Reliability and Network Latency

The discussion highlights the technical challenges of mobile connectivity, specifically latency and dropped connections. Tools like Mosh (Mobile Shell) are frequently recommended over standard SSH because they are designed to handle intermittent networks and roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular data without killing the session. Tailscale is praised for simplifying the networking layer, though some prefer Wireguard for a lighter-weight alternative.

The discussion highlights a growing trend among developers to transform mobile devices into powerful "thin clients" by remotely accessing home workstations or VPS instances through resilient networking stacks. While Tailscale is widely celebrated for its "dead simple" setup, seasoned users debate whether this convenience is worth the overhead compared to lighter alternatives like plain Wireguard or the NAT-free simplicity of fixed IPv6. To survive the unpredictability of cellular data, many identify the combination of Mosh and Tmux as the essential "game-changer" for maintaining persistent, lag-free sessions across network transitions. Ultimately, the community favors a robust stack of specialized apps like Blink Shell or Termius to create a seamless "vibe-coding" environment that makes geographical location irrelevant to productivity.

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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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> 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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Are there any benefits besides a nice GUI? I'm fairly comfortable with my linux desktop as an interface. TBH the most frustrating part is the iPhone shortcut app I made which I strongly believe is less about me and more than Apple is actively trying to be annoying (I recently had an update that required a minor change because the dictionaries in Shortcuts is idiotic)

Also, I heard that you can install Tailscale on it[0], so that can act as a gateway which is nice.

[0] https://tailscale.com/kb/1280/appletv

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a fully open source alternative would be netbird, it's based on wireguard as well, has 0 closed components but lacks some features (like IPv6 or internal CA).
https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird

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Right. For a simple setup I think using plain boring Wireguard is the better option. Boring is good.

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You need tmux to be able to resume the same session from anywhere, mosh-server to make ssh resilient to sketchy mobile connections, and blink shell https://blink.sh/ to have a high quality iOS shell with a mosh and ssh client built right in to resume at any time.

Far more resilient and performant than a web client.

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If setting up a VPN is that difficult for you you may have bigger problems my friend. (I joke). But really I am surprised that a VPN is the part you take issue with.

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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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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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> seems easier then getting a vpn working

it could not possibly be easier to get Tailscale up and running on your mac or linux machine, install tmux and mosh on your mac or linux machine, connect to it with Blink Shell https://blink.sh/ on your iOS device that you've also installed tailscale to, and start vibe-coding from anywhere, on a performant, resilient, instantly resumable terminal connection.

seriously, it's a game-changer

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I do the same. I can SSH into my router at home (which is on 24/7), then issue a WOL request to my dev machine to turn it on.

You don't even have to fully shut down you dev machine, you can allow it to go into stand-by. For that it needs to be wired by cable to LAN, and configured to leave the NIC powered on on stand-by. You can then wake up the device remotely via a WOL magic packet. Maybe this is possible with WLAN too, but I have never tried.

Also, you don't need a Tailscale or other VPN account. You can just use SSH + tunneling, or enable a VPN on your router (and usually enjoy hardware acceleration too!). I happen to have a static IP at home, but you can use a dynamic DNS client on your router to achieve the same effect.

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I don't think WOL works over Wi-Fi and whether you can get WOL from a USB ethernet adapter.

My proxy doesn't attempt to handle security. Most folks use either Tailscale or some other VPN solution. In my case I use the wireguard server in my router to VPN into home which gives me access to the proxy and consequently to the machine.

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Same setup as mine, I have an OpenVPN server running in my router, and my main PC has wake-on-lan and a KVM as a backup to turn it on and off.

I have an old used Dell Latitude that I use as a pseudo thin client. I ssh into my PC, and everything just works.

I really like this setup because I only have one environment, so everything is there, and I don't have to install anything in the laptop

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I mean the power of the work machine really depends on what your needs are. Definitely should adapt to whatever your needs are.

> And there's no way this thing would handle a useful local model

So if you have a setup like mine then it is fairly trivial to incorporate that (or anything else). Either way you'll need a machine that can do the local AI though. Either that is on your "work machine" or you run the AI on a separate machine. You could even rent a machine and as long as you add it to your Tailscale network then you're connected.

