Coding from my phone works because none of it runs on my phone
I went in skeptical. Coding from a phone sounds like a party trick — a cramped keyboard, a toy. I had a long train ride and tried it anyway, and the thing that flipped me wasn’t the editing. It was switching to another app, coming back ten minutes later, and finding the work already done.
That only makes sense once you realise where the work happens. Claude Code on the web runs each session in a fresh Anthropic-managed VM — your repo cloned into ~4 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM on Ubuntu, not on the handset. So when the docs say “sessions persist even if you close your browser, and you can monitor them from the Claude mobile app,” they mean it literally: my phone is a remote control, not the machine. Lock the screen, switch tabs, take a call — the build keeps running server-side. No babysitting a terminal.
Two things came out of a few minutes of chatting on the train: nice-wheel and plan-it-nice. Describe the idea, wait a bit, open the GitHub Pages URL on the same phone, test, refine. The loop is identical to sitting at my PC — I’m just opening the browser somewhere else.
The one gotcha
Make the GitHub repo first. A session clones one repo into its VM and works inside
it; --remote is one repository at a time. Start the session before the project
exists and it has nowhere to go. Honestly better that way — it can’t wander off and
start “improving” something unrelated. (One sharp edge worth knowing: the docs note
the connected GitHub account’s credential can technically reach any repo it can
see — the single-repo scope is about what gets worked on, not a hard wall.)
What you actually give up
Overview. On the PC I skim the diff as it lands; on the phone I’m mostly trusting the
description of what changed. For a throwaway demo that’s fine. For anything I’d merge,
I’d still want the diff in front of me — claude --teleport pulls a cloud session
straight into my local terminal for exactly that.
The surprise wasn’t that a phone can drive a coding agent. It’s that the agent was never on the phone to begin with.
Follow-up resources
- Claude Code on the web — docs — the architecture, session persistence, and the single-repo
--remotemodel. - Announcement: Claude Code on the web — research preview for Pro/Max/Team, iOS monitoring.
- How the sandboxing works — isolated VMs, scoped credentials via a proxy, network limits.
- Web quickstart — connect GitHub and run the first task.