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!
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.
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...
I spend most of my time updating the memory files and reviewing code and just letting a ton of tasks run in parallel
conductor -> multiple claude codes/codexes -> multiple agents -> multiple tools/skills/sub-agents -> LLMs
I like that it ends up in the repo as it means it survives compaction or lets me start a fresh session entirely.
This can be customized via a shell env variable that I cannot remember ATM.
The downside (upside?) is that the plan will not end up in your repo. Which sometimes I want. I love the native plan mode though.
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...
What about running services locally for manual testing/poking? Do you open ports on the Anthropic VM to serve the endpoints, or is manual testing not part of your workflow?
If something is too fiddly to test within the boundaries of a cloud coding agent I switch to my laptop. Claude Code for web has a "claude --teleport" command for this, or I'll sometimes just do a "gh pr checkout X" to get the branch locally.
Even with GitHub CI now all of sudden it wasted $50 on few days of CI actions. Should have everything run on my home server. But I think I may need more powerful home server, I have a cheap Dell refurbished one now.
I don't want to ever have to touch a UI again (except in places like Hackernews or the like) and the ones I specially built (read: vibecoded) for myself.
I do have a managed Kubernetes instance that I run public services on (like for webhooks from github) so I dont need to open my home ports. It's very small to keep costs low. The benefit of using Kubernetes at home is most of my configs need minor changes to work on the managed k8s instance, so there's not much duplicate work to get features/software deployed there. It's the great cloud agnosticator after all!
I've started my own web interface for Claude Code to host it in the same cluster. That's where the CI builds happen, the PR envs get deployed. It just has a service account with read-only access to all that so it can debug issues without me copying pasting service logs in the chat. Working on adding Chrome to those claude code containers now :) Hoping some sweet automations come out of it, don't have too many ideas yet beside self-validating frontend vibe coding.
Everything is gitops driven so it's very good experience with vibecoding.
I could imagine this working for a small number of branches/changes.
They'll include screenshots on your PRs etc.
I like using them a lot when I can.
I have a project where I've made a rule that no code is written by humans. It's been fun! It's a good experience to learn how far even pre-Opus 4.5 agents can be pushed.
It's pretty clear to me that in 12 months time looking at the code will be the exception, not the rule.
Absolutely - for me, that's already true. I just wouldn't want to give up the ability to _ever_ look at the code before I submit it!
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
What alternative do you propose?
Realistically, if you have 300M, you and your direct family are settled for life. So, I want to propose 1B cap on net worth, if its more than that for 12 months straight, surplus goes to government, if your net worth is down after that, government obliges to return it partially to make it to 1B.
People, who are eager building things and innovating, will keep building regardless, power hungry will try to find other ways to enrich themselves, but eventually they will give up (e.g. having 10 kids, each with 1B net worth)
It seems to me that if one tried to actually spend those credits we'd simply get inflation. Prices for roads, food etc. would just go up.
We definitely want to work on inequality, but I think numbers above 1B net worth are just weird quirks of the system. Musk is powerful because he's powerful, the number is just a reflection of that. Keeping his number below some arbitrary threshold isn't going to combat his power.
We need to tackle the problem head on: we need to stop individuals from amassing so much power. We get lost in this stupid abstraction called money. It's not what matters.
One example:
* 300k vs 300M - doesn't matter if I said 100M, 200M, 550M, if you think 300M is not enough for you and your family to afford anything, not sure how other people are surviving for even less.
Here is why I think this is good:
1. Ambitious people will still be ambitious, its rare some genius kid says: I know this is 100B idea, but I won't build it, because I will only own 1B of it.
2. Limits the power, when power is really limited, people will be forced to focus on different things. For example, if you had plans to take over the world by making $10T and creating an army to kidnap president of another state you don't like, then you would know, it is not possible to make 10T, its not only about how much, its about suppressing hungry animal in you by capping your limits.
3. There is a chance "bad" ambitious people, will be converted to real philanthropist, because they know it doesn't matter to own more than 1B anyway and they can't own it.
I can agree with that idea, to an extent. If something is near impossible (not saying this is), then it does become not worth it.
The other questions the parent posed are more interesting to me:
> How would you determine the worth of rare, illiquid or intangibles? What about wealth held in trusts or companies? How does the accounting work if I borrow against my wealth? What happens when things change value dramatically in a short period of time?
Another I wonder is that (ignore all specifics of the values, just the concepts matter here), let's say you own a private business that then becomes valued at 1.5 billion dollars and this individual has 20 million dollars liquid. How do you tax that? The government can't take one third of the business, at least not without a lot of issues (in business dealings and individual rights), and the 20 million liquid wouldn't come close to what this plan would value. What do we do then? Plenty of billionaires don't really have liquid cash and forcing liquidation of assents in such a way seems like it would be very difficult.
