
Are those VM specs documented anywhere, I have used Claude Code for web a lot and never really bothered with the details. Just connect it to my repo and let it cook
Check out superconductor.dev (I’m building it), if you want live app previews, docker-in-docker functionality, multiple agents in one mobile app, and more.
I have my very fast macbook pro at my desk in my office, and I use tmux and tailscale and git worktrees and I’ve built a notification setup like this author.
Thanks to tailscale and ssh I can vibecode on the go from my phone with this setup.
While it’s great to leave a task running, no matter what I do I can’t achieve the type of high quality work on the go that I can when I’m sitting at my desk.
For me working on a full SaaS.. I just can’t do quality work on my phone.
The only way I can do quality work is to sit at my desk where I’m focused on the work. To play with the result of a prompt, take copious notes, feed them back to the agent, not ship until the thing is polished to a shine. To feature flag the changes, review all code in excruciating detail as though it was written by a dyslexic intern, add all the metrics and logs one can think of (VictoriaMetrics), add user-behavior logging (Amplitude/Posthog) and monitor the thing like your livelihood depends on it. Because it’s a product and you have pride in your work.
All of that needs loads of screen real estate and a keyboard.
So I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Same here, I’m vibecoding a toy project where I never looked at the code from my phone, but I always seat for work. I’m using happy app and that’s good enough for now, I have the desktop in tailscale but I access it that way just for testing
For me, setup like this is not a replacement or even supplement the desk + high focus environment. My use case for these mobile vibecode setup is great though for small exploration/POC/learning/research type of work. Then I take the knowledge learned or any actual useful parts of code and incorporate into my work next time I sit back down at my desk.
There has been a sustained campaign over the last few days to push "I use Claude from my phone". I saw multiple posts on LinkedIn already, and now this.
This blog is super sus too. All the posts are about Claude. I suspect it's run by Anthropic, just read the About page: https://granda.org/en/about/
I am not Anthropic. I have vibe-coded a web interface for claude code to use from my phone. It's very similar to Anthropic's, but has a couple more features that I wanted.
Pandora's box is open; we're moving towards a world where white collar workers will be working 24/7 and they'll be expected to do so.
It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.
I'm a heavy LLM user. On a daily basis, I find LLMs extremely useful both professionally and personally. But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.
This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.
The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs
It would be a deep irony if LLMs ended up ushering in the social rupture that never arrived in the industrial era. When the pigs turn hogs and refuse to share even the scraps, they shouldn’t be surprised if the system they depend on becomes their undoing.
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital
This is totally false. The vast majority of consumers enjoy huge benefits from the system while owning almost no capital. For example, Walmart customers or iPhone owners.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between capitalism (which has made their lives materially wealthy beyond imagination) and the root cause of today's economic troubles for ordinary people, which is affordability, which is mostly driven by the housing crisis, which is dominated by nimbyism in megacities.
Fix megacity housing regulation to enable cheap/low risk building that the market wants, and you fix the affordability crisis.
No need to rebuild the (greatest system in the history of humankind) from scratch.
You can do it on a personal level, but when everyone else is overworking you, your manager will compare your output based on your peers, and based on it, you might be negatively impacted
Yeah absolutely. It’s hardly things like Claude Code that are the problem, Slack (or other forms of communication) are much easier to slip into personal time and have been a trend since Blackberries were invented.
This is always the reason I'm interested in this exact workflow. Want to build something but never have the time without sacrificing significant amounts of sleep but now it's easier than ever to get things building.
This is a complete fantasy. If LLM's got to this point of sophistication there would be a total revolution in almost every industry. Society would be radically different. Since LLM's are nowhere near this, I'm not so sure we even have Pandora's box, let alone opened it.
Glad someone is rational. I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.
This AI fear wave has outed that many people have not even the most basic grasp of economics, or the ability to carry a thought to its natural conclusion.
For example, I'll often see people espousing: "there will be no work left, better get rich now or you're screwed!". What's the point in getting rich if there will be no work left? Money is merely a means to an end; in this world with no work everyone will have the ends (goods and services) for free, or else goods and services will still have value and therefore jobs will still exist.
Another equally silly argument "only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable".
I've never seen completely verifiable software, but let's presume it exists! If software engineering can be replaced (or some large part of it) I will simply say to my LLM "please make me a piece of software that replaces my accountant/lawyer/...", for that matter I could just as equally say "please make me manufacturing software for a perfect humanoid robot and a plumber/bricklayer/electrician protocol". LLMs cannot do this? Then software engineers will move to solving these problems. If LLMs can do it, then the entire economy will be meaningless and Dario/Sam/Elon/etc... will be no richer than you or I.
But, as you say, LLMs are not close to being able to do any of this (and yes... I use Claude Code)
It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization within software during these nascent moments of LLM deployment. Software engineers seem totally resigned toward reduced salary and employment instead of just organizing labor while still in control of the development of these systems.
I really don't get it -- is it that people think these technologies will be so transformative that it is most moral to race toward them? I don't see much evidence of that, it's just future promises (especially commensurate with the benefit / cost ratio). When I do use this tech it's usually edutainment kind of curiosity about some subject matter I don't have enough interest in to dive into--it's useful and compelling but also not really necessary.
In fact, I don't really think the tech right now is at all transformative, and that a lot of folks are unable to actually gauge their productivity accurately when using these tools; however, I do not believe that the technology will stay that way, and it will inevitably start displacing people or degrading labor conditions within the only economically healthy remaining tranche of people in America: the white collar worker.
I've been writing software for 30 years, a part of it had success in the sense of being widely known and adopted for a long time. Writing software is difficult, consumes time and is difficult as you get older to focus the needed time away from other matters like a professional life and family.
With LLM, my productivity suddenly went up x25 and was able to produce at a speed that I had never known. I'm not a developer any more, instead feels like project manager with dedicated resources always delivering results. It isn't perfect, but when you are used to manage teams it isn't all that different albeit the results are spectacularly better.
My x25 isn't just measured on development, for brainstorming, documentation, testing, deployment. It is transformative, in fact: I think software is dead. For the first time I've used neither a paper notebook nor even an IDE to build complex and feature-complete products. Software isn't what matters, what matters is the product and this is what the transformation part is all about. We all here can write products in languages we never had contact with and completely outperform any average team of developers doing the same product.
Replaces the experts and domain specific topics? Not yet. Just observe that the large majority of products are boringly simple cases of API, UI and some business logic inside. For that situation, it has "killed" software.
Unfortunately, it's futile to try to convince the median HN poster that labor organization could help them. They've drunk the entire pitcher of corporate anti-union koolaid.
People could be directly in the middle of losing their own job or taking on the responsibilities of 5 other laid-off coworkers, and they would still ask "what could a labor union possibly do for me??"
1. Like most labor organizing, I think this would be beneficial for software engineers, but not long-term beneficial for the world at large. More software that is easier to make is better for everybody.
Would you still want to live in a world where your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick, or where overseas Whatsapp calls cost $1 per minute, because they have to be connected by a chain of operators?
2. Software engineering is a lot easier to move than other professions. If you want to carry people from London to New York, you need to cater to the workers who actually live in London or New York. If you want to make software... Silicon Valley is your best bet right now, but if SV organizes and other places don't, it may not be your best bet any more. That would make things even worse for SV than not organizing. Same story applies to any other place.
Sure, companies won't more overnight, but if one place makes it too hard for AI to accelerate productivity, people will either go somewhere else, or that place will just end up completely outcompeted like Europe did.
> It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization
Never lived in the US, where I assume you are from. It's the same country that contrary to most countries, does not have May 1st as a Holiday. Same country that has states with at will employment, etc etc.
I wish I knew which union to pitch. All I can say is what I know which is if you are dispirited with this state of affairs a great way to figure out where to go with it is to connect with your local democratic socialists of america branch, or maybe the joint union dsa effort:
Yes, labour unions are immoral. Curtailing growth (especially in industries where it can prevent unnecessary death) for your personal needs is plain evil. I say that as someone who is both very stressed by pressure to sustain my family while cushy life is slipping away.
One of these is immutable (shitty managers) one of these is new. I personally am all here for the brief human funtime before we all get paperclipped and whatever, been having a ton of fun with CC/Codex, been pushing my own startup forward... but ... You do see the issue here right?
It's the power imbalance. Shitty managers still control your means to eat.
> It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.
I remember hearing similar criticisms of continuous delivery. On one end of the spectrum people who had to wait months to get changes out now got them out relatively quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, some person was going to push changes at midnight.
A decade on forward I've never actually worked at a shop that at scale did continuous delivery in its truest sense where changes go straight to production. Simply, nothing beats a human in the loop; it's always about balancing the costs of automation and a lower barrier to entry. I imagine this kind of thing, if it ever actually takes hold and can be adopted by a larger subset of engineers, will follow a similar path.
Long way of saying, I don't think you're Chicken Little but also don't start breathing into a bag just yet.
The difference here is, you type a command into your phone at 3pm. Put it down to go play with your kid for 3hours. Type a new one in at 9pm before bed where you’ve been binging your wife’s favorite show. Then you wake up at 10am to a holistic transformation in your business that would’ve taken months previously in your career. But whatever, another command and it’s off to 11am frisbee.
>But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.
Excluding work (where granted, some companies are dictating the use of llms) and trying not to sound uncaring or disrespectful, but have you thought about not using llms for everything and using the old grey cells? Not having answers to every whimsical thought might be a good thing.
It's very easy to relax the brain (and be lazy tbh) with llms and it's scary to think what will happen in the next 4 years in terms of personal cognitive ability (or as a society).
e.g. I've noticed (and probably most have here) that the world is full of zombies glued to their phones. Looking over their shoulder (e.g. on a train, yeah it's a bit rude but I'm the curious type), they are doom scrolling or playing waste-time games (insert that boomer meme in Las Vegas with slot machines [0]). I try to use my phone as little as possible (especially for dog walks) and feel better for it, allowing me to daydream and let boredom take over.
Maybe I'm fortunate to be able to do this (gen-x: having grown up before cell phones/internet), but worth stating in case anyone wants to try.
There is evidence that LLM usage is actually making people dumber. I'm not sure if they've figured out the cause/effect or not but that's enough evidence for me to avoid them if I can. They can be useful for some stuff but I found myself offloading my thinking a little too frequently.
Anyways if we do get to the point where you need to use LLMs to write code, I can make a decision then, but for now I don't feel the need to adopt agentic workflows and I think the people who don't will be better cognitively positioned in the future.
No thanks. I'm so glad I'm getting closer to retirement age. From a young age, all I wanted to do was program computers. _I_ wanted to do it. Not have some tool do it for me. There's no fun or interest or ... anything that comes from that. I want to solve the problems. I want to write the code. It's what I am good at and it's incredibly enjoyable to me. Why the fuck would I ever give that up?
