Worse Than Smoking: Claude Code Remote Control

Over the weekend I replaced doom scrolling with something else.

Not that I was scrolling Instagram all that much, but I was probably reading way too much of the news app. That's pretty much gone now, at least over the last weekend.

What replaced it is something called Claude Code remote control. Here's how it works: I have Claude Code running on my laptop, which has a caffeinate process going on it so it never shuts down. Then I remote control those Claude Code windows into my phone or my iPad. You can see a screenshot of it at the top here.

This is way too addictive. It's worse than smoking. In fact, maybe this is the new smoking for the world in the age of AI.

Here's why. You keep getting pulled back into your phone because Claude does a bunch of work and then asks for permission to continue, or prompts you to decide what's next. So you kind of keep a part of your brain locked into that other process. For people like me, who love productivity, it's amazing.

What happened is that over the weekend I just kept checking in on some long running stuff that I had going. Various different things I was coding in our infrastructure. And you know, you can use Claude Code for stuff that isn't writing code too, so part of it was working on a content strategy and thinking about new terminology for how I want to talk to customers and prospects.

It's crazy. Keeping a long running process on your computer and then mirroring that into your iPad or iPhone while it's running in Claude Code is so powerful. This is really the next level of sort of work that is connected but disconnected.

Here's the docs page if you want to set it up. Still in research preview, but available on all plans now.

Simon Willison did a writeup when it dropped, worth a read for a more technical take and some of the rough edges he hit.

It's going to be amazing to see how this evolves. Of all the AI agents out there, Claude Code is destroying everybody else as far as I'm concerned.