I'm all for more taxes on higher net worth individuals, but I think there's a lot of talk to be had on how one can implement this. It's going to be really difficult to find a way that makes sense.
FATCA law makes this very possible in the US.
> How do you tax that? The government can't take one third of the business, at least not without a lot of issues (in business dealings and individual rights)
I would say that the government can and should and simply be a passive share holder with no voting rights.
For example, say individual has 20M liquid cash, 2 houses each valued at 5M and 1.5B in company shares (based on averaged company value for the last 6 or 12 months):
* whatever you can immediately spend is prioritised first, so you keep your 20M + 2 houses, then surplus is $530M of your company shares
* this equivalent number of shares will be moved to government trust, individual doesn't have any control over it, if person dies next day, government keeps the money (lets simplify for now and keep voting rights as separate question)
* let's say after shares moved to gov. trust, during next 6 months company value halved, gov. returns all your shares, if stock dropped only 10%, you get equivalent back to make your net worth 1B
* regarding taxation, I would keep it as it is today and tax on "realization event"
There are around 3.000 billionaires in the world, even hiring 10 dedicated people for each billionaire to calculate all this stuff on a quarterly basis is not expensive
What do you think all that money you taxed from billionaires will do in the hands of the “government”, pay the bills for 12-24 months? Then what’s your plan after the government has spent it all? No amount of taxation can solve a spending problem.
Some options why it should happen:
1. Assuming Elon is curious person, he will still build it out of curiosity.
2. Assuming Elon is not curios person, just power hungry, he will probably think its not worth building it, but someone else who is curious will build it eventually. This is even better, because when power hungry person owns such thing, they might use it for bad things as well (e.g. to gain more power, eventually interfering with elections, oh wait, it did already happen)
3. Government will build, because government will have more money now, but then we should be even more careful who gets to the top. Assuming people won't have more than 1B, maybe there will be less lobbying? because its not worth as much as it was before?
Ah, so your idea is the good old “only the emperor who controls the violence apparatus should have a lot of money and power”?
It’s not a very original idea, and it has been tried many times, and it failed many times.
> but then we should be even more careful who gets to the top
Right, so “for some reason only the greedy power hungry psychopaths get to the top in the current system — let’s fix it so that there can’t be many of them, only one government who has power to take away other people’s wealth and concentrate it immensely, surely we will figure out how to make sure it’s not filled with greedy power hungry psychopaths as we go”
Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68#Slogans_and_graffiti
Something like we had in advanced western europe and the US between ww2 and the late 70s seemed much more balanced while not requiring a complete system change. Most people would be fine if we sprinkled a bit of socialism on top of the gigantic pile of capitalism.
Stuff like housing, energy, transportation, shouldn't make you live paycheck to paycheck forever. Just the fact that people are slowly starting to talk about 50 years mortgage should be a wake up call.
Most people would be happy knowing there is something a tiny bit better coming, rather than knowing they will never make it out and will kept getting fucked a tiny bit more year after year. My grandparents had objectively a harder life than mine, but their life was improving every year, mine is stagnating at best, and usually I'm losing purchasing power year after year, while being relatively well paid for my country
We should unite, not fight about who's whitest, XYZ gender or a minority, you'll always find someone who has it better or worse than you, what matter is the average is going down, while back then it was going up, the rest is mostly noise.
This is not at all to say that more conservative or reactionary theorists are wrong about how the world works. In fact, I think they're usually more right about what's really going on abstractly.
But, the working man doesn't need to know what's really going on. They need to win the war, and there's a ton of tactical advice written down—hard won lessons by those who built the modern world through the labor movement.
The place to start is with the usual suspects. Verso Books, The New Centre for Social Research, histories of the labor movement, and new political commentators like Josh Citarella.
It sounds like you have not read Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
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 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.
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)
Yeah I've sort of noticed this on X for the brief time I was on there this weekend. The Claude Code creator was hyping it up to the moon, and when people called him out for it he said he would feel the same way if he wasn't making 1000 racks a year with it. Sure mate.
What people don't realise is if tech progresses to the point where everything is automated, the marginal cost of everything will basically go to zero. It would be better to give away food and shelter for free if it keeps things peaceful. And if not, people have revolted for far less.
That being said it's a complete utopia and once this bubble pops we are basically going to be where we were, but with excellent natural language parsing and generation, with some useful code generation and introspection tools, writing assistants, etc. Which will be great, but not world changing.
the thing most (especially non-devs) don't understand is that if software can be automated - 99% of all knowledge work will be replaced, as software is the ultimate automation.