But, the world is changing. Y'all can have it... in a few short years. ;)
Had the same feeling many moons ago when they gave me an office smartphone where email from the company was available 24/7. At the beginning was answering emails at midnight, nowadays couldn't care less. Just wait until work hours.
Hum, I already have a phone with Slack / Email on. And it's only switched on during work hours. No messaging outside of that window. Why would that be different?
In many countries, these and other jobs show you cannot. If you don't, others will and so you won't have a job very soon. Especially if these types of jobs lose their shine/prestige and are basically call center quality/pay like jobs in 5-10 years.
I'd love to believe that, but unless our timeline is disrupted (world war / climate change / regulation re: power generation and consumption), I unfortunately can't imagine a future different to the one I described - and I've tried!
That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.
This was the end game with or without AI. It was always going to result in a zero-sum game because the factories that are open around the clock can output more products - which is exactly why a lot of manufacturing has non stop shift work. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table and a competitor will gladly take it.
When you saw 996 being talked about it should have set a few alarm bells off, because it started a countdown timer until such a work culture surpasses the rather leisurely attitude of the West in terms of output and velocity. West cannot compete against that no matter how many “work smarter, not harder” / “work to live don’t live to work” aphorisms it espouses. This should be obvious by now (in hindsight).
You can blame LLM or capitalism or communism but the hard matter is, it’s a money world and people want to have as much of it as they possibly can, and you and your children can’t live without it, and every day someone is looking to have more of it than you are. This isn’t even getting into the details of the personality types that money and power attracts to these white collar leadership roles.
This has been like this forever. Change is that software engineers, historically spoiled and expensive is going to have a brutal reality check - aka we will work just everyone else.
People need to start having conversations about existential risk here. Hinton, Nobel Prize winner in AI, thinks there's a decent chance AI executes the entire human species. This isn't some crank idea.
On the $210/month VM cost - fair point. For me it's worth it because I'm running multiple parallel agents throughout the day, but you could definitely do this cheaper with a smaller instance or spot pricing.
The real bottleneck isn't typing on mobile - it's reviewing the output. I've found 2-3 parallel agents is my sweet spot before I can't keep up with reviewing PRs. Git worktrees help a lot here since each agent works in isolation with its own containers (including db).
And to the work-life balance concerns - totally valid. For me this isn't about working more, it's about capturing ideas when they strike (usually on walks or waiting in line). The Poke notifications let me stay async rather than glued to a terminal.
Although a little late to the HN post, happy to answer any questions about the setup!
I start/stop to save costs when I'm not actively coding. The VM is ~$7/day running, so I halt it overnight. The wait for Tailscale is just ~10 seconds for the mesh to reconnect after boot.
I started with a beefy VM to make sure I could ramp up without hitting slowdowns, but I'm planning to migrate to an Intel NUC running Proxmox at home soon.
how do you manage to review code without running said apps or testing them, sure the code might look correct, but doesn't mean whatever issue / feature works or the bug is actually fixed
Each worktree has its own Docker containers including the database, so I can hit the dev server from my phone browser via Tailscale. For quick checks I'll just curl an endpoint or check the logs. For anything visual, I open the branch's preview URL.
But honestly - if it needs serious testing, I wait until I'm at my desk. The phone workflow is best for "let Claude run while I'm out" rather than deep debugging.
Shout out to https://exe.dev for this stuff. It'a a VM provider service. It makes it stunningly easy to get https up and going, has a front end http gateway that does all the hard parts for you.
But relevant to this article here, it also has a super sick web based agent, Shelley, that is quite adequate for using from the phone.
I'd also note that OpenCode is a solidjs app, that can run in tui (how most folks know it) or the web. And it has an excellent excellent plugin architecture. The work in this post to build workflows is great!
This is cool, but does everybody have enough work for multiple agents in parallel?
I feel like I'm limited by writing specs for agents, then by reviewing their work.
I typically spend 30-60 minutes writing a spec, then the agent runs for 30-60 minutes, then I spend 30-60 minutes refining code/ui/etc before putting up a PR, then another 30-60 minutes waiting for CI + addressing automated + human code review feedback.
I find if a project is made with agentic coding in mind, you can try to implement features as they come to mind and bounce between different CC terminals.
The problem is that this is true of none of my work projects and the onboarding cliff to agentic coding is quite steep. I have to use discretion to apply CC when it does make sense, which is not that often.
I'll have claude code editing a script on my laptop and another on the VM running it and synthesizing the results. Then sometimes I'll have another doing some odd job or researching something. Then I'll pull up gemini in my browser to figure out what I should make for lunch...
I usually use one instance, sometimes two. But this is a reasonable account of Chris Rackaukas using 32 instances at a time to do boilerplate maintenance across a bunch of open source repositories: https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/claude-code-in-scientifi...
> I have had to spend like 4am-10am every morning Sunday through Saturday for the last 10 years on this stuff before the day gets started just to keep up on the “simple stuff” for the hundreds of repos I maintain. And this neverending chunk of “meh” stuff is exactly what it seems fit to do. So now I just let the 32 bots run wild on it and get straight to the real work, and it’s a gamechanger.
I don't like typing long messages on my phone so this workflow, as cool as it sounds, wouldn't work for me. My current setup is that I have a Claude Code hook that runs whenever CC needs my input and it uses my Home Assistant instance to send a push notification to my phone. I then return back to the computer and continue on the work.
This works reasonably well, but there is a gap for small messages or review comments. I am waiting for Anthropic to shop a feature where the Claude mobile app is able to mirror Claude Code (not the Claude desktop app) and lets me see the diffs of the changes it made and send commands. I'd use this to steer the conversation while on the go with short commands or prompts so that when I'm back at the computer I can focus on the important feedback that I can jot down quickly on the computer keyboard.
I also don't like typing long messages on my phone that's why I use this keyboard that will do high quality transcriptions via whatever AI provider you want. Much better than siri/google speech to text on device.
I used to use Wispr Flow but did not like the non-local aspect, and having yet another subscription, so I switched to VoiceInk (one-time payment around $30 I think), and with a locally running Parakeet v3 model on my
MacBook, transcription is basically instant. I was previously using it with the local Whisper Turbo 3 which is slightly more accurate and it had a 3-4 second lag, so I was absolutely shocked how fast parakeet v3. The slight drop in accuracy is totally fine when talking to AIs, and I also have a line in my CLAUDE.md that says I am usually dictating and that it should take that into account when interpreting my messages.
I concur that phones aren't great as they are today, but perhaps this exact scenario will prompt the return of PDAs with proper keyboards etc? Or, alternatively, subcompact laptops like the stuff that https://gpdstore.net makes - they are still small enough to be pocketable (needs fairly large pockets but...), and yet you get a keyboard that is actually usable, and they even have one device with fold-out dual screen.
I'll half-ass something from my phone to take an idea down, but this setup also works with a keyboard. I just run claude in a container with --dangerously-skip-permissions and it does a lot more work with a lot less questions.
I was looking for a similar scheme, and though far from perfect I found you can run tmux+ttyd. ttyd lets you share your terminal over http. That lets you use your phone's browser (and speech-2-text).
That sounds nice, but what happens when there's something Claude messes up, doesn't know how to do something, or when you have to review the thousand lines it added to your project ?
Unless it's a totally vibe coded side project without any tests or quality control of some sort.
I'm just curious what you can build with this setup. It just seems to be the way to create a mountain of sloppy, unmaintainable code.
If it's really bad, just throw it away. I didn't spend a lot of time/effort generating the code. If my idea was bad or hard to implement I start over with a different approach. Smaller feature or different idea to accomplish the goal.
Essentially you run a server on some machine. Sessions are created in Docker containers, K8s pods, or via Zellij (an app similar to tmux). You can:
- Directly attach to sessions via Docker attach (built-in via a TUI). You get a normal Claude Code experience, but multiplexed. The switcher/UI shows you the status of Claude and the PR (pushed, merge conflicts, CI status, review status, etc.)
- Manage sessions via a web UI. Connect to Claude Code directly via your browser. You have access to the usual Claude Code terminal or a native chat view.
- Manage sessions via an app. You have access to a native chat view.
It achieves isolation via Git worktrees + a proxy so that containers have access to zero credentials (there aren't even any Claude code creds in the container), which allows you to more safely use bypass all permissions mode.
This works better for me that Claude Code on Web because I have control over the environment Claude is running in. I can give it any Docker image I want, I can have it connect to my local network, etc.
It's still a WIP (the core bits are there, but it's not polished yet), but I'm hoping it provides a friendlier UX with a similar goal for what the OP has in mind.
> Port allocation is hash-based—deterministic from branch name, no conflicts:
> hash_val = sum(ord(c) for c in branch_name)
> django_port = 8001 + (hash_val % 99)
> Six agents, six features, one phone.
What do you mean, no conflicts? The probability of a collision with six branches and 99 ports slots is ~14% assuming optimal hashing (which this decidedly isn't).
You also don't need fail2ban, if the entire VM is behind a firewall that only allows the tailscale coordination traffic, nothing is going to reach the VM for fail2ban to work on.
Linode will provide a configured Linux box for $5/mo that works well with Claude Code and Termius. I had to jump through a surprising amount of hoops with Claude Code, Tmux and Termius to issue a shift+tab before Claude Code gained the ability to invoke plan mode conversationally
It makes sense - i build something very similar for my company over the last couple weeks :)
I have a tweak that allows pasting images to claude code over SSH:
How it works:
PTY Interception: It creates a pseudo-terminal (PTY) to wrap the SSH process, allowing it to sit as a "man-in-the-middle" between your keyboard and the remote shell.
Bracketed Paste Detection: It monitors stdin for "bracketed paste" sequences (the control codes terminals send when you Cmd+V or drag-and-drop a file).
The "Hook": When a paste occurs, it pauses execution and scans the text for local macOS file paths.
Auto-Sync: If a local path is found, it immediately syncs that file to the remote server (using the provided SSH key) in the background.
Transparent Forwarding: Once the sync is complete, it forwards the original text to the shell.
You can drag and drop a file from your local Finder into a remote SSH session, and the file is automatically uploaded to the server before the path appears on the command line. Also works with copy paste, screnshots.
This is a bit too "plugged in" for my liking. If I am in line for coffee, it's usually respite away from work, not an opportunity to do more. However, I do love the tmux + worktree + claude setup. I use this now and I know a few peers who do too and it's very enabling. This is what work feels like these days: cycling through agents, each working on a task, checking their work, unblocking them.
You can optimize things. I have a github action that starts stops a fast google cloud vm for our builds. It only gets used about 3 minutes per build. We maybe have a few dozen builds per month. So that's a few hours of run time. The rest of the time the vm is stopped and not billed (except for storage, which is cents per month at most). It's a simple debian vm so it boots in about 20 seconds.
VMs are expensive if you leave them running 24/7 but the logic to start/stop them is pretty easy. There's no need.
