Driving your machine from the Claude apps

Claude has a feature called /remote-control that turns a Claude Code session into a target you can drive from the native Claude apps — iOS, Android, macOS, web. On a laptop, this is constrained by the laptop being a laptop: it closes, the network drops, the battery dies.

Restful is the always-on target that makes /remote-control actually reliable.

Setup

In your console, start a Claude Code session and run:

/remote-control

Claude prints a code and a URL. Sign in to the same Claude account on the Claude app on your phone (or any other device). Connect the session using the code.

From that point on, your phone, tablet, laptop, and the Claude web app can all drive the same Claude Code session. Type into any of them; Claude is doing the work on your Restful machine and reporting back.

What it feels like

Walking to lunch, you remember a bug in the auth flow. Open Claude on your phone, dictate “look at the OAuth scope check in the admin route and tell me if it’s right.” Claude reads the code on your machine, replies, and you keep walking.
Friday afternoon: kick off a “rewrite the test suite to use vitest” task from your laptop. Close the lid, go to your kid’s recital. Saturday morning open your phone and Claude has a diff ready for you to review.
Pair coding from the iPad on the couch + the laptop at the desk. Both connected to the same session. The conversation goes wherever you’re typing.

What `/remote-control` doesn’t do

It’s a control channel — your phone is sending instructions and receiving Claude’s responses. The Claude Code session itself is still running on your machine. So:

Files Claude creates live on your machine, not your phone.
Deploys happen on your machine, hit your machine’s URLs.
Long-running processes (a bun dev server, a watch script) keep running between sessions because they’re on the machine, not the phone.

Privacy

/remote-control is an Anthropic feature — the relay is between your Claude app and the Claude API. Restful doesn’t sit in the middle. We don’t see the messages. The machine your Claude session runs on is yours alone, with sudo, no co-tenants.

When it breaks

If a /remote-control session goes quiet, the issue is almost always one of:

The Claude Code session on your machine died. Open the browser console and check. If tmux is dead, restart it.
admin-console on your machine is in a crash loop. The fleet view at /admin/fleet (admin only) shows per-VPS console health. The agent will auto-recover; usually back within 60 seconds.
Your machine isn’t reachable. Check the fleet view’s heartbeat column — if it’s >2 minutes stale, the box itself is down.