I strongly suggest having a workhorse machine and then let other devices be your terminal into it. Your terminals can be very cheap (or an old machine) or as suggested, your phone.

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I don't think it's actually the VM crashing, it's the Android OS killing what it thinks is an idle app.

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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 did show hn just yesterday
you don't need tailscale or any 3rd party server. Just use webrtc and it's just your mobile and laptop. end 2 end encrypted. no 3rd party dependency.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514587

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Is being able to SSH into your home machine that easy these days? I never had a strong enough reason to spend more than a few minutes trying, but I always suspected that my ISP would make this harder for me than I would hope.

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That's the whole point of Tailscale or just any VPN really : it doesn't matter what your ISP says, as long as you can establish a connection to the outside, the outside can connect back. Tailscale just makes that easier if you are not familiar with VPN setup.

FWIW typically ISP blocks port related to spamming, so usually they block ports related to emails, e.g. SMTP, I believe DNS too, but other ports no problem.

That being said it's quite a silly use case IMHO. If you want to work on a project from "anywhere" then put your project on your server accessible from anywhere, that's literally what servers are for and they cost the price of a coffee per month.

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Been using exactly this setup for a year now, works great.
Have to be on the same WiFi to install from Xcode to iPhone. There is a “workaround” having it deploy to TestFlight, but it’s slow.
Looking for a way to forward mDNS over VPN, to bad iPhone/Tailscale don’t support it. Only possibility I found is to have a separate mobile router that support forwarding mDNS.

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I'm looking at Opencode and it might be better because it allows you to abort a task. VPN needed.

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It’s a simple idea but one that hadn’t occurred to me yet.

I spend hours each week riding transit, and use Claude for a bunch of side projects and have Tailscale set up already, so looks like I’ll be giving this a try this week!

Doom coding might be doomed while I’m in the transbay tube though, with awful cell service…

How’s the diff review? I rely heavily on the vs code integration for nice side by side diffs, so losing that might be a problem unless there’s some way to launch the diffs into a separate diff viewer app on the phone.

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I do the same but my unifi network gives me a vpn out of the box.

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Tailscale is quite handy in remote agent coding, Sometimes I use tailscale and RustDesk on my phone to check Claude code, I also built an app called NovaAccess which bake tailscale into the app which does not confict of VPN I used.

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Scrolling is quite jenky with Termius - I thought there's a way to keep sessions going when there are intermittent drops in connection via Termius, but for how I've been building, when I lose connection I just restart claude and reexplain the context of the task.

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Tailscale is a lot of permanent runtime overhead/latency just to avoid setting up dynamic DNS and changing a few lines in the sshd_config.

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this is literally my setup and it is a game-changer:

tailscale, tmux, codex/claude code, mosh, blink shell (iOS) https://blink.sh/

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Curious if you are directly running mosh on macOS. Last I checked, it was broken on macOS Tahoe, so I have been relying on tmux for surviving flaky ssh connections.

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i use both tmux and mosh-server

i install them via nix-darwin (I've abandoned homebrew)

i am on Tahoe latest beta

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Why Tailscale instead of plain wireguard?

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probably because you just install it, then you log in and youre done. tailscale takes care of the rest. going through any more effort just so you can write some slop code is probably not worth it

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Fixed IPv6 workstation, ssh (pre-shared key) and vim, 4G usb modem, a "big" screen, nice battery life, "code anywhere" on your workstation (the best would be a "backpack" modular system: a RISC-V board in its case slapped to a "big" DP/eDP screen on a stand, an usb dvorak [ortholinear|columnar] keyboard, a 4[5]G usb modem (using the USB modem standard) with a IPv6 enable mobile ISP sim card, and a rather good battery pack.

(I even use a webcam to capture what my monitor does display when I do remote coding of low level GFX oriented software! Actually my wayland compositor for linux and AMD GPUs)

BTW, IPv6 = ZERO NAT to setup, delicious.

"It's magic".

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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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