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How to check on a coding agent from your phone

Guide

Run the agent on a machine that stays on, then open the Spaces web app on your phone through an SSH tunnel. The phone layout at /m shows every agent with its state (working, blocked, done), the last thing it printed, quick keys for the prompts agents ask (tap y to approve), and voice input for the next prompt.

What you need

  • A machine that stays on with Spaces running: your desktop, or a server set up with spaces --remote you@server (see running on a remote server).
  • SSH access to that machine from the phone. Any SSH app with local port forwarding works: Termius and Blink on iOS, Termius or JuiceSSH on Android.

Step 1: a sign-in link

Spaces listens on loopback only and answers only its owner, so you cannot just open the server's address. On the machine running Spaces, print a one-time sign-in link:

spaces open

Where there is no browser to open it in, it prints the link instead. It looks like http://127.0.0.1:3457/auth/desktop?code=… and works once, within two minutes.

Step 2: a tunnel from the phone

In the SSH app, add a local port forward from port 3457 on the phone to 127.0.0.1:3457 on the server, and connect. The web app is now at http://127.0.0.1:3457 in the phone's browser, and only there: the tunnel is the only way in.

Step 3: open the link

Paste the sign-in link into the phone's browser. You land in the web app signed in; add /m for the phone layout. Add it to your home screen and the sign-in survives.

From a laptop instead

From a laptop the tunnel and the sign-in are one command: spaces open --remote you@server opens the web app signed in and keeps the tunnel up until you press Ctrl+C.

What you can do from the phone

  • See every space and agent, with blocked, working, done and idle states, and read what each one did.
  • Answer the prompt an agent is waiting on with the quick keys (y, n, Enter, Esc), or type.
  • Dictate the next task with voice input (needs a GROQ_API_KEY or OPENAI_API_KEY on the server for transcription).
  • Browse and read files in the project.

Nothing runs on the phone. The agents run on the server whether or not the page is open, so closing the browser changes nothing.

Get started

npm install -g @jlongo78/agent-spaces
spaces

Open source, Apache-2.0, no telemetry. Source on GitHub · every feature.

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