Anyway, you need to balance this against the payoff. Agentic coding is useful enough that it beats spending your own time. And that includes waiting time for the relatively slow/underpowered containerized environments that some tools would use by default. I use codex web and codex cli (with a qemu vm so I can use the --yolo flag). Codex web is a bit limited with memory and CPU. Some of my slower builds are taking forever there. To the point where most of the time it consumes is just waiting for these builds to happen.
With a bit of plumbing, you can do things like the author describes pretty easily. IMHO this needs to be better integrated into tools. With Github you have the option to run your own runners. I don't think codex/claude web have similar options currently. But with the cli versions, you can get more creative if you know your tools. And if you don't, use LLMs to drive them for you. It's mostly just about expressing what you want and how you want it.
If you are already paying $200-500/m… and you are doing the work of 10 people… I can totally see the value.
I’ll check the Terragonlabs option.
Lots of options for startups right now, selling pickaxes! I’m waiting for a better terminal experience, personally. I can’t deal with 30+ poorly named windows. I need to be able to search for that one thread I was working on yesterday…
I have a feeling most of these folks are talking about personal projects or work on relatively small products. I have a good amount of personal projects that I haven’t written a line of code for. After bootstrapping an MVP, I can almost entirely drive by having Claude pick up GitHub issues. They’re small codebases though.
My day job is mostly a gigantic codebases that seem to still choke the best models. Also there’s zero way I’d be allowed to tailscale to my work computer from my phone.
From my perspective: tons of very simple, duplicated software. The bad thing is - there is a lot of space on different markets for such software. Here in Poland you can earn for pretty decent life being lame programmer, but building simple automations for small companies.
I was raised in a way I still don’t have courage to switch to such approach, but doing this for 3-4 such entities I can see how you can make living from that.
With LLMs you can automate 90+% of the job if not more.
Why not just use the mobile app? It has Claude Code built in. Maybe I'm an unsophisticated idiot but it works well for me. Some shortcomings with repo management but other than that, CC mobile seems ... fine
I've built something similar to run in my own cloud to run my own container images and add some features. The Claude Code web app has been pretty buggy for me and I like to run these things myself. If I do run into bugs or issues I still have access to the containers (and I do, because I vibe coded the whole thing). I gave it service accounts to the cloud it's running in, where the CI builds take place and setup dev environments per PR that deploy automatically. This is a massive productivity boost imo.
Yeah, me too. The only thing that shows up is poke.com which has something to do with mobile notifications (and seems like at some point they offered some api, but maybe it was discontinued? or something, there are some medium posts talking about their api https://jpcaparas.medium.com/get-sms-or-imessage-alerts-from...
How'd you find this? I spent 5 minutes bouncing between their various domains and marketing videos and login walls and couldn't find the developer docs.
Personally, I'd setup a Mattermost server and use its WebHooks for notifications. That's also more flexible (can send commands back to the bot, etc.)
I currently use Hapi (https://github.com/tiann/hapi/) for this and find it quite handy. I can easily tap into a session on my PC from my phone.
Before that I used Happy (https://happy.engineering/) which is also open source and a lot more sophisticated. It has a voice assistant that can chat with Claude Code on your behalf in the mobile app. However, it wasn't very reliable, and there are other reasons to use Hapi instead (documented in the Hapi repo).
Before that, Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) a YC company and seemingly a proprietary Happy fork (?) but it never worked properly for me.
Long story short, there are a few of the around, and frankly I really like to use them. Unlike other commenters, I don't find that they wreck my work-life balance. Rather, I can go out and have a walk in the park, only checking in on long-running tasks every once in a while. The diff view is pretty good too. There are many tasks where I'd rather not stare at my PC all day and instead do other things, and these tools allow me to do that.
Also recommend Opencode which has `opencode web` built in. It's really impressive how good opencode web is. It's far more polished than I'd have expected from a free alternative!
Been using Termux and iSH on my phones for years. You can ssh to your server or just directly code for the phone itself.
I also used Web based coding environment like Glitch (R.I.P.) for years.
You can do that with your virtual keyboard, voice or a even a physical keyboard via BT, e.g. Corne-ish Zen.
That's how I travel.
That's really nothing AI specific or novel. It's cool though.
FWIW I even coined a related term https://fabien.benetou.fr/Languages/OwnConcepts#ResponsivePr... "extending responsive design to be able to program on the device, any device from eink to mobile phone to device, one is currently using not just to "consume" content, e.g read a Website that is then properly formatted for it, but rather program back that very device"
That being said, if you do want to go that route check out CloudInit as it will help you (or whatever tool you rely on) to spawn new instance on your favorite cloud provider to boot specific instances and e.g. setup Docker/Podman then services, etc with no interaction. Also ntfy can help you manage notifications across devices on your own infrastructure, no 3rd parties.
Also on the topic of gaps... liminal space IS precious. It doesn't require coding per se though. You can problem solve, jolt down a solution THEN only implement it as code later on. What matters IMHO is that the potential solution is not lost, wherever you might be. For that... I have shower crayons. Point is, CAPTURE ideas, don't necessarily implement on the spot but of course if you want to, it's good to be able to.
I have been doing the same but with happy. It works quite well for quick brainstorms etc. but for deeper work on a real research / plan / implement thing I think you need to actually engage with the output which is hard to do on mobile. Maybe if I had a better UI than terminus to read and check the remote files I would be able to get more done.
I am also hoping / trying to put Claude code on top of a personal zettlekasten to automate more of my “personal life” tasks and get more stuff done for me. Haven’t gotten it really singing yet but I think that could also be really cool.
An alternative might be to start up a VM on exe.dev. Supposedly, mobile access works out of the box [1].
I've not tried that myself since I've only been using it from my laptop, but I do prefer chatting with their coding agent in a browser tab to using Claude Code in a terminal window.
This is interesting. Particularly the notifications flow. I run a simpler setup with webssh on my iPhone over WG back to my LAN and manage Claude that way. It’s fine, and can handle disconnects (with some big cons). I can run code-server via browser on my iPad and can get all the same benefits mosh provides.
One thing to note: the VM seems like an absolute waste of money. If you are using tailscale, might as well connect back to bare metal VMs you can run at home. Save yourself some coin.
There's an X thread where Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) shows his workflow of running 5 CC agents in the terminal using 5 tabs while running 10-15 instances of CC on the web [1] and how he moves projects from the terminal to the web and vice versa.
This sounds cool but I feel like I need to often run the code in one way or another when verifying what Claude does. Otherwise it feels like driving blind. Claude Code already has the web version which I could use from my phone and fair it can't run scripts etc which limits the output quality. But if I can't verify what it did it also limits how long I can let it run before I need my laptop eventually.
Ofc if you have demo deployments etc on branches that you could open on mobile it works for longer.
Another issue is that I often need to sit down and think about the next prompt going back and forth with the agent on a plan. Try out other product features, do other research before I even know what exactly to build. Often doing some sample implementations with Claude code and click around these days. Doing this on a phone feels... limiting.
I also can't stand the constant context switching. Doing multiple feature in parallel already feels dumb because every time I come from feature B to A or worse from feature G to E it takes me some time to adjust to where I was, what Claude last did and how to proceed from here. Doing more tasks than 2 max. 3 in parallel often ends up slowing me down. Now you add ordering coffee and small talk to the mix and I definitely can't effectively prompt without rereading all history for minutes before sending the next prompt. At which point I might have also opened up my laptop.
Ofc if you truly vibe code and just add feature on feature and pray nothing breaks, the validation overhead and bar for quality goes down a lot so it works a lot better but the output is also just slop by then.
I typed this on my phone and it took 20 minutes, a laptop might have been faster.
>Development fits into the gaps of the day instead of requiring dedicated desk time.
I find myself planning and jotting down things into a notebook while juggling adult/parent responsibilities. On little longer gaps I research. Then when the occasional longer gap happens I'm ready to start cracking on my desktop. I've been only dabbling with AI but have found that writing prompts by hand in the notebook and using the desk time to execute them works well. This also keeps me in the free tier.
Ive thinking about doing something very similar to this as I've a small 3 node k3s cluster at home but couldn't get enough motivation to start thinking I could just use termux + ssh and installing codex cli.
I do want a setup like this, however, most of my development is on Windows which means license cost is usually higher than the cost of the VM. I could run vm's on my home machine, but even then I feel like the terminal experience is quite poor. You want to have a mobile native code, to check the code/read the plans. So far I have been using teamviewer to access my home desktop which works, albeit annoying to use, plus I don't have fancy notifications. Perhaps a web first approach with a mobile responsive web app would work, that shows the files of the project as well as the terminal.
Awesome. This really sounds like it would fit into my life, too. For once I really hope someone can productionalize this pattern into a platform with tooling, and pay for only what it needed. As it stands this feels expensive, even if it the price of coffee.
Setup is still rough around the edges (use an agent to set it up), but clawdbot (prev clawdis) from Peter Steinberger works phenomenally well for agent orchestration and personal assistance. The community for clawd is exploding right now, and I think this is purely based on merit. It’s been a game changer for my vibe coding workflow, and lots of fun.
I've been running a variation of this for the past 3 weeks. I swapped out the default pi agent back to Claude Code because I didn't like the smaller feature set. Bought a phone line and communicate with my agent via iMessage on a clamshelled mac. A Tailscale network connect the head agent to all the computers on my network including my laptop, a few raspberry pi's, steam deck, and all the IoT devices in my house. As I discover new uses, I ask it to make skills and it is remarkable what it's been able to handle all through the single chat interface because it has 24/7 access to all my computers' file systems and my home network. It's been really fun to see how far I can take it, and the skills framework built into CC/Codex now make it feel infinitely extensible.
I should note, a lot of the functionality I built into my agent was custom after-the-fact because (at least three weeks ago) the clawdis repo was in a state that I found very broken and with tons of false information. Luckily it's easy work for Claude to get things working for you, but really the key unlock was the phone line through iMessage and the unrestricted access to all my systems. It really does feel like I'm able to work with any of my files anywhere now, while hardly requiring much of my attention at all. I would recommend something like this at the bare minimum if you intend to implement a system like this: https://github.com/kenryu42/claude-code-safety-net
Both clawdbot and pi have improved and expanded functionality a lot during the last 3 weeks, maybe worth another look? What you have described sounds a lot like the experience I’m having.
hey there, shameless plug here, I built pinacle.dev exactly with this use case in mind, cheap $7 VMs that comes with vs code, vibe kanban everything else needed out of the box to keep vibe coding on the go, no need to leave your computer running
As an aside have found the mosh + tmux Claude Code experience somewhat suboptimal, tmux's scrollback seems to clash with CC's, and makes copying between windows etc challenging.
It is tolerable on an iPad with Blink with commands to maximise and minimise panes using vim-style keyboard bindings, kind of like an iOS sway.
