Claude Code Remote Control

Struggled with it also, given up (for now).

I thought coding was a solved problem Boris?

Exactly my experience, I know they vibe code features and that’s fine but it looks like they don’t do proper testing which is surprising to me because all you need bunch of cheap interns to some decent enough testing

Also broken for me.

First of all /remote-control in the terminal just printed a long url. Even though they advertise we can control it from the mobile app (apparently it should show a QR code but doesn't). I fire up the mobile app but the session is nowhere to be seen. I try typing the long random URL in the mobile browser, but it simply throws me to the app, but not the session. I read random reddit threads and they say the session will be under "Code", not "Chats", but for that you have to connect github to the Claude app (??, I just want to connect to the terminal Claude on my PC, not github). Ok I do it.

Now even though the session is idle on the pc, the app shows it as working... I try tapping the stop button, nothing happens. I also can't type anything into it. Ok I try starting a prompt on the pc. It starts the work on the PC, but on the mobile app I get a permission dialog... Where I can deny or allow the thing that actually already started on the pc because I already gave permission for that on the PC. And many more. Super buggy.

I wonder if they let Claude write the tests for their new features... That's a huge pitfall. You can think it works and Claude assures you all is fine but when you start it everything falls apart because there are lots of tests but none actually test the actual things.

That's a bummer. I was looking forward to testing this, but that seems pretty limiting.

My current solution uses Tailscale with Termius on iOS. It's a pretty robust solution so far, except for the actual difficulty of reading/working on a mobile screen. But for the most part, input controls work.

My one gripe with Termius is that I can't put text directly into stdin using the default iOS voice-to-text feature baked into the keyboard.

Why couldn't they prompt Claude code to fix all the issues?

Not just the mobile app, but also Claude Code Web is super unreliable.

Frequently chews through lots of expensive Opus tokens, then it just stops with no communication about why or what's next.

No way to tell what it's done, what's remaining to complete.

Only choice is to re-run everything and eat the cost of the wasted time and tokens.

On top of that is something they should have had from earlier times. My biggest pain point is to not to be able to continue from my phone. I just use a service to pipe telegram to any cc session in the dev machine. This is the number 1 reason why I got excited by openclaw in the first place but its overkill to have it just to control cc

Sounds like something that was vibe coded :)

I think they should be aware that CC is big enough codebase that they can't vibe code anymore.

Remember 100% of Claude Code is written by Claude

> - You can't interrupt Claude (you press stop and he keeps going!)

This is normal behavior on desktop sometimes its in the middle of something? I also assume there's some latency

> - At best it stops but just keeps spinning

Latency issues then?

> - It can get stuck in plan mode

I've had this happen from the desktop, and using Claude Code from mobile before remote control, I assume this has nothing to do with remote control but a partial outage of sorts with Claude Code sometimes?

I don't work for Anthropic, just basing off my anecdotal experience.

check out codecast.sh its so far ahead :)

oh. i was excited for a native alternative to happy coder, or sshing to a tmux session, but i guess not:/

[dead]

Omnara founder here.

We’ve been building in this space for a while, and the issues listed here are exactly the hard parts: session connectivity, reconnection logic, multi-session UX, and keeping state in-sync across devices. Especially when it comes to long running tasks and the edge cases that show up in real use.

I have just today discovered zmx [1] which is like tmux but I always hated the tmux terminal emulation and how it hijacks scrolling, especially on Termius on my phone. It does session persistence but I think without the terminal emulator side of things, so scrolling works normally.

Been testing it today with Claude Code and it seems to work quite well switching between my laptop and phone.

[1] https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx

I do this and it is powerful, but I find that not being able to swipe/autocorrect my mobile typing in Termius makes things pretty painful.

I think everyone started out with this

Do you have an alias or something so that every time you open CC, tmux is running?

How do you deal with multiple concurrent sessions of CC with this setup?

How important is mosh? I wasn't able to get it set up the last time I tried... ran into a bunch of issues.

Yes. Doing the same. What is the advantage of this new feature? Tmux/Tailscale/Termius give you full control of your terminal. Or mainly to save the end user the hassle to set it up correctly?

It can help to recognize that tmux combines three kinds of functionality: 1. process persistence; 2. client attachment; 3. view layout. If you don't like how tmux works, there are alternatives. I prefer Zellij [1]. (It also can be informative to take a peek at dtach [2] and abduco [3].)

[1]: https://zellij.dev and https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij

[2]: https://github.com/crigler/dtach and https://dtach.sourceforge.net

[3]: https://github.com/martanne/abduco/issues/70

I also do this!

I was having too many bugs using it with my phone, I gave up and went back to Termux

Set it up and never managed to have it work. Only thing it did was renaming my sessions on my main cc instance. Mobile did nothing, not even an error message.

I was using this religiously but there’s a bug currently that makes the initialization fail and/or throws an error on the phone client. Absolutely great piece of software otherwise, free, anonymous, encrypted and so on. Really hope the team can fix this soon - I would hate to switch back to tmux tunneling.

Yeah but this is from an AI company so its mad different

Lol. I've been looking at this stuff wondering what the hell I was missing and what it was trying to solve.

