So this is the 4th+ article I've seen on using a VPN to vibe code on your phone. Would an email interface to Claude code work better?

- Email Claude to start the coding

- Claude emails you with any thing it needs acked on.

- you reply back to emails telling it what to do.

- maybe Claude can run your program and send back screen shots.

seems easier then getting a vpn working. What is the downside to using email?

Claude Code recommended a Telegram bot over email for this very workflow. I've configured my basement RPi to use my "spare tokens" during off hours. At 5PM it messages me to ask if I want the agent to work this evening. If there's no task in the queue I can add one then using the bot. There's also a set of commands to check on status etc. I'm working on the next step to make it a more automated and if there's no specific task, it will create it's own.

> Would an email interface to Claude code work better?

No.

> What is the downside to using email?

Email is clunky and feedback is not immediate.

> seems easier then getting a vpn working.

Tailscale is easy for a dev to get going and very reliable. The author uses the Termius SSH app with Mosh, so it keeps the same SSH session going across device sleeps and disconnects. Tmux is helpful, too.

I do exactly what the author is doing, except I use a $5 Linode VPS, instead of a Mac at home.

He doesn't seem to be credited on this page, but I believe Pieter Levels (@levelsio) actually popularized this scheme. The author documents a nearly identical scheme.

I've been using Claude Code in their iOS app (on a Pro account). I just point it at my GitHub repo, and tell it to work on one of the issues I created. It required very little setup beyond what I did for Claude Code CLI.

> So this is the 4th+ article I've seen on using a VPN to vibe code on your phone.

and all of them mentions Tailscale. I would not be surprised if we hear in a few days it got next big fund and all of this is just a preparation for it

Why not use a browser?

OpenCode has a webUI, you can simply host that on your machine at home and VPN to it.

https://opencode.ai/docs/server/ (sadly no screenshots, but its a pretty good GUI, looks like their desktop app)

Email might work, however if you're a Telegram user you could write a bot that runs on your home system that runs the cli commands on your behalf and then sends the output as a response to you. No need to open up any ports on your router.

I have read of people doing remote coding with clause but through having Claude create pull request. The user then looks through the requests, and either approves or sends it back with edits. Seems like a good way to interact with Claude code, especially once one sets up a test suite and those proposed pull requests have proven not to regress.

Claude Code does a very decent UI, somehow the text mode is much more attractive. As if there is once in a lifetime opportunity to make the console great again.

> What is the downside to using email?

If true to the post, it lacks "real time". Doom scrolling by nature is while chat is async. Refreshing Gmail constantly is not fun.

You don't need a VPN to vibe code on your phone. I've been happily doing thumb-driven development for the last 4 months now using GitHub Copilot on github.com from my phone. It even has real-time chat with copilot as it works. Having your PRs deploy to an environment allows you to check it. I also have playwright tests that record screenshots and traces that get uploaded as artifacts I can check too.

I’ve been doing some of this through a term on my phone, but it honestly sucks. Other interfaces (telegram, web ui, email) are gonna be much better experiences on your phone.

ive tried slack before, but a challenge is how well you can get results returned back in a way where you can actually see what it did and give proper next steps

getting a PR back and being able to put comments on it is fine, but ive had middling success getting qcli at least to actually match the comments with the code that was commented on. i get the sense that there isnt any training with the comments inlined well on a diff:/

it doesnt have to be a vpn though, i was on an oauth webbrowser terminal, and things like coder[0] let you run vscode on the browser, including on your phone browser. there's also happy coder[1] which i tried using to connect between the new builtin android linux vm, and skip all the remote stuff entirely, but the phone would inevitably kill the terminal runbing claude, killing the whole thing. you can currently just run claude from your phone in that, which only has the problem that when the vm crashes, all you can do is wipe the partition.

[0] https://coder.com/ [1] https://happy.engineering/

If setting up a VPN is that difficult for you you may have bigger problems my friend. (I joke). But really I am surprised that a VPN is the part you take issue with.

No syntax highlighting, I do like to review snippets of code. Also the interactive questions / answers during planning would be a pain over email. And what about text wrapping? Headache.

Edit: also setting up an email interface API to Claude Code seems like a lot more work than just setting up a VPN.

I see no downsides. Seems like an actually useful udea.

I'd rather have an DM interface and each task has its own little icon or face. You still have to set up one of the text servers and also do VPN but if you're already vibe coding that stuff why not make it more pleasant than TUI on your phone?

it looks like some kind marketing push or 'growth hack', just to get some viral thing around which justify why do you extra reason to pay for Claude or Tailscale subscription.

I personally not even convinced that Claude Code any better on average than something like Aider+Gemini 3 or other good model. May be in some specific cases it actually better but in those Aider+'Antropic Model via API' most likely will work too.

So basically back to the chat-interface. You could also replace e-mail with WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Mattermost or whichever you prefer, it would be all the same.

Email is funny - maybe as a backup. Prompting is chatting.

I’d love this, if only for improved diff reviews possible compared to a terminal window! Would also work better for intermittent connectivity.

> What is the downside to using email?

Make sure you authenticate somehow to prevent external abuse.

How about leveraging the git email workflow? hey - Claudio submitted a patchset

I code from my phone via GitHub and the Claude actions plugin.

interesting. email. Simple multiple sessions support to reply vs tabbing here there get threaded. clever

with vpn vps if want to interact? how would that work?

E-mail is not secure (sent in plain text)

or text messages? Could be more convenient to reply to a text

It's amazing to me this is called coding at all. Who knew all project managers and business analysts coming up with business requirements were actually just coding gods sent from the future.

Inspiring me to do this in Telegram

“Why not Telegram”

all the crypto bros are already there, and maybe some e-commerce

> seems easier then getting a vpn working

it could not possibly be easier to get Tailscale up and running on your mac or linux machine, install tmux and mosh on your mac or linux machine, connect to it with Blink Shell https://blink.sh/ on your iOS device that you've also installed tailscale to, and start vibe-coding from anywhere, on a performant, resilient, instantly resumable terminal connection.

seriously, it's a game-changer

> Would an email interface to Claude code work better?

This might be the most "when your only tool is a hammer all your problems look like nails" suggestion I've ever read.

Email driven automation isn't a terrible solution to everything - it works very well for support tickets, for example - but it's really lacking in the immediacy required from a serious software development environment.

I'll go further: I think coding on my phone is a fun, neat, idea, and an interesting curiosity, but I don't actually want to do it. There are few situations where I'd feel comfortable getting my phone out to code where I don't also have my laptop with me, and that's going to provide a way better software development experience, so I'm always going to use that for anything serious.