Comment by satvikpendem
12 hours ago
Just...write longer messages. Maybe it is age but I've written huge forum such as on HN all from my phone often with multiple tabs open to source various links for foot notes. When I type for an LLM, I will type a lot too if needed and will often even type a little, wait to think, then continue, over the course of like 15 minutes even, so that the intention of the prompt is correct since that saves much more time and produces better results than shorter messages.
I think you just need to type more rather than feeling constricted, as it's actually a form of liberation, to produce (or have an AI produce, whatever) something from wherever you are rather than needing to sit down on a laptop where you're gonna be waiting around anyway.
What tunnel setup do you use by the way? I'm on Android so it's kind of annoying all the LLM remote coding apps are iOS only.
Oh, I agree completely. I avoid loose language, revise my wording, and usually write prompts that require scrolling on mobile.
It isn’t so much that I feel restricted, I guess it’s that mobile wasn’t as big of a game changer as it was ~6 months ago.
My bandwidth feels more restricted by my own cognitive capacity (usually due to do context switching), rather than the limits of the model itself, and the mobile interface makes that worse.
I’ve recently found myself reserving larger tasks for “keyboard time” and reverting my thinking back to notes (in mobile), which I’ll then formulate to the LLM at some future time.
> What tunnel setup do you use by the way?
I “vibecoded” an agentic runtime that operates my machine generally (including TUIs like Codex/Claude Code), which I connect through a custom proxy and mobile app (both also vibecoded).
I previously tried Cloudflare Tunnels and an SSH setup, but it all felt a bit hacky.
Unfortunately the app is iOS only, but I could open source it and you’d probably be able to make an Android clone quickly (:
That could be cool, no issues with Claude Code not working in third party harnesses or their recent changes about different (more expensive) billing for programmatic usage? I guess I generally use OpenAI models which don't care.
It's a lot easier to write long messages on a phone with something like Whisper.
I'm not sure about others but I can't coherently voice my thoughts through speech alone as I'd want to think and revise the message, so I generally don't use voice transcription with AI.
I haven't found that to be an issue. Just say what revisions you want. Once you're done, paste it into an LLM to clean it up into a usable prompt.
I've been coding on Android for a few months, mostly while walking around outside or showering. I'm on a mix of Tailscale + Termux + ssh server + tmux + codex CLI, Tailscale is great.
I think you may be able to optimize your workflow more by drafting your prompt in ChatGPT first; get it to expand out the intent for you. Doing that has made phone coding a lot more tolerable for me.
I like to think that I've given phone coding a fair shot (and I continue to do it), but I agree with the other poster that there's something about the lack of a keyboard that really gets to me :) I wish I knew what it was.
I was thinking about this, don't you think having everything in a terminal on a phone screen is a bit clunky to type in? Ideally I'd want it to be a clone of the official iOS apps from these AI companies with good mobile features like copy paste, smooth scroll, etc. Looks like the article's ChatGPT Codex functionality is in Android as well.