I think you just need to type more rather than feeling constricted, as it's actually a form of liberation, to produce (or have an AI produce, whatever) something from wherever you are rather than needing to sit down on a laptop where you're gonna be waiting around anyway.
What tunnel setup do you use by the way? I'm on Android so it's kind of annoying all the LLM remote coding apps are iOS only.
It isn’t so much that I feel restricted, I guess it’s that mobile wasn’t as big of a game changer as it was ~6 months ago.
My bandwidth feels more restricted by my own cognitive capacity (usually due to do context switching), rather than the limits of the model itself, and the mobile interface makes that worse.
I’ve recently found myself reserving larger tasks for “keyboard time” and reverting my thinking back to notes (in mobile), which I’ll then formulate to the LLM at some future time.
> What tunnel setup do you use by the way?
I “vibecoded” an agentic runtime that operates my machine generally (including TUIs like Codex/Claude Code), which I connect through a custom proxy and mobile app (both also vibecoded).
I previously tried Cloudflare Tunnels and an SSH setup, but it all felt a bit hacky.
Unfortunately the app is iOS only, but I could open source it and you’d probably be able to make an Android clone quickly (:
Where it starts to become a pain is when the task demands a lot of formatting, symbols/punctuation, uncommon words, non-linear writing/editing, or referencing of outside information. The more I have to multitask, and the less I can just stay in a flow and churn out effectively a stream of consciousness, the more constraining a mobile device is going to feel. But for lots of things it's surprisingly great; sometimes I'll intentionally do the heavy lifting on a longer document from my phone and then handle editing/formatting/proofreading from my laptop.
Anyway, I set up Tailscale and aRDP a few months ago (as well as Termius, but have gravitated more toward aRDP in practice), and it's been a pretty substantial efficiency boost. On one hand, I've sort of experienced the same thing as the parent — not necessarily longer, but more complex prompts often have me putting down the phone and grabbing my laptop. On the other hand, lots of prompts are totally fine from mobile. There are also entire categories of tasks where every few hours I just need to sanity check the current diff, latest commits, and Codex output, then resend some variation of "please continue" from my prompt history and maybe answer some follow-up questions; mobile is perfect for that.
Does the tunnel setup feel clunky to use? That's the main thing that stops me.
Another thing I didn't mention is copying to the clipboard, which kind of sucks on mobile in general, but is particularly a hassle within RDP. If I'm going to need to copy a bunch of terminal output, snippets of files from VS Code, maybe some browser console errors, etc., I generally don't bother attempting to put that prompt together from my phone.
Tailscale is fairly polished and seamless to use for creating the actual tunnel to the dev machine. The RDP part may be a bit hacky, but it does everything I need and works well enough that at this point I haven't invested time in trying out alternatives. Using a full Linux desktop from a 6" smartphone is inherently going to be clunky, but the flip side is it's 100% batteries-included. You'll never have to rely on some app to reimplement end-to-end support for your entire dev workflow, because it's already a direct interface to your actual dev box.
aRDP deserves a lot of credit for how practical this is. It's clear that a lot of care was taken to map mobile interaction metaphors to desktop UIs in a way that was as natural as could reasonably be done. For what it is, the UI/UX is surprisingly smooth.
I also tested the new ChatGPT feature. Not a full RDP replacement, but it'll be a super handy companion UI after Plan mode is fully supported.
I think you may be able to optimize your workflow more by drafting your prompt in ChatGPT first; get it to expand out the intent for you. Doing that has made phone coding a lot more tolerable for me.
I like to think that I've given phone coding a fair shot (and I continue to do it), but I agree with the other poster that there's something about the lack of a keyboard that really gets to me :) I wish I knew what it was.