There would be absolutely no issues automating accountants/lawyers/etc etc etc. Sure few will be left but 99% can be automated when software is that advanced.
Not only knowledge work, also a massive amount of blue collar jobs. AI already can guide you how to fix a lot of things or analyze issues with plumbing/electricity/you name it.
So if software goes down - everyone will go down.
Where we're going, there's no "white collars workers" anymore.
Only white collars Claude agents.
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.)
Either "we" create models better than commercial state of the art (by using whatever means).
Or we use open models AND fund organisations building such models (could be by purchasing service from these orgs or donations - in which case would these orgs be different than hyperscalers?).
But i dont see how just hosting the models on some private servers would give us an edge?
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.
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.
You'll get a lot further and faster than you'd expect.
Things will probably plateau as you master the new tech, but it's possible you'll not write a ton of code manually along the way.
Oh, your general software development experience should help with debugging the weird corner cases.
I imagine it's really hard to do this with 0 software dev experience, for example. Yeah, you'll build some simple things but you'll need and entire tech education to put anything complex in prod.
The code is written in Dart and never wrote a line of DART in my life, I'm a veteran expert around Java, C++. The reason for choosing DART is simply because it is way readier for multi-platform contexts than Java/C++. The same code base now runs on Linux, Android, iOS, OSX, Windows and Web (as static HTML). Plus the companion code in C++ for ESP32 microcontrollers. It also includes a CLI for running as linux server.
Don't ask me for a hard analysis and data proving x25 performance increase, what I know is that an off-grid product was previously taking me two years of research/effort to build in Android/Web and get a prototype running. Now in about a month went far above all previous expectations (cached maps with satellite imagery, bluetooth mesh, webRTC, whatever apps) and was able to release a product several times per day that works as envisioned. Iterating quickly and getting direct feedback from users.
The repository: https://github.com/geograms/geogram
Overview of the apps being written: https://github.com/geograms/geogram/tree/main/docs/apps
IMHO, Codex is far superior at the moment for complex tasks, Claude is cheaper and still good enough quality for most tasks. In addition to keep several terminals with tasks in parallel, this gives me time throughout the day for other tasks with family/friends and a lot of motivation like a coding-buddy to try different routes and quickly implement a prototype instead of always being alone doing this kind of work. For example, it added an offline GPT bot but wasn't what was needed so could quickly discard it too.
These tools get lost on API implementations and the documentation folder is mostly there to provide the right context when needed. I've learned to use simple markdown documents with things to keep in mind like "reusable.md" or "API.md" to make sure it won't reinvent them. Given my experience, there are parts that I'd implement with higher quality on my own, the trade-off is that I can't touch the code by myself now. One of the reasons is that it would make more difficult for these AI to work since my naming and file structure would make it difficult for the AI to work with, the other reason is because I don't want to waste a full day on a single problem like before. As the product grows more stable is when more attention is given to the finer details. On early stages, that type of quality is still more than good enough for me.
You can try the Android or Linux versions if you are so inclined. Never in my life would I ever be able to build so much in 5 weeks.
Quite ambitious.
Is this an LLM hallucinating? taking a break from coding? or leaking your personal desktop session?
I've answered in more detail on the other reply below on the conversation. Thank you for spotting that.
> Would you describe this product as a whole application suite
The rabbit hole goes even further. The reason why callsigns are used is because geogram can happily communicate using radio-waves on walkie-talkies without internet at all. On the previous iterations (before AI) it was sending free SMS using walkie-talkies and satellites (APRS), this current incarnation should soon be doing the same things too. A presentation from two months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb_VUSaNw8k
This is a niche app, written for our community in Portugal to connect with each other.
Ha! In any case, I'm happy to see I'm not the only one compulsively "ls-ing" all over the place in every terminal I open :)
Had some fun and added some CLI dungeon and dragon games inside. Will put that file on the .ignore list. Basically the games are based on markdown text files: https://github.com/geograms/geogram/blob/main/games/azurath-...
I don't believe people will spend time looking at the code beyond the small blurbs they can read from the command line while talking with the AI, so I agree with you that it ends being treated as a blackbox.
Did an experiment for a server implementation in Java (my strong language), gave the usual instructions and built up the server. When I went to look into the code, it was a far smaller and more concise code base than what I would write myself. AI is treating programming language on the level of a compiler for javascript, it will make the instructions super efficient and uses techniques that on my 30 years experience I'm not able to pair-review because we tend to have our own patterns of programming while these tools use everything, no matter how exotic they will use it to their advantage.
After that experience I don't look at generated source code any longer. For me it is becoming the same as trying to look at compiled binary data.