I was starting to think I've really fallen behind or something. I feel relief AND horror.

I don't know a single person who is satisfied with the status quo on streaming services where you have to subscribe to multiple ones. Everyone is complaining that the landscape is 1) more fragmented than cable was, 2) costs more, 3) has even more ads than cable

I'm using copilot on vscode and the agent is "Auto" which cost 10% less.

The results are enough for me and I'm not doing things that allow me to differentiate the output between ChatGPT, Claude and, the others.

The agents are more like the radio in my car, whenever I want music, I switch channel until I find something good enough.

If I'm really in need of something special, I'll use Spotify on my phone.

And sometimes, I just drive with the radio off.

I agree. I spend a lot of time working from my phone so I had to make my own workflow that works for me. I've been following all these bans and drama with the subscription keys and custom harnesses etc. I think there's room for a "universal control plan" that lets you leverage the CLI providers (and whatever crappy interfaces / apis they give you).

There's a comparison of the approaches as I see them here https://yepanywhere.com/subscription-access-approaches

This is a classic case of vibe coding gets you 80% of the way there, but polishing takes the other 80%.

I find Xcode's Claude Agent client to be much more stable than the Claude web and Mac apps.

Claude Code is a good product, they should just keep on steadily improving it and improving the model. I am not sure why they are spraying in all directions like this..

[flagged]

Well it DOES have less storage than a Nomad (hence lame), but this way you don't need to pay for a public IP address, or for a VPS to run Wireguard on, or for a commercial VPN solution, and then install a terminal emulator on your phone and set up SSH keys.

People tried reinventing terminals, SSH, and tmux for phones. It's a pretty terrible experience using your thumbs. And it takes significant know-how to set up.

And in modern stacks, it almost necessitates a man in the middle - tailscale is common but it's still a central provider. So is it really the most inefficient way possible?

Fair point technically, but I think the value proposition isn't the persistent session, rathere it's the abstraction layer. Screen/tmux assumes you know what commands to run. This assumes you know what outcome you want. For someone like me who came to coding late and doesn't have 20 years of muscle memory with terminal tools, the inefficiency in transport is more than offset by the efficiency in intent. Different tools for different people.

That’s not at all how this works. Commands are relayed through Anthropic’s servers with a client polling mechanism.

I’m running the agent in tmux in a colo. When I’m at a computer I use that, when I’m on the go the RC app is more convenient

I've used similar things (omnara/happy) while taking walks. Sometimes I'll get an idea about the problem I'm working on and I can just dictate it into my phone and check in 15min later. I stopped being able to do that when claude added those nice interview panes to clarify things because it didn't work back then. But mostly it's really annoying when you think you've created the plan/prompt and that it's ready to go. But it gets stuck or decided to stop while you're away. I pretty often need to give Claude a "continue" kick. To be fair this happens far less after Opus 4.6.

Also, I felt the need to use it far more when I was on Pro vs a Max plan. On Pro when you hit the usage windows it's nice to be able to kick claude back into gear without scheduling your life around getting back to the terminal to type "continue".

- Plan mode -> answer questions/make corrections, continue planning

- Some of us don't do full yolo mode all the time, then tool approvals or code reviews are required, nice to do a quick review and decide if you need to go back to your computer or not

- Letting claude spin or handle a long-running task outside of normal work hours and being able to check in intermittently to see if something crashed

I don't dangerously accept permissions outside of a few scripts I have reviewed as safe. This means claude gets stuck often when testing it's work, but also means it doesn't uninstall production workloads from the kubernetes cluster.

What are the drawbacks of HAPI? Seems too good to be true. Will give it a try.

claude /logout -> claude /login -> claude /remote-control

Same here on my iPhone. I didn't previously log it into my github account as I don't use github anymore, I use gitlab. So it wont find anything useful there. You actually only need to do this in order to be able to access the list of sessions. Even if you don't log into github, remote-control still works if you copy across the link that the cli tool outputs for you and just visit that on your phone. That's a bit of a pain though of course.

You can scope it to repos. Make a repo just for what you want. That's your sandbox.

Make a throwaway GitHub account just for it and give it PR access to your private repos.

Maybe combine Claude Code + Obsidian, so Claude can use the node structure as a second brain for projects. I was just watching this video (not affiliated):

https://youtu.be/6MBq1paspVU

Honestly, build it yourself. I think we’re firmly in the personal software era (or disposable).

But if you don’t want to, I’ve been building basically this https://github.com/Robdel12/OrbitDock

Native macOS and iOS apps, backed by a rust binary that I put anywhere and connect to. Right now I’m just LAN but eventually will tailscale.

Works with claude and codex. Both passively watching an active CLI session for both and you can take over those sessions if needed and interact in the app

Conductor (mac app) does some of this, might want to take a look.

This kind of release shows Anthropic as a company is suffering from the same thing we all are right now. Removing the friction from having an idea and executing it stops you from remembering The Point. Yes, programming from your phone is an exciting modality and maybe even the future of how we work, but coding from your bedroom, AND the toilet, AND the woods AND your office is definitely (hopefully) not the future.

