29 July 2026
How I took Claude Code from my Mac to my phone
I wanted to leave my Mac and carry on working from my phone. Ideas tend to arrive on a walk, in a queue, or in the car before I get out. Waiting until I was back at my desk wasn’t working for me.
My projects, decisions, and notes live in an iCloud folder I call Second Brain. I work on it with Claude Code: it sorts, I approve. I needed to pick up the same work from my phone, with the instructions I’d already written for it.
I needed access to the folder on my Mac
The tools I tried expected a repository: a project stored in a version control system. Claude Code on the web cloned one from GitHub. In Cursor for iOS, I also started by choosing a repository. Adapting my notes folder would have meant extra changes just to get phone access.
Dispatch could send a task to my Mac, but the setup I tried couldn’t see my configuration. I’d have had to sort out fourteen custom instructions and procedures again.
I ended up using SSH to connect remotely to the Mac’s terminal, with a VPN and a program to keep the session alive. It worked, but took half an hour to set up and three extra apps. I wrote up the recommendation, then dropped it within an hour when I found a simpler option.
My phone could open the same conversation
I’d been trying to work out how to transfer work between my phone and computer. All I needed was access to the conversation already running on the Mac.
Claude Code offers this through Remote Control. I type in the terminal, leave, and pick up where I left off on my phone. Back at the Mac, I can see what I asked it to do while I was out.
File operations still run on my computer. The connection isn’t entirely local, though: messages and the conversation transcript pass through Anthropic’s servers. The Remote Control documentation explains the details.
At first, I kept opening empty sessions
I connected, picked up my phone, and opened an empty window in the app. The second one was empty too, even though my work was right there on the Mac.
I had three different sessions with the same name and kept picking the empty ones. Some processes had stayed running after I thought I’d ended them with Ctrl+C.
Then I ran into a difference between two connection modes. One let me keep typing in the terminal; the other used it just to keep the connection running. Naturally, I’d started the second one and couldn’t work out where I was supposed to type.
Both problems took five minutes to fix once I checked which sessions and processes were actually running. If it happened again, I’d start there: am I opening the same conversation on both devices?
The Mac has to stay awake
When my Mac went to sleep after I closed the lid, I couldn’t keep working from my phone. I accepted that limitation because I wanted the work to run on my own computer.
If you want to use your phone while your Mac stays on at home, this approach may suit you too. Working independently of a running Mac would need a different setup.
I’ll look into that the third time a closed lid annoys me.
This is an account of my setup in July 2026. During an edit in September 2026, I clarified how data travels over the connection. See the linked documentation for current features and requirements.