I really want to use Claude Code on the phone or tablet, with voice commands only, and perhaps a few simple approval thumb actions. I don't want to type out complex prompt information on a virtual keyboard. I tried setting this up with some of the iOS terminal emulators, and it almost worked, but there was some glitch where Claude would try to start using the first characters that arrived from the voice command.
Not quite the same thing, but I wrote my own agent (as in a replacement for Claude Code) that uses SSH for all operations. That means I can run a very minimal VM (like 4GB RAM Oracle free tier), run the agent locally, and the agent only operates on remote files.
The limitation is that some Typescript builds run out of RAM (even with swap) and I can't use playwright, but still it's been useful.
But this way I can open the firewall, npm run dev and send the link of my new vibe coded security vulnerability/app to my friends without my computer running.
Plus a VM for this, a container for that and soon my 32GB memory isn't enough. I offload aggressively.
Copilot Agent and Claude Code use their own sandbox, which requires less setup but is also quite limited. With your own cloud setup, agents can perform better end to end testing, including database dependencies and specific tool calls.
I'm almost there. I also have tailclscale/SSH/Claude sessions on a VM.
The thing I'm missing is a phone that makes it comfy. I could just SSH feom my standard S23, but what I've got my eye on is one of those foldable things.
Has anyone used one like a laptop? Keyboard on the bottom half, terminal on the top? Does it work decently?
I wonder when/how to test and review the code though? I mean, how do you know Claude Code hasn't entered a completely different path than you had imagined?
Will we still use "batch jobs" agents in 2027? Checking a Java program and downloading a 10mb program used to be slow things which now happen faster than the blink of an eye.
1.Install Tailscale on WSL2 and your iPhone
2.Install openssh-server on WSL2
3.Get an SSH terminal app (Blink, Termius, etc.). I use blink ($20/yr).
4.SSH from Blink to your WSL2’s Tailscale IP
5. Run claude code inside tmux on your phone.
Tailscale handles the networking from anywhere. tmux keeps your session alive if you hit dead spots. Full agentic coding from your phone.
Step 2: SSH server
In WSL2:
sudo apt install openssh-server
sudo service ssh start
Run tailscale ip to get your WSL2’s IP (100.x.x.x). That’s what you’ll connect to from your phone.
Step 3: Passwordless login
In Blink, type config → Keys → + → create an Ed25519 key. Copy the public key.
On WSL2:
echo "your-public-key" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Then in Blink: Hosts → + → add your Tailscale IP, username, and select your key. Now it’s one tap to connect.
Switch apps, connection dies, no problem. Reconnect: I can just type `ssh dev` in blink and I'm in my workstation, then `tmux attach`, you’re right back in your session.
Pro tip: multiple Claude sessions
Inside tmux:
•Ctrl+b c — new window
•Ctrl+b 0/1/2 — switch windows
I run different repos or multiple agents in the same repo, in different windows and jump between them. Full multi-project workflow from my phone.
Is there a way to use the official Claude web app with GitHub providers other than GitHub? I’ve put a decent amount of effort into moving away from there, I don’t want to go back.
I do the same, but with ConnectBot and Gemini CLI. I have found ssh sufficiently good (mosh required some port forwarding dance, that Tailscale may have solved for the author).
I work on Poke; admittedly the docs[1] are a bit hidden but we're spending Q1 making it far easier for developers to work with Poke, feel free to email me if you're having any troubles!
But anthropic has since launched the ability to “teleport” sessions to mobile. (Claude Code is baked into the app). The iOS experience has been smooth for the most part.
People keep saying things like “2026 is the year of background agents, sandboxes, etc” but imo the harness will eat the entire platform stack. It already is. It will only get better.
Hah, I set up basically the same thing on Saturday during a long car ride. Couple of differences: I’m an opencode user and I used a different VPS provider (though I use vultr for other things). It was my first time actually sitting down and using tailscale, which was quite easy to get going. Did everything from my phone, didn’t even have my laptop with me.
This is a pretty sophisticated setup. I particularly like how it uses Tailscale.
I've been using the simpler but not as flexible alternative: I'm running Claude Code for web (Anthropic's version of Codex Cloud) via the Claude iPhone app, with an environment I created called "Everything" which allows all network access.
(This is moderately unsafe if you're working with private source code or environment variables containing API keys and other secrets, but most of my stuff is either open source or personal such that I don't care if the source code leaks.)
Anthropic run multiple ~21GB VMs for me on-demand to handle sessions that I start via the app. They don't charge anything extra for VM time which is nice.
I frequently have 2-3 separate Claude Code for web sessions running at once, often prompted from my phone, some of them started while I'm out walking the dog. Works really well!
I don't like claude code web due to its lack of planning mode. I found the result is often lackluster compare to claude code cli.
My current setup: Tailscale + Terminus(ipad) + home machine(code base)
Need to look into how to work on multiple features at the same time next.
I've been using git worktrees with Claude and it's pretty awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up91rbPEdVc
Pair worktrees with the ralph-wiggum plugin and I can have Claude work for hours without needing any input:
https://looking4offswitch.github.io/blog/2026/01/04/ralph-wi...
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I haven't missed planning mode myself. I tend to tell it "write a detailed plan first in a file called spec.md for me to review", then use that as the ongoing plan.
I like that it ends up in the repo as it means it survives compaction or lets me start a fresh session entirely.
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The lack of Plan Mode is puzzling, I'm sure they must get to it at some point. But until then it CAN still plan, you just have to ask it to write a plan and not write code yet.
I've been really impressed with https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban to do this. Really really impressed.
Not sure if this works in claude code web, but running non-interactive claude code I can still get it to use plan mode by simply asking it. It's just a tool call.
Can you not use PAL MCP for this? Have one top agent as controller etc? It's not ideal but it feels like the space of multi agent stuff is evolving ... I notice that there are a lot of posts on hn about these things so we are trying to do the same thing really.
I'm surprised to see people getting value from "web sandbox"-type setups, where you don't actually have access to the source code. Are folks really _that_ confident in LLMs as to entirely give up the ability to inspect the source code, or to interact with a running local instance of the service? Certainly that would be the ideal, but I'm surprised that confidence is currently running that high.
I still get the full source code back at the end, I tell it to include code it wrote in the PR.
I also wrote my own tool to extract and format the complete transcript, it gives me back things like this where I can see everything it did including files and scripts it didn't commit. Here's an example: https://gistpreview.github.io/?3a76a868095c989d159c226b7622b...
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Right - I’m missing how you get the source code in the OP. It says you tmux in with ssh agent forwarding for GH. But you can’t do that on your iOS device? So you have to set up all your repos in the morning before leaving the house, then collect and push all your branches when you return home?
I could imagine this working for a small number of branches/changes.
The output from Jules is a PR. And then it's a toss-up between "spot on, let's merge" and "nah, needs more work, I will check out the branch and fix it properly when I am the keyboard". And you see the current diff on the webpage while the agent is working.
Claude Code on the web, ChatGPT Codex and Google Jules are not the same as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. They are entire apps where you authorize Github access and they work via PRs.
They'll include screenshots on your PRs etc.
I like using them a lot when I can.
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Are those VM specs documented anywhere, I have used Claude Code for web a lot and never really bothered with the details. Just connect it to my repo and let it cook
Not documented, so I had Claude code for web write me a report: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/environment-rep...
Check out superconductor.dev (I’m building it), if you want live app previews, docker-in-docker functionality, multiple agents in one mobile app, and more.
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I have my very fast macbook pro at my desk in my office, and I use tmux and tailscale and git worktrees and I’ve built a notification setup like this author.
Thanks to tailscale and ssh I can vibecode on the go from my phone with this setup.
While it’s great to leave a task running, no matter what I do I can’t achieve the type of high quality work on the go that I can when I’m sitting at my desk.
For me working on a full SaaS.. I just can’t do quality work on my phone.
The only way I can do quality work is to sit at my desk where I’m focused on the work. To play with the result of a prompt, take copious notes, feed them back to the agent, not ship until the thing is polished to a shine. To feature flag the changes, review all code in excruciating detail as though it was written by a dyslexic intern, add all the metrics and logs one can think of (VictoriaMetrics), add user-behavior logging (Amplitude/Posthog) and monitor the thing like your livelihood depends on it. Because it’s a product and you have pride in your work.
All of that needs loads of screen real estate and a keyboard.
So I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Same here, I’m vibecoding a toy project where I never looked at the code from my phone, but I always seat for work. I’m using happy app and that’s good enough for now, I have the desktop in tailscale but I access it that way just for testing
For me, setup like this is not a replacement or even supplement the desk + high focus environment. My use case for these mobile vibecode setup is great though for small exploration/POC/learning/research type of work. Then I take the knowledge learned or any actual useful parts of code and incorporate into my work next time I sit back down at my desk.
There has been a sustained campaign over the last few days to push "I use Claude from my phone". I saw multiple posts on LinkedIn already, and now this.
This blog is super sus too. All the posts are about Claude. I suspect it's run by Anthropic, just read the About page: https://granda.org/en/about/
I am not Anthropic. I have vibe-coded a web interface for claude code to use from my phone. It's very similar to Anthropic's, but has a couple more features that I wanted.
I think your statement "I use Claude from my phone" is quite a large set of folks - the iOS app alone likely has several millions of installs.
Not everything is a conspiracy or content marketing by some bullshit company.
I'm increasingly using Claude from my phone because the models are now good enough to use unsupervised.
There's nothing suspicious to me on that About page.
How hard is it to build a marketing agent these days?
Pandora's box is open; we're moving towards a world where white collar workers will be working 24/7 and they'll be expected to do so.
It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.
I'm a heavy LLM user. On a daily basis, I find LLMs extremely useful both professionally and personally. But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.
This technology should be liberatory, and allow us all to work less while enjoying the same standard of living. We've all contributed in its development by creating the whole corpus of the internet, without which it could never have been bootstrapped.
The only reason we can't expect this is that we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs or that our own personal advantage can be found in making a Faustian bargain with it.
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs
What alternative do you propose?
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Do the owners of capital work less?
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It would be a deep irony if LLMs ended up ushering in the social rupture that never arrived in the industrial era. When the pigs turn hogs and refuse to share even the scraps, they shouldn’t be surprised if the system they depend on becomes their undoing.
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> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital
This is totally false. The vast majority of consumers enjoy huge benefits from the system while owning almost no capital. For example, Walmart customers or iPhone owners.
A lot of people can't tell the difference between capitalism (which has made their lives materially wealthy beyond imagination) and the root cause of today's economic troubles for ordinary people, which is affordability, which is mostly driven by the housing crisis, which is dominated by nimbyism in megacities.
Fix megacity housing regulation to enable cheap/low risk building that the market wants, and you fix the affordability crisis.
No need to rebuild the (greatest system in the history of humankind) from scratch.
I’m a remote work from home employee who never ever works overtime.
