Novelty vs. Rebranding Old Tech

Commenters frequently note that SSHing into a remote machine is a standard practice that has existed for decades, comparing the article's framing to the infamous 'Dropbox comment' on Hacker News. Users express confusion over why a basic remote administration workflow is being presented as a new concept called 'Doom Coding,' while others argue that the integration of LLM agents like Claude Code provides a fresh layer of utility to the established setup.

Commenters largely dismiss the "Doom Coding" framework as a rebranding of standard remote administration practices, noting that SSHing into servers from mobile devices has been a commonplace workflow for decades. While critics view the hype as a marketing push for specific AI and VPN services, others argue that the integration of modern LLM agents like Claude Code provides a fresh layer of utility that makes "vibe coding" on a phone genuinely productive. This debate frequently references the infamous "Dropbox comment" on Hacker News, pitting those who see a redundant assembly of existing tools against those who value a curated recipe that inspires new ways of working. Ultimately, the discussion highlights a generational divide between veterans who have long used mobile terminals and a new wave of developers rediscovering the command line through the lens of modern AI.

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I am still trying to understand how installing Tailscale and Claude Code then connecting to your home network externally and opening a mobile terminal on your phone is a novel idea that requires a full Github writeup.

So, I do this when I am sitting on the couch and too lazy to boot up my laptop that I normally do work on, but it never gets much further than updating, pulling or pushing one or two containers, or more times than not trying to remember what port AI have something on so I can connect the companion app to it.

It's not a bad idea in full, but "death coding" is a ridiculous notion.

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There is an infamous "Dropbox comment" on HN that reads the same way as this comment. No idea is new, and novelty is almost never the point. I had seen people do similar things in the past but never approached it myself. Here is someone that has done the thinking for me and put it out there for free. I appreciate that.

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the comment, for the interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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Yeah, but the OP is more like the "all you have to do is rsync and cron job". It's an article about the relatively complex step by step process that people do to implement a functionality. It may be the inspiration for an analogous dropbox, but definitely not the dropbox article or post. A product that you could grab from the app store that does all of this out of the box would be the analogue to dropbox.

That said, this would be interesting to someone who didn't know these tools could be stitched together in this way. I think that's a big part of why it's on the home page.

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I’m equally surprised to see these posts pop up everywhere on X, GitHub and now also HN. Am I that old that SSHing into a server through a VPN is such a novel concept nowadays?

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I think the commonly used platforms, ISPs, etc. make this just annoying enough that most people really don't know how easy this should be.

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Why would it have to be novel? We now have a full interesting discussion about vibe coding on phones thanks to this GitHub writehub that we wouldn't have had otherwise.

I haven't set up a vibe coding phone environment, nothing has stopped me at all as I agree it is really simple/"basic", but this post made me actually go do it.

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I'm fairly sure that levelsio didn't popularize SSHing into a computer from your phone to run a program. We were all doing it before LLMs.

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I agree, I'm failing to see what's novel here... Running an ssh client from a phone has been a thing forever

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The LLM crowd kind of likes hype.

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RDP clients as well.

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I did this on my Nokia phone over GPRS in 2005, my program of choice was irssi. We did have a Markov chain bot though.

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By “this scheme” I meant combining these several technologies for vibe coding on an iPhone with Claude Code. It’s been a bit of a viral meme on X this week.

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I started doing this before it was viral - it's basically obvious and I'm sure many people simultaneously did it since it was so obvious and easy to do - I even have the same tech combination.

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New ideas build on existing ideas. He said SSH into a computer to run Claude Code on that computer .

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Yeah, I've never read anything levelsio wrote and I sshed into my computer to run Claude Code five minutes after I installed Claude Code and had to leave the house for a bit.

It's not such a crazy idea.

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No, somebody famous had to influence you for it to exist. The real progenitors are always other people.

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The whole point to SSH into a computer is to run the programs on it.

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Yes. I and many others were already doing this obvious thing.

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People have all kinds of bad experiences with tech. The kids write off any thing they didn't invent or adopt as inadequate.

It usually comes from the bad experience or poor exposure.

Its hard to hate on them when it comes from a position of limited exposure.

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Yeah, any outright dismissal of a perfectly reasonable idea like this smells of market opportunity.

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> Tmux is helpful, too.

Yes. tmux is essential. It's great to be able to monitor a session from desktop, or to pick up an existing conversation i'm having on the computer on my phone. In my shell, I have gemini flash wrapper that I use to manage my sessions so I can quickly connect to an existing one, or create a new one with natural language.

> 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 doing this (tailscale + termius + tmux + ssh) for at least a year and a half. First with Aider in this exact setup, and now with Claude Code and Codex.

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It wouldn't shock me if multiple people came up with this idea independently. I've certainly experimented with it over the last couple years.

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> 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

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I did this on my own without reading any of these articles - I already had a terminal program on my Android phone and was already using Tailscale for shared projects in Ghidra so... Maybe it's just a path of least resistance.

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Tailscale has been a HM darling for a long time, this isn’t very surprising!

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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.

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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.

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Historically I had thought there was a pendulum swing between using local computing resources vs. having a dumb terminal to access something remotely.

But now instead of swinging back to local resources, apparently we're proposing to add a second layer of remote access (phone -> computer -> Claude servers).

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I wrote C with a compiler running on my Palm Pilot well before smartphones existed yet

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I remember having some kind of a shell app on my iPod Touch in college and needing to run and find wifi a few times to troubleshoot something at a job I was student working at.

They were fun times :D

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Imagine doing that on a time share system through a rotary phone...

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I vaguely recall a service in the 90's where you'd write HTML on paper and mail it to them and they would make a website for you...