Either way it’s been a fun ride.
Personally I don't think they're a great fit for the software industry where the nature of the job and the details are continuously changing as technology evolves.
The fundamental point of the union is to be able to negotiate as a group. That is valuable regardless of the industry.
- paternity leave
- overtime
- not having to answer a call or email outside of work hours
- workman’s comp / short/long-term disability for issues with my back or wrists or eyes or…
- about 100 more things
It's not just the labor regulations holding Europe back, it's the lack of funding due to not having a unified European digital market.
Netflix Europe needs to have 20+ licensing deals. Selling across Europe at a large scale requires interactions with 20+ legal teams. Language and cultural barriers kill a lot of things.
How do US giants thrive in Europe, then?
Because they come in directly giant-sized based on growth in the US. They either ignore European legal compliance until sued or pay peanuts for them to handle all the legal aspects.
I wonder if there is a difference in context that explains why we might disagree. I'm in Australia where I think it's politically easier to "add" broad top level protections for all workers than it would be in the US.
I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here:
LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs).
The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications.
For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate.
... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anything that can be described tersely that is novel and therefore valuable unfortunately has very little value practically because the seed of the short descriptor is sort of a private key of an idea itself: it will seed the idea into reality by labor of LLMs, but all that is needed for that seed's maturation is the original phrase. These would be like trade secrets, but also by virtue of something existing out there, its replication becomes trivial since that product's patterns are visible and copyable.
In this way, the only real outcome here is that LLMs entirely replace human labor including decision making or are tools to real human operators but not replacements.
Consider "Uber, but for X"
This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber.
I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ???
Maybe something like (just spitballing)
The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?
Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work?
Hmm
Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?
Yeah, this feels right. It's like a process of condensing: new ideas brought to life condense metaphors into more compact forms and so make language more dense and expressive. This idea reminds me of Julian Jaynes's description of metaphor condensation in Origin of Consciousness.
A lot of hard work goes into novel products, but once that work has been proven, it is substantially more trivial for human or machine to copy. Groping around in the darkness of new, at the edge of what-could-be is difficult work that looks simple in hindsight to others who consider that edge a given now.
> The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?
Yeah, I think that naming and grouping things, then condensing them (through portmanteau construction or other means) is an underrated way to learn. I call this "personal taxonomy," and it's an idea I've been working on for a little bit. There is just tremendous value in naming patterns you personally notice, not taking another person's or group's name for things, and most importantly: allow those names to move, condense, fall away, and the like.
I left out a piece of my fragment above wherein I posit that a more constrained form of natural language to LLMs would likely lead to better results. Constraining interaction with LLM to a series of domain-specific metaphors, potentially even project specific givens, might allow for better outcomes. A lot of language is unspecific, and the technical documents that would truly detail a novel approach to an LLM require a particularly constrained kind of language to be successful where ambiguity is minimized and expressiveness maximalized (legal documents attempt at minimal ambiguity). I won't go into details there, I'm likely poorly reiterating a lot of the arguments that Dijkstra made here:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
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.
> your elevator stops working when the elevator operator is sick
Can you point somewhere outside of US where this is the case with unions?
When dockworker's unions are able to prevent port automation, is that beneficial to society?
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.
“I don’t need a union, I can negotiate my wages and working conditions just fine on my own”
(I'm not really sure LLMs will make it that much worse here, but all those things have been harmful to workers already.)
It's the power imbalance. Shitty managers still control your means to eat.
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
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.
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...
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.
Is this still accurate?
But, the world is changing. Y'all can have it... in a few short years. ;)
You'll likely get used to this new thing too.
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.
Why is that?
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 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.
Sounds like you need a foldable phone!
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
works perfectly, i just say what i want coded, press enter, and Claude Code just does it in my server over Termius app
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
E.g. a Terragonlabs subscription is 25/month for 3 concurrent tasks and 50/month for 10.
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.
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…
Same! Even colored tabs would go a long way for me.
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.
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.
I use Remote Desktop to connect to my mac from iPhone because I also want to test local front-end changes remotely.
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 love that as we go through our GenAI development journey, we're all finding success in the same patterns.
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.
I tried using Code on my phone but it’s janky.
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.
Have you tried vscode server? - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server
QUESTION=$(echo "$EVENT_DATA" | jq -r'.tool_input.questions[0].question')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.
Anyone have better results?
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.
why dont you run the VM on your machine?
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.
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
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 run it containerized with --dangerously-skip-permissions and let it run wild.
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.
Free and seamless setup!
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.
.. with a valid SSH key unless I’m reading it wrong?
Except that you are doing anything else but coding here. Coding involves writing code, which isn't actually done by the author here.