I do use Claude code for my personal projects and ping at them from coffee shops and micro moments during my free time.
It’s possible to engineer your own life boundaries and not be a victim of every negative trend in existence.
You can do it on a personal level, but when everyone else is overworking you, your manager will compare your output based on your peers, and based on it, you might be negatively impacted
Yeah absolutely. It’s hardly things like Claude Code that are the problem, Slack (or other forms of communication) are much easier to slip into personal time and have been a trend since Blackberries were invented.
This is always the reason I'm interested in this exact workflow. Want to build something but never have the time without sacrificing significant amounts of sleep but now it's easier than ever to get things building.
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This is a complete fantasy. If LLM's got to this point of sophistication there would be a total revolution in almost every industry. Society would be radically different. Since LLM's are nowhere near this, I'm not so sure we even have Pandora's box, let alone opened it.
Glad someone is rational. I believe this new wave of zeal is being somewhat driven by an Anthropic astroturfing campaign.
This AI fear wave has outed that many people have not even the most basic grasp of economics, or the ability to carry a thought to its natural conclusion.
For example, I'll often see people espousing: "there will be no work left, better get rich now or you're screwed!". What's the point in getting rich if there will be no work left? Money is merely a means to an end; in this world with no work everyone will have the ends (goods and services) for free, or else goods and services will still have value and therefore jobs will still exist.
Another equally silly argument "only software will be completely replaced because it is verifiable".
I've never seen completely verifiable software, but let's presume it exists! If software engineering can be replaced (or some large part of it) I will simply say to my LLM "please make me a piece of software that replaces my accountant/lawyer/...", for that matter I could just as equally say "please make me manufacturing software for a perfect humanoid robot and a plumber/bricklayer/electrician protocol". LLMs cannot do this? Then software engineers will move to solving these problems. If LLMs can do it, then the entire economy will be meaningless and Dario/Sam/Elon/etc... will be no richer than you or I.
But, as you say, LLMs are not close to being able to do any of this (and yes... I use Claude Code)
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> white collar workers will be working 24/7
Where we're going, there's no "white collars workers" anymore.
Only white collars Claude agents.
Yeah, there's no way we have these careers in 30 years.
The best we can do is wrestle the control away from hyperscalers and get as much of this capability into the open as possible.
Stop using Anthropic products and start using weight available models. (I'm not talking ICs - I mean the entire startup / tech ecosystem.)
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You still need humans to supervise them. Just a lot less.
It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization within software during these nascent moments of LLM deployment. Software engineers seem totally resigned toward reduced salary and employment instead of just organizing labor while still in control of the development of these systems.
I really don't get it -- is it that people think these technologies will be so transformative that it is most moral to race toward them? I don't see much evidence of that, it's just future promises (especially commensurate with the benefit / cost ratio). When I do use this tech it's usually edutainment kind of curiosity about some subject matter I don't have enough interest in to dive into--it's useful and compelling but also not really necessary.
In fact, I don't really think the tech right now is at all transformative, and that a lot of folks are unable to actually gauge their productivity accurately when using these tools; however, I do not believe that the technology will stay that way, and it will inevitably start displacing people or degrading labor conditions within the only economically healthy remaining tranche of people in America: the white collar worker.
I've been writing software for 30 years, a part of it had success in the sense of being widely known and adopted for a long time. Writing software is difficult, consumes time and is difficult as you get older to focus the needed time away from other matters like a professional life and family.
With LLM, my productivity suddenly went up x25 and was able to produce at a speed that I had never known. I'm not a developer any more, instead feels like project manager with dedicated resources always delivering results. It isn't perfect, but when you are used to manage teams it isn't all that different albeit the results are spectacularly better.
My x25 isn't just measured on development, for brainstorming, documentation, testing, deployment. It is transformative, in fact: I think software is dead. For the first time I've used neither a paper notebook nor even an IDE to build complex and feature-complete products. Software isn't what matters, what matters is the product and this is what the transformation part is all about. We all here can write products in languages we never had contact with and completely outperform any average team of developers doing the same product.
Replaces the experts and domain specific topics? Not yet. Just observe that the large majority of products are boringly simple cases of API, UI and some business logic inside. For that situation, it has "killed" software.
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If you think the profession has enough time to organize reasonable unions, you’re an optimist. Pessimists are changing careers altogether as we speak.
Either way it’s been a fun ride.
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Unfortunately, it's futile to try to convince the median HN poster that labor organization could help them. They've drunk the entire pitcher of corporate anti-union koolaid.
People could be directly in the middle of losing their own job or taking on the responsibilities of 5 other laid-off coworkers, and they would still ask "what could a labor union possibly do for me??"
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Two things:
1. Like most labor organizing, I think this would be beneficial for software engineers, but not long-term beneficial for the world at large. More software that is easier to make is better for everybody.
Would you still want to live in a world where your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick, or where overseas Whatsapp calls cost $1 per minute, because they have to be connected by a chain of operators?
2. Software engineering is a lot easier to move than other professions. If you want to carry people from London to New York, you need to cater to the workers who actually live in London or New York. If you want to make software... Silicon Valley is your best bet right now, but if SV organizes and other places don't, it may not be your best bet any more. That would make things even worse for SV than not organizing. Same story applies to any other place.
Sure, companies won't more overnight, but if one place makes it too hard for AI to accelerate productivity, people will either go somewhere else, or that place will just end up completely outcompeted like Europe did.
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> It's utterly unreal to me to hear so little discussion about labor organization
Never lived in the US, where I assume you are from. It's the same country that contrary to most countries, does not have May 1st as a Holiday. Same country that has states with at will employment, etc etc.
unreal? nope, totally coherent and expected.
The ownership class sure did a number on the white collar working class.
“I don’t need a union, I can negotiate my wages and working conditions just fine on my own”
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I wish I knew which union to pitch. All I can say is what I know which is if you are dispirited with this state of affairs a great way to figure out where to go with it is to connect with your local democratic socialists of america branch, or maybe the joint union dsa effort:
https://workerorganizing.org/
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Yes, labour unions are immoral. Curtailing growth (especially in industries where it can prevent unnecessary death) for your personal needs is plain evil. I say that as someone who is both very stressed by pressure to sustain my family while cushy life is slipping away.
Did they say the same when Email took over? Or Slack?
Are you suggesting that workers are NOT already more constantly "on the clock" with mobile phones/email/slack/text than before those things?
(I'm not really sure LLMs will make it that much worse here, but all those things have been harmful to workers already.)
Well yes, they did... For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29201917
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Remember "Crackberry"?
That sounds more like the fault of shitty managers who would find a way to make you work 24/7, with or without Claude Code "On-the-Go".
One of these is immutable (shitty managers) one of these is new. I personally am all here for the brief human funtime before we all get paperclipped and whatever, been having a ton of fun with CC/Codex, been pushing my own startup forward... but ... You do see the issue here right?
It's the power imbalance. Shitty managers still control your means to eat.
The answer is boundaries
If I get emails outside of work hours and they're not urgent - I reply during work hours. This is no different
Burnt out workers are far less productive so win-win for everyone
> It won't matter if I'm washing the dishes, walking the dog, driving to the supermarket, picking up my kids from school. I'll always be switched on, on my phone, continuously talking to an LLM, delivering questionable features and building meaningless products, destroying in the process the environment my kids are going to have to grow in.
I remember hearing similar criticisms of continuous delivery. On one end of the spectrum people who had to wait months to get changes out now got them out relatively quickly. On the other end of the spectrum, some person was going to push changes at midnight.
A decade on forward I've never actually worked at a shop that at scale did continuous delivery in its truest sense where changes go straight to production. Simply, nothing beats a human in the loop; it's always about balancing the costs of automation and a lower barrier to entry. I imagine this kind of thing, if it ever actually takes hold and can be adopted by a larger subset of engineers, will follow a similar path.
Long way of saying, I don't think you're Chicken Little but also don't start breathing into a bag just yet.
The difference here is, you type a command into your phone at 3pm. Put it down to go play with your kid for 3hours. Type a new one in at 9pm before bed where you’ve been binging your wife’s favorite show. Then you wake up at 10am to a holistic transformation in your business that would’ve taken months previously in your career. But whatever, another command and it’s off to 11am frisbee.
More like you'll manage 20 agents and will be reading, reviewing and testing in between builds. Race to the bottom.
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>But the cognitive dissonance I feel when I think about what this means over a longer time horizon is really painful.
Excluding work (where granted, some companies are dictating the use of llms) and trying not to sound uncaring or disrespectful, but have you thought about not using llms for everything and using the old grey cells? Not having answers to every whimsical thought might be a good thing.
It's very easy to relax the brain (and be lazy tbh) with llms and it's scary to think what will happen in the next 4 years in terms of personal cognitive ability (or as a society).
e.g. I've noticed (and probably most have here) that the world is full of zombies glued to their phones. Looking over their shoulder (e.g. on a train, yeah it's a bit rude but I'm the curious type), they are doom scrolling or playing waste-time games (insert that boomer meme in Las Vegas with slot machines [0]). I try to use my phone as little as possible (especially for dog walks) and feel better for it, allowing me to daydream and let boredom take over.
Maybe I'm fortunate to be able to do this (gen-x: having grown up before cell phones/internet), but worth stating in case anyone wants to try.
[0]: https://tenor.com/view/casino-oldpeople-oldpeopleonslots-slo...
There is evidence that LLM usage is actually making people dumber. I'm not sure if they've figured out the cause/effect or not but that's enough evidence for me to avoid them if I can. They can be useful for some stuff but I found myself offloading my thinking a little too frequently.
Anyways if we do get to the point where you need to use LLMs to write code, I can make a decision then, but for now I don't feel the need to adopt agentic workflows and I think the people who don't will be better cognitively positioned in the future.
The LLMs have successfully domesticated humans.
"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." - Winston Churchill
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
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No thanks. I'm so glad I'm getting closer to retirement age. From a young age, all I wanted to do was program computers. _I_ wanted to do it. Not have some tool do it for me. There's no fun or interest or ... anything that comes from that. I want to solve the problems. I want to write the code. It's what I am good at and it's incredibly enjoyable to me. Why the fuck would I ever give that up?
But, the world is changing. Y'all can have it... in a few short years. ;)
Had the same feeling many moons ago when they gave me an office smartphone where email from the company was available 24/7. At the beginning was answering emails at midnight, nowadays couldn't care less. Just wait until work hours.
You'll likely get used to this new thing too.
Seems more likely that that won't happen
Hum, I already have a phone with Slack / Email on. And it's only switched on during work hours. No messaging outside of that window. Why would that be different?
You can just say no.
In many countries, these and other jobs show you cannot. If you don't, others will and so you won't have a job very soon. Especially if these types of jobs lose their shine/prestige and are basically call center quality/pay like jobs in 5-10 years.