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Coding on a phone really isn't something new. With tmux a lot of people created crazy things directly on their phone. In some countries this even is the only possibility to code at all, because there are no laptops.

The example use case images are very funny though! :-)

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I use a bespoke hacker software keyboard (ctrl/meta/custom keys for GNU screen and emacs) and also bespoke SSH client (fork of the original irssiconnectbot) for years.

My phone is the original Pixel Fold. You would think I use it unfolded but the passport form factor lends itself to be almost as productive folded that I use it that way most of the time. Unfolded it's just a bit better experience (bigger keys / more display real estate/ more characters per line/ etc).

With that said I'm looking forward to the Click Communicator: https://clicks.tech/communicator

I've also been meaning to write about my setup and open sourcing my tools.

Oh. Writing clojure helps due to the terseness of the language. Not sure it would be a pleasant experience writing something like Java with the 80 character line limit I try to impose on myself

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been using the same setup for the past 2-3 months now. My company gave the employees old mac pro (intel) for free to use for whatever purpose they want to. I was using AWS for most of my personal projects which I have now migrated to this mac. I use the app 'Amphetamine' to not let the mac sleep, and rest of the setups are the same with Tailscale + termius etc

Fun fact: once you get ssh access to mac, you can control almost anything running on it. Like I added my mac air under termius, and I could mute/unmute any videos playing on chrome using osascript from my iphone :)

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I've used this for a decade and still use it. Easy compatibility with tmux, can ssh, use llm, etc.

https://github.com/fandreuz/TUI-ConsoleLauncher

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I don’t get it. How is this different from using the Claude iOS (and I assume Android) native app and use their “Code” option. It fires up a Claude Code session in the cloud and you can vibe code anything while on the toilet.

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DIY culture I guess, but yea both Claude and Codex have native phone apps that run the agent on a cloud VM and can push PRs.

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I've seen this concept a few times recently and am interested.

However, what's the benefit over just using the "Claude Code for Web" feature built into the Claude Code mobile app?

It clones your repo into a VM which has a bunch of dev tools installed, you can install additional packages, set env vars, and then prompt it remotely. The sessions can be continued from the web and desktop apps, and it can even be "teleported" into the terminal app when back at a laptop/desktop.

Would be great to understand what the differences / advantages of OP approach are.

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Number 1 on the front page of Hacker News for explaining how to connect to a remote machine via ssh.

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I too am dumfounded by this. Is it an off day? Have all the people that actually know how to do things with computers gone somewhere else? What is going on here?

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It's all AI hype bro sycophants for the most part now. Oh, well.

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Yeah I feel like I'm missing something here. I'm not sure if people being so dependent on these LLMs generating code is that widespread at this point or if this is some kind of publicity stunt.

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What does Claude add to this? I've done coding on my phone before by sshing into my home server and just... writing code. Is there a benefit to writing code through a third party instead?

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I'm just as baffled. I went to the comments to better understand but I still don't get it.

I've coded on my phone on several occasions. If you use Android, you don't even need a server or a home computer since Termux works really well as it is. It can run node.js and a bunch of other development tools easily. Or you can just ssh into a server with a development environment and do your stuff their (AI or not).

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I genuinely did that a few times. Using an ssh client to fix a commit failing CI, for example. Even launching release builds remotely. Notably once when I was on vacation and half the Scala ecosystem was waiting for me.

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Very true! Was that Rumsfeld, right? Unknown unknowns?

And thank you! I'm glad you appreciated the humor. I'm still a novice builder, so the thought of ssh-ing to my home computer from a plane geeks me out. I'm about 20 years late but I'm here now!

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Yeah, even if I'm on a plane or a train I probably wouldn't pull out my laptop.

Lack of space, vibrations etc. even though I can do a lot of work offline if the internet is spotty. It's just not enjoyable.

I prefer to read or chill out.

I kind of envy people who are like oh yeah I coded the feature on the flight... I can't really get in the zone in that environment.

Saying that, I assumed this post was a joke. ssh to a work machine or a personal machine through a VPN is not new, even if you happen to run claude code in that terminal.

I'm interested in these "micro exercises".

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İ've been using Termux (and Vim) to code on my phone for years, way easier than this setup.

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I was expecting this to be about using Termux or similar. Why are LLMs involved here?

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Why would I need claude code for remote programming, if I could just use ssh and tmux?

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> What You'll Need

> A Computer running 24/7 with Internet Connection

> A Smartphone

> A Claude Pro subscription

Or.. just install Termux and do it the same way you do it anywhere else?

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I just use ConnectBot to ssh to my house. It runs tmux and vim well, especially with a little pocket-size folding bluetooth keyboard to go with it.

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Can't we do the same with an SSH client such as Termius?

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I built my AI dungeon master game and play it using my phone, Tailscale, and an app called Termius.

https://github.com/derekburgess/dungen

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Claude not needed to "code from anywhere you are" and certainly not from your phone. no LLM needed. no agents. Tailscale or any other VPN not needed

use a laptop. (trying to do it with only a phone-factor UI is madness.) have a mobile-friendly ISP if desired or needed. solved. been solved for decades

so much of the AI BS hyping is about inventing supposedly unsolved problems. like Google showing me ads to convince me to use Gemini to write a README. no thanks, kids, have been able to do that for many decades using only my brain, eyes, fingers and vi/vim

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but also dont try coding on a laptop. use a proper desktop, or better yet, get time on a mainframe. the problem has been solved forever, juat do work from the workplace at a dedicated terminal, built for doing that work at.

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Guys hear me out. If you ssh into your raspberry pi or any PC you could open console and run nano text.md file. Then you can manage your todo list from any device remotely. Stop doom scrolling and start disrupting todo subscription services. /s

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