Chat-Based and Async Interfaces

To bypass the limitations of mobile terminal UIs, users suggest and share workflows that use chat interfaces like Telegram, Email, or WhatsApp to interact with coding agents. These setups allow users to send prompts and approve pull requests via natural language messages or buttons, treating the coding process as an asynchronous conversation rather than a real-time terminal session, which resolves many formatting and typing issues.

To bypass the friction of mobile terminals, many developers are shifting toward asynchronous "vibe coding" workflows using Telegram, Discord, and even email to interact with AI agents. While some debate whether the simplicity of email outweighs the clunkiness of its delayed feedback, there is a strong preference for custom messaging bots that can intercept agent queries and present them as interactive buttons. These setups allow users to "unblock" complex coding tasks via push notifications, effectively transforming software development into a casual, mobile-friendly conversation that can happen anywhere from a commute to a bedroom. This transition suggests a broader paradigm shift where the immediacy of a real-time terminal is being traded for the convenience of global, persistent chat interfaces that treat code generation as a background process.

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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?

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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.

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> 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.

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>Email is clunky and feedback is not immediate.

You're vibe coding on a smartphone into an external computer. You already abandoned "Immediate feedback" and "cohesion".

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So what about setting up a discord server for you and your LLM? Gets the notification benefit of E-mail but retains the immediate-resposne, no? That's how all my UptimeKuma notifs are setup atleast...

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tried tmux but realized claude/gemini/codex's --resume works great and have since started using a single chat for all small work projects

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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.

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I didn’t know until I read this comment, but this is exactly what I want. A telegram bot with Claude on the other side and GitHub app to check out the code

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I've replied with this in another comment, but this seems more pertinent ;)

Thats exactly the approach I took with https://github.com/cloud-atlas-ai/miranda , Telegram bot, PR is the human review point, tests + CodeRabbit catch most issues.

Bot intercepts Claude's AskUserQuestion calls via a hook, sends me an inline keyboard, injects my answer back into the session. Claude keeps working, PR still happens—but I can unblock it from my phone in 5 seconds instead of rejecting a PR based on a wrong guess.

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I have custom scripts I use at home to keep track of various personal data, assisted by an LLM. The idea of using Telegram as a way to have a global, quick, and personal interface from my phone or tablet, is perfect and easy to set up.

Claude is making it easier to have bespoke data and dashboards for anything. We're going to make a lot of them, for all reasons. I've also made apps with Django interfaces, but quick, global interfaces are going to become in demand.

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I've been using Telegram bot to talk to a Claude SDK agent who talks to my Claudes via tmux commands (all running on a DigitalOcean VPS)

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Can you do it with signal?

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Same approach here. PR is the human review point, tests + CodeRabbit catch most issues -> https://github.com/cloud-atlas-ai/miranda .

The gap I wanted to fill: when Claude is genuinely uncertain ("JWT or sessions?" "Breaking change or not?"), it either guesses wrong or punts to the PR description where you can't easily respond.

Built a Telegram bot that intercepts Claude's AskUserQuestion calls via a hook, sends me an inline keyboard, injects my answer back into the session. Claude keeps working, PR still happens—but I can unblock it from my phone in 5 seconds instead of rejecting a PR based on a wrong guess.

Works in tandem with a bunch of other LLM enhancers I've built, they're linked in the README or that repo

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> 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.

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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.

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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/

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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.

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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.

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This is genius! The tailscale vpn was stupid easy to setup (I'm a near novice and figured it out). An email interface with progress updates would be even better than doom coding.

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

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> What is the downside to using email?

Make sure you authenticate somehow to prevent external abuse.

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then run the mail servers locally?

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

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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?

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

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Unless you set up pgp in your email client...

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

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Okay, IRC then!

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

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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?

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

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Inspiring me to do this in Telegram

“Why not Telegram”

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

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But I already have email.

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> 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.

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Being able to “code” from your phone really feels like a huge change; it never took before because coding from your phone was miserable, but if you’re just coding by having a conversation then it might even be better to do it from your phone. I don’t know what that leads to, but it’s let me fix bugs from bed and build an MVP while moving, so I can’t complain.

For anyone looking for a more integrated and smaller approach, I built an open source app builder + runtime: https://github.com/tinykit-studio/tinykit

Basically gives you a Lovable-like app builder with built-in services (database/files/auth/email/payments/etc), content and design fields, and a code editor. Code is a single Svelte 5 file, and you can build/host unlimited apps on one server. And the server is just node + PocketBase, so runs easy on a $2 VPS. And LLM is BYOKey.

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My flow is GitHub issues+ GitHub Copilot+ Web Deployments from GitHub actions.

I can just ask GitHub to fix something from the mobile app, and then set it to build on PR merge. It works most of the time, but you'd have to be absolutely wacky to do it in production or with any code you actually care about

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It’s largely asynchronous for me. I'll trigger the generation and come back to the PR whenever I'm free.

I'd say the cycle time largely depends on the complexity of the tools you are building. I've built a movie shelf hooking up with trakt.tv under 30 minutes and a mermaidJS diagram editor spanning multiple sessions and couple of days.

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I recommend https://happy.engineering/ . It is very easy to set up. I can have an instance in a container which contains my repository and lots of packages/binaries necessary for the work. I can then use the different binaries to run commands in the container. I was able to easily do `ls -la` in the container and email that to myself, all done from my phone. You can also connect it to applescript and whatnot in order to send sms messages, or you can connect to whatsapp. I was able to make it extract the top 5 headlines on hacker news, get the top ideas being discussed in the comments for each submission, and send all of that into my Apple Reminders for me to read on my phone.

No VPN needed.

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I'm using this setup as well, and I've been as far as writing a small Telegram bot to send input to Claude when it's stopped running via a Stop Hook

https://github.com/PABannier/claude-telegram-bot

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I’ve thought about this many times, maybe with a custom telegram bot!

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