I'd love to believe that, but unless our timeline is disrupted (world war / climate change / regulation re: power generation and consumption), I unfortunately can't imagine a future different to the one I described - and I've tried!
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That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.
You can do that if you want. Ill refuse. Ill take a manual labor job doing basically anything else for 40 hours a week over what your describing.
An LLM send may send the work ticket or work order lol but i get your point
Are there really that many “things to do” that anyone, let alone everyone, will need to work that way?
This was the end game with or without AI. It was always going to result in a zero-sum game because the factories that are open around the clock can output more products - which is exactly why a lot of manufacturing has non stop shift work. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table and a competitor will gladly take it.
When you saw 996 being talked about it should have set a few alarm bells off, because it started a countdown timer until such a work culture surpasses the rather leisurely attitude of the West in terms of output and velocity. West cannot compete against that no matter how many “work smarter, not harder” / “work to live don’t live to work” aphorisms it espouses. This should be obvious by now (in hindsight).
You can blame LLM or capitalism or communism but the hard matter is, it’s a money world and people want to have as much of it as they possibly can, and you and your children can’t live without it, and every day someone is looking to have more of it than you are. This isn’t even getting into the details of the personality types that money and power attracts to these white collar leadership roles.
Best of luck to you.
The Chinese are not doing 996 as much these days. It is illegal for starters.
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You have a profound amount of certainty about such an absurdly dystopian vision.
Why is that?
Experience.
This has been like this forever. Change is that software engineers, historically spoiled and expensive is going to have a brutal reality check - aka we will work just everyone else.
People need to start having conversations about existential risk here. Hinton, Nobel Prize winner in AI, thinks there's a decent chance AI executes the entire human species. This isn't some crank idea.
Author here! Thanks for checking it out.
On the $210/month VM cost - fair point. For me it's worth it because I'm running multiple parallel agents throughout the day, but you could definitely do this cheaper with a smaller instance or spot pricing.
The real bottleneck isn't typing on mobile - it's reviewing the output. I've found 2-3 parallel agents is my sweet spot before I can't keep up with reviewing PRs. Git worktrees help a lot here since each agent works in isolation with its own containers (including db).
And to the work-life balance concerns - totally valid. For me this isn't about working more, it's about capturing ideas when they strike (usually on walks or waiting in line). The Poke notifications let me stay async rather than glued to a terminal.
Although a little late to the HN post, happy to answer any questions about the setup!
Can you explain more about the vm-start/vm-stop? I don't understand why you start/halt the VM and wait for Tailscale, you could just keep it running.
I start/stop to save costs when I'm not actively coding. The VM is ~$7/day running, so I halt it overnight. The wait for Tailscale is just ~10 seconds for the mesh to reconnect after boot.
I started with a beefy VM to make sure I could ramp up without hitting slowdowns, but I'm planning to migrate to an Intel NUC running Proxmox at home soon.
> The real bottleneck isn't typing on mobile - it's reviewing the output.
Sounds like you need a foldable phone!
Better yet multiple foldable phone!
how do you manage to review code without running said apps or testing them, sure the code might look correct, but doesn't mean whatever issue / feature works or the bug is actually fixed
Each worktree has its own Docker containers including the database, so I can hit the dev server from my phone browser via Tailscale. For quick checks I'll just curl an endpoint or check the logs. For anything visual, I open the branch's preview URL.
But honestly - if it needs serious testing, I wait until I'm at my desk. The phone workflow is best for "let Claude run while I'm out" rather than deep debugging.
A dedicated OVH or Hetzner box would be faster and cheaper even when on all the time :)
Shout out to https://exe.dev for this stuff. It'a a VM provider service. It makes it stunningly easy to get https up and going, has a front end http gateway that does all the hard parts for you.
But relevant to this article here, it also has a super sick web based agent, Shelley, that is quite adequate for using from the phone.
I used it to build a little guestbook thing in ~2 hours, late night in bed in my phone. Link to submission, and my post on it there, and the guestbook I wrote. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46397609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398115 https://nan-falcon.exe.xyz
I'd also note that OpenCode is a solidjs app, that can run in tui (how most folks know it) or the web. And it has an excellent excellent plugin architecture. The work in this post to build workflows is great!
This is cool, but does everybody have enough work for multiple agents in parallel?
I feel like I'm limited by writing specs for agents, then by reviewing their work.
I typically spend 30-60 minutes writing a spec, then the agent runs for 30-60 minutes, then I spend 30-60 minutes refining code/ui/etc before putting up a PR, then another 30-60 minutes waiting for CI + addressing automated + human code review feedback.
Boris who created Claude Code has a multiple clauses setup it seems as daily usage https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179832300581177
I find if a project is made with agentic coding in mind, you can try to implement features as they come to mind and bounce between different CC terminals.
The problem is that this is true of none of my work projects and the onboarding cliff to agentic coding is quite steep. I have to use discretion to apply CC when it does make sense, which is not that often.
I'll have claude code editing a script on my laptop and another on the VM running it and synthesizing the results. Then sometimes I'll have another doing some odd job or researching something. Then I'll pull up gemini in my browser to figure out what I should make for lunch...
If you can context switch then you can pipeline
I usually use one instance, sometimes two. But this is a reasonable account of Chris Rackaukas using 32 instances at a time to do boilerplate maintenance across a bunch of open source repositories: https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/claude-code-in-scientifi...
> I have had to spend like 4am-10am every morning Sunday through Saturday for the last 10 years on this stuff before the day gets started just to keep up on the “simple stuff” for the hundreds of repos I maintain. And this neverending chunk of “meh” stuff is exactly what it seems fit to do. So now I just let the 32 bots run wild on it and get straight to the real work, and it’s a gamechanger.
I don't like typing long messages on my phone so this workflow, as cool as it sounds, wouldn't work for me. My current setup is that I have a Claude Code hook that runs whenever CC needs my input and it uses my Home Assistant instance to send a push notification to my phone. I then return back to the computer and continue on the work.
This works reasonably well, but there is a gap for small messages or review comments. I am waiting for Anthropic to shop a feature where the Claude mobile app is able to mirror Claude Code (not the Claude desktop app) and lets me see the diffs of the changes it made and send commands. I'd use this to steer the conversation while on the go with short commands or prompts so that when I'm back at the computer I can focus on the important feedback that I can jot down quickly on the computer keyboard.
I also don't like typing long messages on my phone that's why I use this keyboard that will do high quality transcriptions via whatever AI provider you want. Much better than siri/google speech to text on device.
https://github.com/DevEmperor/Dictate
I used to use Wispr Flow but did not like the non-local aspect, and having yet another subscription, so I switched to VoiceInk (one-time payment around $30 I think), and with a locally running Parakeet v3 model on my MacBook, transcription is basically instant. I was previously using it with the local Whisper Turbo 3 which is slightly more accurate and it had a 3-4 second lag, so I was absolutely shocked how fast parakeet v3. The slight drop in accuracy is totally fine when talking to AIs, and I also have a line in my CLAUDE.md that says I am usually dictating and that it should take that into account when interpreting my messages.
I concur that phones aren't great as they are today, but perhaps this exact scenario will prompt the return of PDAs with proper keyboards etc? Or, alternatively, subcompact laptops like the stuff that https://gpdstore.net makes - they are still small enough to be pocketable (needs fairly large pockets but...), and yet you get a keyboard that is actually usable, and they even have one device with fold-out dual screen.
I'll half-ass something from my phone to take an idea down, but this setup also works with a keyboard. I just run claude in a container with --dangerously-skip-permissions and it does a lot more work with a lot less questions.
I use the same setup myself, download WisprFlow for IOS and over time just add to its dictionary the unusual words you often use during development
works perfectly, i just say what i want coded, press enter, and Claude Code just does it in my server over Termius app
I was looking for a similar scheme, and though far from perfect I found you can run tmux+ttyd. ttyd lets you share your terminal over http. That lets you use your phone's browser (and speech-2-text).
That sounds nice, but what happens when there's something Claude messes up, doesn't know how to do something, or when you have to review the thousand lines it added to your project ?
Unless it's a totally vibe coded side project without any tests or quality control of some sort.
I'm just curious what you can build with this setup. It just seems to be the way to create a mountain of sloppy, unmaintainable code.
If it's really bad, just throw it away. I didn't spend a lot of time/effort generating the code. If my idea was bad or hard to implement I start over with a different approach. Smaller feature or different idea to accomplish the goal.
I've been working on something similar: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...
Essentially you run a server on some machine. Sessions are created in Docker containers, K8s pods, or via Zellij (an app similar to tmux). You can:
- Directly attach to sessions via Docker attach (built-in via a TUI). You get a normal Claude Code experience, but multiplexed. The switcher/UI shows you the status of Claude and the PR (pushed, merge conflicts, CI status, review status, etc.)
- Manage sessions via a web UI. Connect to Claude Code directly via your browser. You have access to the usual Claude Code terminal or a native chat view.
- Manage sessions via an app. You have access to a native chat view.
It achieves isolation via Git worktrees + a proxy so that containers have access to zero credentials (there aren't even any Claude code creds in the container), which allows you to more safely use bypass all permissions mode.
This works better for me that Claude Code on Web because I have control over the environment Claude is running in. I can give it any Docker image I want, I can have it connect to my local network, etc.
It's still a WIP (the core bits are there, but it's not polished yet), but I'm hoping it provides a friendlier UX with a similar goal for what the OP has in mind.
Looks super nice, will take it for a spin.
Please give any feedback! Note it has no auth yet and binds to all network interfaces by default, so you shouldn’t run on an untrusted network
> Port allocation is hash-based—deterministic from branch name, no conflicts:
> hash_val = sum(ord(c) for c in branch_name)
> django_port = 8001 + (hash_val % 99)
> Six agents, six features, one phone.
What do you mean, no conflicts? The probability of a collision with six branches and 99 ports slots is ~14% assuming optimal hashing (which this decidedly isn't).
You also don't need fail2ban, if the entire VM is behind a firewall that only allows the tailscale coordination traffic, nothing is going to reach the VM for fail2ban to work on.
Linode will provide a configured Linux box for $5/mo that works well with Claude Code and Termius. I had to jump through a surprising amount of hoops with Claude Code, Tmux and Termius to issue a shift+tab before Claude Code gained the ability to invoke plan mode conversationally
It makes sense - i build something very similar for my company over the last couple weeks :)
I have a tweak that allows pasting images to claude code over SSH:
How it works:
PTY Interception: It creates a pseudo-terminal (PTY) to wrap the SSH process, allowing it to sit as a "man-in-the-middle" between your keyboard and the remote shell.
Bracketed Paste Detection: It monitors stdin for "bracketed paste" sequences (the control codes terminals send when you Cmd+V or drag-and-drop a file).
The "Hook": When a paste occurs, it pauses execution and scans the text for local macOS file paths.
Auto-Sync: If a local path is found, it immediately syncs that file to the remote server (using the provided SSH key) in the background.
