Summarizer

This is a pretty sophisticated setup. I particularly like how it uses Tailscale. 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!

7 USD/day? That's ~200/month -- isn't that just very expensive? I am probably missing something. E.g. a Terragonlabs subscription is 25/month for 3 concurrent tasks and 50/month for 10.

You can optimize things. I have a github action that starts stops a fast google cloud vm for our builds. It only gets used about 3 minutes per build. We maybe have a few dozen builds per month. So that's a few hours of run time. The rest of the time the vm is stopped and not billed (except for storage, which is cents per month at most). It's a simple debian vm so it boots in about 20 seconds. 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.

If you are already paying $200-500/m… and you are doing the work of 10 people… I can totally see the value. 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…

An alternative might be to start up a VM on exe.dev. Supposedly, mobile access works out of the box [1]. 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. [1] https://commaok.xyz/ai/just-in-time-software/

This is interesting. Particularly the notifications flow. I run a simpler setup with webssh on my iPhone over WG back to my LAN and manage Claude that way. It’s fine, and can handle disconnects (with some big cons). I can run code-server via browser on my iPad and can get all the same benefits mosh provides. 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.

I do want a setup like this, however, most of my development is on Windows which means license cost is usually higher than the cost of the VM. I could run vm's on my home machine, but even then I feel like the terminal experience is quite poor. You want to have a mobile native code, to check the code/read the plans. So far I have been using teamviewer to access my home desktop which works, albeit annoying to use, plus I don't have fancy notifications. Perhaps a web first approach with a mobile responsive web app would work, that shows the files of the project as well as the terminal.

Not quite the same thing, but I wrote my own agent (as in a replacement for Claude Code) that uses SSH for all operations. That means I can run a very minimal VM (like 4GB RAM Oracle free tier), run the agent locally, and the agent only operates on remote files. 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.

oracle free tier seems to be 1GB RAM. why dont you run the VM on your machine?

Yes that works too. 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.

Shout out to https://exe.dev for this stuff. It'a a VM provider service. It makes it stunningly easy to get https up and going, has a front end http gateway that does all the hard parts for you. 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!

Why does this need a $210/mo VM?

Guys checkout Catnip, it uses GitHub workspaces so it’s free and it has a mobile app. Free and seamless setup!

A VM that cost 7 EUR per day? Or is that his price for claude?

“ Worst case: Claude does something unexpected on a disposable VM.” .. with a valid SSH key unless I’m reading it wrong?