I wonder if is anyone working on an AI framework that encourages us to keep our eye on the big picture, then walk away when a reasonable amount of work is done for the day.

Yes, individuals are creating cool mobile coding solutions and Anthropic doesn't want to get left behind. I know I'm working my ass off at work right now because LLM coding makes it fun, but I also often don't prioritize what I'm doing for the big picture because I just try every thing that comes into my inbox, in order, because it's so fast to do with Claude Code.

We all sense it!: <https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-wo...> <https://ghuntley.com/teleport/> <https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163>

There are two types of software engineers: Those who do and then think, or those who think and then do. Claude Code seems to strictly be for the former, while typically the engineers who can maintain software long-term are the latter.

Not sure if we have any LLM-tooling for the latter, seems to be more about how you use the tools we have available, but they're all pulling us to be "do first, think later" so unless you're careful, they'll just assume you want to do more and think less, hence all the vibeslop floating around.

One could just as easily argue hunching over your desk staring at your computer has neurological implications.

My favorite way to vibe code is by voice while in the hot tub. Rest AND focus AND build.

Wait why should I prefer being stuck in the office over taking a walk and periodically steering Claude code by phone?

On the other hand, you lose a lot of time if you step away from a session and it gets stuck asking for permission to do something simple.

I think a significant distinction between your approach and Claude’s approach is that your approach requires allowing your machine to accept inbound connections but Claude’s approach does not. Claude probably went with the latter to avoid a whole class of security issues and mitigate risk of users having their machines compromised. I’m not familiar with what the new vectors of attack are with Claude’s approach though.

Yeah the remote control featureset is pretty limited right now. I did a comparison here https://yepanywhere.com/claude-code-remote-control/ (with my own project). I'm sure they'll iterate on it. Overall it's such an obvious feature for them to add I'm surprised it took them so long to ship. There are probably at least 50 such projects that people have made (https://github.com/kzahel/yepanywhere/blob/main/docs/competi...)

The one feature drawback of tailscale/tmux/termius is no file upload. And ergonomics, ability to view files/diffs easily, though that's subjective.

Which is so much better because you can do other terminal stuff and you can avoid vendor lock in.

Perhaps, but the key difference is that it’s a developer tool you use from the command line.

except there will be no dropbox moment. There is no startup that stands a chance, Openclaw is free, the foundation model providers basically won this space just by providing subscriptions cheaper than any competitor could ever do.

Yeah, the only thing keeping them from doing that is that the open weight free models are just as good.

I wonder if they would take away your ability to prompt, maybe only letting you run agentically.

Seems like it could be problematic in the future since code can't be fixed by humans so the only source of future code for training is unedited Claudeslop.

This just points out that Claude is not on your computer, only your interface to your Claude session is.

You can also just open the app on your phone and go to the sidebar and click on Code and then you'll see the session at the top of your session list.

This comment sounds like the basis for a nice Black Mirror episode.

Regular claude code is already a remote access door to your setup, once you've granted a few command execution permissions. (e.g. if it can edit your code and run the test suite)

[dead]

I run Codex using terminus, iOS, and a VPS.

Hoping Cursor will also adopt.

This resonates hard. I'm a self-taught dev who started coding ~7 months ago, and honestly the conversational back-and-forth with Claude is how I built my entire first app. Not by reading docs cover to cover, but by describing what I wanted, getting code back, breaking it, asking why, and iterating. The idea of doing that untethered from my desk is genuinely exciting — not because I want to work more, but because some of my best thinking happens on walks, not in front of a screen.

Wispr Flow just got an Android release, so everything except it talking back to you is now doable

Are you actually complaining about having an option available, if you want it?

I’m genuinely wondering the same thing, seems like at least a precursor.

have you gotten a terminal interface on your phone to be acceptably usable? I haven't - not without a real keyboard attached in any case. too many parts of the UX are designed for a true keyboard.

TIL that HA notifications can have associated actions. I have the exact same setup as you, except I only receive the notification and then walk over to the laptop to unblock the agent feeling like a human tool call. This will improve my workflow, thank you.

I'm trying to understand the setup you have here.

So your hook -> HA -> push notification? And then you just tap to approve?

Yep. Came to say the same thing. I'd only used Codex in VSCode and in the Codex app, and at least those have the same history, but my understanding is that the cloud and CLI versions have this hierarchy of 'visibility' [0]. Perhaps they'll need to change this design decision?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cczkDMmmrEE

At this point if one lab comes up with a feature it’s a matter of time before another does the same!

I honestly think this is definitely where (at least part of) the industry is heading, yes.

This is not to say engineers are getting replaced — but, certainly, they are changing their work. And, sure, maybe _some_ of them are being replaced. Not most of the ones I know, though. They are essential to orchestrate, curate, maintain, and drive all of this.

(Now, do they want to orchestrate it? Whole different story...)

Except this time around the code is only maintainable using AI agents.

Doesn't have to be. Before OpenClaw was a thing, people were experimenting with setups to allow them to drive their agent remotely.

And of course, OpenClaw is built to be a very generalist agent with a chat interface - same effective outcome as remotely controlling an AI harness, but not exactly what everyone wants.