Transparent Forwarding: Once the sync is complete, it forwards the original text to the shell.
You can drag and drop a file from your local Finder into a remote SSH session, and the file is automatically uploaded to the server before the path appears on the command line. Also works with copy paste, screnshots.
Are you aware of iterm2's Inline Images Protocol (which I think is supported in some other terminals)?
https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html
HappyEngineering offer what looks like a similar setup, open source:
https://happy.engineering/
This. Can't believe this is not the top comment!
This is a bit too "plugged in" for my liking. If I am in line for coffee, it's usually respite away from work, not an opportunity to do more. However, I do love the tmux + worktree + claude setup. I use this now and I know a few peers who do too and it's very enabling. This is what work feels like these days: cycling through agents, each working on a task, checking their work, unblocking them.
this is my workflow as well
Easier to use https://happy.engineering/ for better mobile UX
7 USD/day? That's ~200/month -- isn't that just very expensive? I am probably missing something.
E.g. a Terragonlabs subscription is 25/month for 3 concurrent tasks and 50/month for 10.
You can optimize things. I have a github action that starts stops a fast google cloud vm for our builds. It only gets used about 3 minutes per build. We maybe have a few dozen builds per month. So that's a few hours of run time. The rest of the time the vm is stopped and not billed (except for storage, which is cents per month at most). It's a simple debian vm so it boots in about 20 seconds.
VMs are expensive if you leave them running 24/7 but the logic to start/stop them is pretty easy. There's no need.
Anyway, you need to balance this against the payoff. Agentic coding is useful enough that it beats spending your own time. And that includes waiting time for the relatively slow/underpowered containerized environments that some tools would use by default. I use codex web and codex cli (with a qemu vm so I can use the --yolo flag). Codex web is a bit limited with memory and CPU. Some of my slower builds are taking forever there. To the point where most of the time it consumes is just waiting for these builds to happen.
With a bit of plumbing, you can do things like the author describes pretty easily. IMHO this needs to be better integrated into tools. With Github you have the option to run your own runners. I don't think codex/claude web have similar options currently. But with the cli versions, you can get more creative if you know your tools. And if you don't, use LLMs to drive them for you. It's mostly just about expressing what you want and how you want it.
If you are already paying $200-500/m… and you are doing the work of 10 people… I can totally see the value.
I’ll check the Terragonlabs option.
Lots of options for startups right now, selling pickaxes! I’m waiting for a better terminal experience, personally. I can’t deal with 30+ poorly named windows. I need to be able to search for that one thread I was working on yesterday…
> I’m waiting for a better terminal experience, personally.
Same! Even colored tabs would go a long way for me.
What kind of things people are building that can be almost completely automatically built like this?
I have a feeling most of these folks are talking about personal projects or work on relatively small products. I have a good amount of personal projects that I haven’t written a line of code for. After bootstrapping an MVP, I can almost entirely drive by having Claude pick up GitHub issues. They’re small codebases though.
My day job is mostly a gigantic codebases that seem to still choke the best models. Also there’s zero way I’d be allowed to tailscale to my work computer from my phone.
From my perspective: tons of very simple, duplicated software. The bad thing is - there is a lot of space on different markets for such software. Here in Poland you can earn for pretty decent life being lame programmer, but building simple automations for small companies. I was raised in a way I still don’t have courage to switch to such approach, but doing this for 3-4 such entities I can see how you can make living from that. With LLMs you can automate 90+% of the job if not more.
I'm wondering about the same thing, I imagine it's good for posting it on the #hustleculture circles.
I'm kind of confused too. I spend way more time testing and reviewing code than I could possibly keep up with 4 agents
One very common thing I do is think of a small feature and ask Claude Code for Web to impl it. It works very well.
I'm definitely going to try this
Why not just use the mobile app? It has Claude Code built in. Maybe I'm an unsophisticated idiot but it works well for me. Some shortcomings with repo management but other than that, CC mobile seems ... fine
I've built something similar to run in my own cloud to run my own container images and add some features. The Claude Code web app has been pretty buggy for me and I like to run these things myself. If I do run into bugs or issues I still have access to the containers (and I do, because I vibe coded the whole thing). I gave it service accounts to the cloud it's running in, where the CI builds take place and setup dev environments per PR that deploy automatically. This is a massive productivity boost imo.
cc web can't run docker
Can't it?
I know Jules can, and I'm pretty sure I've used Docker on Codex Web. I'm surprised Claude can't if the network permissions are correct.
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Why not use Claude App in GitHub (if your code is in GitHub)?
I kick off a prompt as a GitHub issue, Claude fires away on this issue, provides updates as comments and a PR is created for me at the end for review.
It also notifies me throughout, and I can look at the pipelines to see the thinking behind the action.
Or even Claude's native iOS app can achieve what the OP desires. It shows the full interactive transcript as it goes.
I use Remote Desktop to connect to my mac from iPhone because I also want to test local front-end changes remotely.
Does anyone know what the "Poke" service that this blog mentions is? I'm having trouble finding it on Google.
Yeah, me too. The only thing that shows up is poke.com which has something to do with mobile notifications (and seems like at some point they offered some api, but maybe it was discontinued? or something, there are some medium posts talking about their api https://jpcaparas.medium.com/get-sms-or-imessage-alerts-from...
Hey! I work on Poke, and OP is apparently a user :)
Right now, there's a bouncer/waitlist to access Poke, but you can see how other people use Poke at poke.com/explore :)
Other users have linked the developer documentation, but if you're particularly interested in anything specific, feel free to email me!
Maybe [1]? Sounds like ntfy.sh, but more… AI
[1] https://poke.com/docs/developers/api/message-poke
How'd you find this? I spent 5 minutes bouncing between their various domains and marketing videos and login walls and couldn't find the developer docs.
Personally, I'd setup a Mattermost server and use its WebHooks for notifications. That's also more flexible (can send commands back to the bot, etc.)
yeah this was a poorly written blogpost (which is fine to be clear, something is better than nothing and OP gave the highest order bits).
but its this poke: https://poke.com/ verified because TFA is cited in this page https://poke.com/explore
the sign up is very annoying fair warning.
Maybe chat with poke? SMS ai service? I haven’t used it yet though
I use Pushover for notifications.
You can poke me on my website vikashbajaj.com
I currently use Hapi (https://github.com/tiann/hapi/) for this and find it quite handy. I can easily tap into a session on my PC from my phone.
Before that I used Happy (https://happy.engineering/) which is also open source and a lot more sophisticated. It has a voice assistant that can chat with Claude Code on your behalf in the mobile app. However, it wasn't very reliable, and there are other reasons to use Hapi instead (documented in the Hapi repo).
Before that, Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) a YC company and seemingly a proprietary Happy fork (?) but it never worked properly for me.
Long story short, there are a few of the around, and frankly I really like to use them. Unlike other commenters, I don't find that they wreck my work-life balance. Rather, I can go out and have a walk in the park, only checking in on long-running tasks every once in a while. The diff view is pretty good too. There are many tasks where I'd rather not stare at my PC all day and instead do other things, and these tools allow me to do that.
Also recommend Opencode which has `opencode web` built in. It's really impressive how good opencode web is. It's far more polished than I'd have expected from a free alternative!
I have an almost identical setup with tmux and Tailscale and Termius, except I'd leave my laptop on and connect my phone to it instead: https://www.qu8n.com/posts/running-claude-code-from-my-phone
Been using Termux and iSH on my phones for years. You can ssh to your server or just directly code for the phone itself.
I also used Web based coding environment like Glitch (R.I.P.) for years.
You can do that with your virtual keyboard, voice or a even a physical keyboard via BT, e.g. Corne-ish Zen.
That's how I travel.
That's really nothing AI specific or novel. It's cool though.
FWIW I even coined a related term https://fabien.benetou.fr/Languages/OwnConcepts#ResponsivePr... "extending responsive design to be able to program on the device, any device from eink to mobile phone to device, one is currently using not just to "consume" content, e.g read a Website that is then properly formatted for it, but rather program back that very device"
That being said, if you do want to go that route check out CloudInit as it will help you (or whatever tool you rely on) to spawn new instance on your favorite cloud provider to boot specific instances and e.g. setup Docker/Podman then services, etc with no interaction. Also ntfy can help you manage notifications across devices on your own infrastructure, no 3rd parties.
Also on the topic of gaps... liminal space IS precious. It doesn't require coding per se though. You can problem solve, jolt down a solution THEN only implement it as code later on. What matters IMHO is that the potential solution is not lost, wherever you might be. For that... I have shower crayons. Point is, CAPTURE ideas, don't necessarily implement on the spot but of course if you want to, it's good to be able to.
I have been doing the same but with happy. It works quite well for quick brainstorms etc. but for deeper work on a real research / plan / implement thing I think you need to actually engage with the output which is hard to do on mobile. Maybe if I had a better UI than terminus to read and check the remote files I would be able to get more done.
I am also hoping / trying to put Claude code on top of a personal zettlekasten to automate more of my “personal life” tasks and get more stuff done for me. Haven’t gotten it really singing yet but I think that could also be really cool.
An alternative might be to start up a VM on exe.dev. Supposedly, mobile access works out of the box [1].
I've not tried that myself since I've only been using it from my laptop, but I do prefer chatting with their coding agent in a browser tab to using Claude Code in a terminal window.
[1] https://commaok.xyz/ai/just-in-time-software/
This is interesting. Particularly the notifications flow. I run a simpler setup with webssh on my iPhone over WG back to my LAN and manage Claude that way. It’s fine, and can handle disconnects (with some big cons). I can run code-server via browser on my iPad and can get all the same benefits mosh provides.
One thing to note: the VM seems like an absolute waste of money. If you are using tailscale, might as well connect back to bare metal VMs you can run at home. Save yourself some coin.
There's an X thread where Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) shows his workflow of running 5 CC agents in the terminal using 5 tabs while running 10-15 instances of CC on the web [1] and how he moves projects from the terminal to the web and vice versa.
[1]: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179832300581177
This sounds cool but I feel like I need to often run the code in one way or another when verifying what Claude does. Otherwise it feels like driving blind. Claude Code already has the web version which I could use from my phone and fair it can't run scripts etc which limits the output quality. But if I can't verify what it did it also limits how long I can let it run before I need my laptop eventually.
Ofc if you have demo deployments etc on branches that you could open on mobile it works for longer.
Another issue is that I often need to sit down and think about the next prompt going back and forth with the agent on a plan. Try out other product features, do other research before I even know what exactly to build. Often doing some sample implementations with Claude code and click around these days. Doing this on a phone feels... limiting.
I also can't stand the constant context switching. Doing multiple feature in parallel already feels dumb because every time I come from feature B to A or worse from feature G to E it takes me some time to adjust to where I was, what Claude last did and how to proceed from here. Doing more tasks than 2 max. 3 in parallel often ends up slowing me down. Now you add ordering coffee and small talk to the mix and I definitely can't effectively prompt without rereading all history for minutes before sending the next prompt. At which point I might have also opened up my laptop.
