Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 420 posts

Re: Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

#341

Post by magospietato »

wickedsight wrote: post #325
magospietato wrote: post #152

I'm using the Android terminal and Claude Code to vibecode on the go. Or rather, as a fairly boring father of two, when I'm tied up in the necessary chores of family life - cooking and cleaning. Nothing as complicated as this - just Claude Code and a fairly standard Linux dev term, but it's remarkable. Over the recent break, across four or five sessions, I wrote a set of prompts around ~500 words in total. The result…

How did you make sure Claude wasn't doing anything unintended while allowing it to run scripts it wrote on your network?

I still manually approve tool use requests at the start of a run. As it gets deeper in I might allow it to run safer commands without that oversight (e.g. writing to local text files), but potentially destructive execution still requires approval.

As for the local env, I'm treating the Android terminal as a sandbox. Anything gets trashed I just reset and reinstall my toolchain.

I won't pretend I'd use this workflow for anything high-stakes. But for simple things like "I wonder how my Hue lights actually work?", its viable.

Re: Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

#342

Post by wickedsight »

gregoriol wrote: post #327
wickedsight wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you make sure Claude wasn't doing anything unintended while allowing it to run scripts it wrote on your network?

Run it inside a VM, make snapshots of the VM if needed (or use vagrant/ansible to rebuild), commit regularly, ...

The VM still needs access to the network for the use cases they described though.

Re: Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

#343

Post by PopePompus »

interloxia wrote: post #305
PopePompus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, if your Android phone is a Pixel, you can run the recently added Terminal app, which runs a plain vanilla Debian distribution within a VM. So you then have a pocketable Linux machine to develop code on. Not only does Python run on it, you can install the entire Anaconda Python suite.

I tried this a while back with. NET and Blazor. With split screen I was able to add some code and preview live in the browser and build and 'install' a simple pwa. Presumably with an external monitor and the desktop mode it would be better. Code from tiny llms such as Gemma are a waste of time but it "worked". It was neat to generate a working app completely offline. The main problem was that the VM crashed on my pix…

I don't think it's actually the VM crashing, it's the Android OS killing what it thinks is an idle app.

Re: Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

#345

Post by PopePompus »

cess11 wrote: post #311
PopePompus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, wonderful as Termux is, it has a very nonstandard filesystem layout, so installation scripts for something like Anaconda will not run without extensive modifications. And Termux has no access to /proc, /dev etc., so lots of utilities fail. Since Terminal provides a full Linux VM, all programs that will run on Linux just work as expected.

I haven't noticed anything like that. Some more obscure tools have trouble with the file system but that happens in ordinary Linux too. Though I have no experience with Anaconda specifically so you likely know better whether it'll need adaptations to work under Termux. I run htop just fine on my handhelds and I'm pretty sure it sources directly from /proc, /sys or something.

On my unrooted Pixel, I get "Permission denied" errors if I ls /sys, /dev, /proc and / within Termux. And /usr and /var don't exist.

Re: Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

#346

Post by voidUpdate »

kreddor wrote: post #337
voidUpdate wrote: post #286

What does Claude add to this? I've done coding on my phone before by sshing into my home server and just... writing code. Is there a benefit to writing code through a third party instead?

I'm just as baffled. I went to the comments to better understand but I still don't get it. I've coded on my phone on several occasions. If you use Android, you don't even need a server or a home computer since Termux works really well as it is. It can run node.js and a bunch of other development tools easily. Or you can just ssh into a server with a development environment and do your stuff their (AI or not).

Yeah, I use Termux a decent amount, whether it's just updating my todo list on my home server or actually programming on it. I feel like this is just aimed at the people who want to code entire projects with LLMs, cost be damned

Re: Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

#347

Post by abinmn »

simonmales wrote: post #279
abinmn wrote: post #261

I've been using a similar workflow for the past couple of months.Heavily inspired by Simon Willison’s approach of building micro tools, I’ve started building micro-utilities. I do this mostly while I'm commuting or outside or waiting for something at work. Instead of just jotting down an idea in a notes app (and it sitting there for eternity), I’ll open up Jules, describe the tool, and have it scaffold the HTML. I ha…

Whats the cycle time here? This work flow makes sense to me.

It’s largely asynchronous for me. I'll trigger the generation and come back to the PR whenever I'm free.

I'd say the cycle time largely depends on the complexity of the tools you are building. I've built a movie shelf hooking up with trakt.tv under 30 minutes and a mermaidJS diagram editor spanning multiple sessions and couple of days.

Re: Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

#348

Post by gregoriol »

isolli wrote: post #334
gregoriol wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run it inside a VM, make snapshots of the VM if needed (or use vagrant/ansible to rebuild), commit regularly, ...

That seems incompatible with the parallel tasks of cleaning and cooking (at least for me, especially with kids around).

The VM is setup once, before you get to be "on the go": that's your development environment, you need one anyway

Re: Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

#349

Post by jdshaffer »

godelski wrote: post #172
wolfgang000 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same setup as mine, I have an OpenVPN server running in my router, and my main PC has wake-on-lan and a KVM as a backup to turn it on and off. I have an old used Dell Latitude that I use as a pseudo thin client. I ssh into my PC, and everything just works. I really like this setup because I only have one environment, so everything is there, and I don't have to install anything in the laptop

> I really like this setup because I only have one environment, so everything is there, and I don't have to install anything in the laptop Yeah that's one of my favorite parts. Same about living in the terminal. I can be effective anywhere nearly instantly. I carry everything around in my dotfiles and keep it small (keep the .git folder small and don't add anything except text files)[0]. On that note, one thing I hig…

If you don't mind, I'd like to hear more about your setup. I have a bunch of bash scripts and python programs I've used to make working in the terminal easier (and more fun). Are you saving your dotfiles are a git project and then just syncing and pulling them down from there? I'm not an expert, just a tinkerer, but I like tinkering in the terminal. :)

Thanks in advance!

Post reply on HN