Ask HN: How do you AI code from your phone?

7 pointssplitbrain2mo ago3 comments

I would like to find a good way to use coding agents like claude or codex to code from my (Android) phone. But I can't find any tools that work.

What I tried:

An ssh terminal app on my phone. This works, but a TUI interface is far from what I would call "comfortable" on a mobile phone.

Happy Coder (happy.engineering) promises to be the solution but I found it rarely works reliably, it can't deal with claude's new question format and (judging from issues and discussions) seems a bit abandoned.

Ideally I would want something selfhosted with a mobile optimized web interface that let's me start different coding sessions (bonus points if each session runs in its own docker container). Important would be that I am not just being dropped into a console but that the interface is actually optimized for phone use.

What are you using to control coding agents on the go? Did I miss an obvious choice?

3 comments

marxism1mo ago

Hey! Happy Coder contributor here. Great timing on this post. I hear you on the reliability issues and feature stagnation. The project went through a rough patch, but we've had some new core contributors come on board and things have picked up significantly.

Planning to release this week (clean out about 100 issues and pulls in 20 of the 30 open PRs). Would love for you to give it another shot once the update drops. And if you hit issues, we're actually responding to them now :)

Importantly for you Leeroy has created a single statically linked binary for self-hosting in this release, no more docker-compose with postgres, redis, node, minio.

Here are the minutes from the the contributor meeting today; I think you'll find your problems addressed:

Jan 25, 2026

  - Karl
      - rebase and merge Ryan Newton's happy-devbox e2e tests.
  - Leeroy
      - Secret sharing session
      - Profiles!!!! Improving
      - Allow to define api keys in app
      - Modals / popovers / overlays
      - Auth fixes
      - Opening a session without auth would still show you the screen, but it won’t work
      - Permissions sticky to the session
      - Codex permissions now applied
      - Claude allowlist
      - Not in codex / gemini - unified this
      - Modified message queue - see in the UI that the message is pending
      - Ask user question - fixed / permission related (will resolve #383)
      - CLI installed / not detection
      - Used in resume features - claude / codex / acp resume
      - Capability registry
      - Agent registry
      - Added opencode!! (will resolve #394)
      - Improved daemon reliability - reattach to sessions that were running with it
      - Tmux / profiles - decoupled
      - Resume sessions from the UI
      - Claude streaming / local / remote - not update the session - missing some messages
      - Local / remote switches not working completely - previously messages in the queue were broken
      - Server light - now in the server, different flavour. Postgress schema / sqlite schema auto synced
      - If you are working with multiple sessions - notifications in app for other sessions
      - [denis overlap] reworked the ACP part, codex / opencode had some duplicated parts. Make it easier to add new agents - works / stable. Tools display - unify it. Normalization layer different providers have different formats! Normalize on the CLI
  - Kirill
      - Server is deployed from main on path modification /server in the monorepo
      - Steve fixed certificates - so ready to release
      - #16 on app store

mcfratty1mo ago

Awesome! I've started off using Happy and I think there is a ton of potential with some stability. Codex has been my daily driver, and I think Happy could make me way more productive.

ec1096852mo ago

EC2 spot instance, Claude code, Prompt from Panic, Eternal Terminal.

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