Ofc if you truly vibe code and just add feature on feature and pray nothing breaks, the validation overhead and bar for quality goes down a lot so it works a lot better but the output is also just slop by then.
I typed this on my phone and it took 20 minutes, a laptop might have been faster.
I found wisprflow (paid app) to do a great job at smart-dictating my notes / emails.
Too many options here - keep it simple https://coderemote.dev/ https://www.tonkotsu.ai/ https://www.terragonlabs.com/ https://kisuke.dev/ https://opcode.sh/ https://yolocode.ai/
I just sent a feature request in to Anthropic to add a mobile app to essentially what's been constructed here.
I love that as we go through our GenAI development journey, we're all finding success in the same patterns.
They already have - the Claude app on mobile (maybe iOS-only?) has a Code section, which is a frontend for https://claude.ai/code
Hooked it up. This is bonkers.
I am now never going to sleep and may never have a girlfriend again.
The drug of "productivity" is a bad one to throw at a nearly retired enterprise architect.
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>Development fits into the gaps of the day instead of requiring dedicated desk time.
I find myself planning and jotting down things into a notebook while juggling adult/parent responsibilities. On little longer gaps I research. Then when the occasional longer gap happens I'm ready to start cracking on my desktop. I've been only dabbling with AI but have found that writing prompts by hand in the notebook and using the desk time to execute them works well. This also keeps me in the free tier.
Ive thinking about doing something very similar to this as I've a small 3 node k3s cluster at home but couldn't get enough motivation to start thinking I could just use termux + ssh and installing codex cli.
I do want a setup like this, however, most of my development is on Windows which means license cost is usually higher than the cost of the VM. I could run vm's on my home machine, but even then I feel like the terminal experience is quite poor. You want to have a mobile native code, to check the code/read the plans. So far I have been using teamviewer to access my home desktop which works, albeit annoying to use, plus I don't have fancy notifications. Perhaps a web first approach with a mobile responsive web app would work, that shows the files of the project as well as the terminal.
> Perhaps a web first approach with a mobile responsive web app would work, that shows the files of the project as well as the terminal.
Have you tried vscode server? - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server
Awesome. This really sounds like it would fit into my life, too. For once I really hope someone can productionalize this pattern into a platform with tooling, and pay for only what it needed. As it stands this feels expensive, even if it the price of coffee.
Appreciate the write up. If Claude presents a multi part shell questionnaire (as it does in planning). Would this miss other questions?
Setup is still rough around the edges (use an agent to set it up), but clawdbot (prev clawdis) from Peter Steinberger works phenomenally well for agent orchestration and personal assistance. The community for clawd is exploding right now, and I think this is purely based on merit. It’s been a game changer for my vibe coding workflow, and lots of fun.
https://github.com/clawdbot/clawdbot
I've been running a variation of this for the past 3 weeks. I swapped out the default pi agent back to Claude Code because I didn't like the smaller feature set. Bought a phone line and communicate with my agent via iMessage on a clamshelled mac. A Tailscale network connect the head agent to all the computers on my network including my laptop, a few raspberry pi's, steam deck, and all the IoT devices in my house. As I discover new uses, I ask it to make skills and it is remarkable what it's been able to handle all through the single chat interface because it has 24/7 access to all my computers' file systems and my home network. It's been really fun to see how far I can take it, and the skills framework built into CC/Codex now make it feel infinitely extensible.
I should note, a lot of the functionality I built into my agent was custom after-the-fact because (at least three weeks ago) the clawdis repo was in a state that I found very broken and with tons of false information. Luckily it's easy work for Claude to get things working for you, but really the key unlock was the phone line through iMessage and the unrestricted access to all my systems. It really does feel like I'm able to work with any of my files anywhere now, while hardly requiring much of my attention at all. I would recommend something like this at the bare minimum if you intend to implement a system like this: https://github.com/kenryu42/claude-code-safety-net
Both clawdbot and pi have improved and expanded functionality a lot during the last 3 weeks, maybe worth another look? What you have described sounds a lot like the experience I’m having.
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Try lody.ai, you can chat with your machine’s Claude Code/Codex from a browser with a much nicer UI and GitHub integration.
hey there, shameless plug here, I built pinacle.dev exactly with this use case in mind, cheap $7 VMs that comes with vs code, vibe kanban everything else needed out of the box to keep vibe coding on the go, no need to leave your computer running
As an aside have found the mosh + tmux Claude Code experience somewhat suboptimal, tmux's scrollback seems to clash with CC's, and makes copying between windows etc challenging.
It is tolerable on an iPad with Blink with commands to maximise and minimise panes using vim-style keyboard bindings, kind of like an iOS sway.
I really want to use Claude Code on the phone or tablet, with voice commands only, and perhaps a few simple approval thumb actions. I don't want to type out complex prompt information on a virtual keyboard. I tried setting this up with some of the iOS terminal emulators, and it almost worked, but there was some glitch where Claude would try to start using the first characters that arrived from the voice command.
Anyone have better results?
Not quite the same thing, but I wrote my own agent (as in a replacement for Claude Code) that uses SSH for all operations. That means I can run a very minimal VM (like 4GB RAM Oracle free tier), run the agent locally, and the agent only operates on remote files.
The limitation is that some Typescript builds run out of RAM (even with swap) and I can't use playwright, but still it's been useful.
It's fun writing an agent, too.
oracle free tier seems to be 1GB RAM.
why dont you run the VM on your machine?
Yes that works too.
But this way I can open the firewall, npm run dev and send the link of my new vibe coded security vulnerability/app to my friends without my computer running.
Plus a VM for this, a container for that and soon my 32GB memory isn't enough. I offload aggressively.
Jules and GitHub Copilot Agent suffice for similar workflows with less setup.
I've not tried Claude Code for Web but assume it would be similar. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/claude-code-on-the-web
Copilot Agent and Claude Code use their own sandbox, which requires less setup but is also quite limited. With your own cloud setup, agents can perform better end to end testing, including database dependencies and specific tool calls.
I'm almost there. I also have tailclscale/SSH/Claude sessions on a VM.
The thing I'm missing is a phone that makes it comfy. I could just SSH feom my standard S23, but what I've got my eye on is one of those foldable things.
Has anyone used one like a laptop? Keyboard on the bottom half, terminal on the top? Does it work decently?
I wonder when/how to test and review the code though? I mean, how do you know Claude Code hasn't entered a completely different path than you had imagined?
I just tell it to open a PR when it's done. I check the diff, and I give it feedback.
I run it containerized with --dangerously-skip-permissions and let it run wild.
Will we still use "batch jobs" agents in 2027? Checking a Java program and downloading a 10mb program used to be slow things which now happen faster than the blink of an eye.
I do similar except I log into my office workstation and avoid the extra fees. I detailed my setup in an x post here https://x.com/bobjordanjr/status/1999967260887421130?s=20 and the TLDR is:
1.Install Tailscale on WSL2 and your iPhone 2.Install openssh-server on WSL2 3.Get an SSH terminal app (Blink, Termius, etc.). I use blink ($20/yr). 4.SSH from Blink to your WSL2’s Tailscale IP 5. Run claude code inside tmux on your phone.
Tailscale handles the networking from anywhere. tmux keeps your session alive if you hit dead spots. Full agentic coding from your phone.
Step 2: SSH server In WSL2:
sudo apt install openssh-server sudo service ssh start
Run tailscale ip to get your WSL2’s IP (100.x.x.x). That’s what you’ll connect to from your phone.
Step 3: Passwordless login In Blink, type config → Keys → + → create an Ed25519 key. Copy the public key. On WSL2:
echo "your-public-key" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Then in Blink: Hosts → + → add your Tailscale IP, username, and select your key. Now it’s one tap to connect.
Step 4: tmux keeps you alive iOS kills background SSH connections. tmux solves this.
sudo apt install tmux tmux claude
Switch apps, connection dies, no problem. Reconnect: I can just type `ssh dev` in blink and I'm in my workstation, then `tmux attach`, you’re right back in your session.
Pro tip: multiple Claude sessions Inside tmux: •Ctrl+b c — new window •Ctrl+b 0/1/2 — switch windows I run different repos or multiple agents in the same repo, in different windows and jump between them. Full multi-project workflow from my phone.
Such a complex coding setup to get rate-limited out after only 40 minutes of development.
Is there a way to use the official Claude web app with GitHub providers other than GitHub? I’ve put a decent amount of effort into moving away from there, I don’t want to go back.
I do the same, but with ConnectBot and Gemini CLI. I have found ssh sufficiently good (mosh required some port forwarding dance, that Tailscale may have solved for the author).
What happens when your tailscale session expires? Or if tailscale dies. How do you log back in to fix it?
I simply bring my laptop with me and a hotspot.
Why does this need a $210/mo VM?
Why not just use the Claude app, and remote desktop?
tried recreating this but I don't see Poke's webhook stuff on the docs
I work on Poke; admittedly the docs[1] are a bit hidden but we're spending Q1 making it far easier for developers to work with Poke, feel free to email me if you're having any troubles!
[1]: https://poke.com/docs/developers/api/message-poke
Guys checkout Catnip, it uses GitHub workspaces so it’s free and it has a mobile app.
Free and seamless setup!
Or just install the GitHub action
A VM that cost 7 EUR per day? Or is that his price for claude?
I did much similar with Tailscale over summer.
But anthropic has since launched the ability to “teleport” sessions to mobile. (Claude Code is baked into the app). The iOS experience has been smooth for the most part.
People keep saying things like “2026 is the year of background agents, sandboxes, etc” but imo the harness will eat the entire platform stack. It already is. It will only get better.
Claude Code mobile app + GitHub app? Works well enough.
Has not discovered Clawdbot yet.
“ Worst case: Claude does something unexpected on a disposable VM.”
.. with a valid SSH key unless I’m reading it wrong?
I think the SSH key that has push permissions is SSH-forwarded. It is quite a sophisticated setup (in both a good and a bad sense).
You can use a PAT token which has write access to a single repo instead. No need to add a full access SSH key to GitHub.
I run Claude code directly on Termux and it runs like a dream. My projects are mounted on a private S3 folder with rclone.
Hah, I set up basically the same thing on Saturday during a long car ride. Couple of differences: I’m an opencode user and I used a different VPS provider (though I use vultr for other things). It was my first time actually sitting down and using tailscale, which was quite easy to get going. Did everything from my phone, didn’t even have my laptop with me.
> Now I code from my phone.
Except that you are doing anything else but coding here. Coding involves writing code, which isn't actually done by the author here.
Yeah, wanted to reply something similar. Technically he's building software, but he's not "coding".
typing in mobile terminal is... painful
the future
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