I built Ciao to solve problems I was experiencing:
1. Connecting to a new host should be as seamless as possible. I SSH a lot nowadays, and I find the key sharing across devices cumbersome.
2. I get annoyed by setting up insert-your-favorite VPN on new machines. They're all great. I don't want to think about them.
3. There's a lot of harnesses: Claude Code and Codex now have decent mobile push notifications but what about Pi or xyz-shiny-new harness? The harness is another tool that should be abstracted out.
4. I want a single application that has the big picture of all of my agents. Tmux and Herdr are great but they don't have an overview of all my connected machines' agents.
---
With Ciao you curl|sh the daemon --> run ciao pair --> point your phone's camera at the QR code --> and you're connected. It uses iroh for accountless and E2EE connection. There's an optional relay server for APNS which too is E2EE.
One of my favorite aspects of agentic-engineering is being able to just have a lot of fun with programming. Among many features, I built a visually pleasing toggle between terminal-mode and native-chat-mode. If you install Ciao, come back here and tell me what you think.