By James Aspinwall, co-written by Alfred (your trusted AI agent) – February 25, 2026, 09:00
Anthropic added a “remote control” feature to Claude Code, currently in research preview for Max plan users. It solves a specific problem: you kick off a 30-minute refactor or test generation task and then sit at your desk watching a terminal, or walk away and come back blind.
How It Works
- Start a Claude Code session in your terminal as usual
-
Run
/remote_control - You get a URL
- Open that URL on your phone (or any browser)
That’s it. You now have a mobile-friendly dashboard showing your active Claude Code sessions with their current status – ready for review, in progress, waiting for input, etc.
What You See
The mobile UI is simple by design. It lists your sessions and shows:
- Status: Is Claude still working, or has it paused waiting for your approval?
- Progress: What step it’s on, what it’s doing right now
- Session list: Multiple sessions sorted by status so you can see which ones need attention
When a session needs your input – a permission prompt, a question, a review of proposed changes – you can respond directly from the mobile interface. No need to walk back to your terminal.
Who It’s For
This targets a specific workflow: long-running code tasks. The kind that take 20-40 minutes and don’t need constant supervision but do need occasional input.
Real examples:
- Large refactors – renaming across 50 files, restructuring module hierarchies, migrating APIs
- Test generation – writing test suites for untested modules, running them, fixing failures iteratively
- Documentation – generating docs for an entire codebase, module by module
- Dependency upgrades – updating packages, fixing breaking changes, running tests until green
These are tasks where Claude works autonomously for stretches but periodically needs a yes/no decision or a clarification. Without remote control, you either sit and wait or miss the prompt and add 20 minutes of dead time.
Why This Matters
The productivity pattern with AI coding assistants is shifting. Early usage was conversational – you sit at your desk, type a prompt, read the response, iterate. That works for quick tasks.
But as agents get better at longer autonomous runs, the bottleneck moves from “how fast can the AI think” to “how fast can the human respond when the AI needs input.” If Claude finishes a 15-minute task and then waits 25 minutes for you to notice, you’ve doubled the wall-clock time.
Remote control removes that bottleneck. Claude works, you step away, your phone buzzes (or you glance at the dashboard), you approve, Claude continues. The human stays in the loop without being chained to the terminal.
Practical Considerations
- Max plan only for now – this is a research preview, not generally available
- URL-based access – the session URL is your authentication. Keep it private. Anyone with the URL can see and interact with your session.
- Network dependent – your terminal session needs to stay connected. If your laptop sleeps or loses network, the remote view disconnects too.
- Not a full IDE – you can monitor and respond to prompts, but you’re not editing code on your phone. It’s a control surface, not a development environment.
For WorkingAgents
We already have a similar pattern in our architecture – WhatsAppClaude lets you interact with Claude from your phone via WhatsApp messages, including triggering MCP tool calls. The difference is scope: WhatsApp gives you a conversational interface to the platform’s tools, while remote control gives you a monitoring interface to a specific coding session.
Both solve the same underlying problem: the human doesn’t need to be at their desk to keep an AI agent productive.
If Anthropic opens this up beyond Max plan, the interesting question is whether the remote control protocol becomes an API. Imagine hooking it into our notification pipeline – Pushover alert when a session needs attention, with a direct link to the mobile UI. That would close the loop completely: Claude works, you get a push notification, you approve from wherever you are, Claude continues.
The Bigger Picture
Remote control is a signal of where AI-assisted development is heading. The interaction model is moving from synchronous pair programming to asynchronous task delegation. You describe what you want, the agent works on it, and you review when it’s ready – or when it needs help.
The tools that win will be the ones that make that async handoff seamless. Remote control is Anthropic’s first step toward that.