My secondary coding environment is a Proxmox server I use to spin up LXC dev containers which are just Debian containers with tmux and Neovim and all my dev dependencies on them.

I can get to that using Termius on a phone or tablet and do stuff. My stack is already terminal based so the change vs a laptop is pretty minimal.

Up until recently this has existed mainly as a backup, it means I can handle emergencies without a laptop.

I’ve always imagined it “freeing” me from a laptop but it just hasn’t stuck. Don’t get me wrong, Vim works using an iPhone keyboard but only in the same way a bicycle “works” for off-roading.

But recently I added Claude Code to this configuration.

Increasingly I’ve found myself not bothering to get my laptop because whatever I need to do, I could just fire up a Claude instance inside tmux and ask it to do it for me.

Side projects I’ve been meaning to continue for years are coming along again, I’ve redesigned my blog, revamped my local LLM setup and—for reasons I’ll explain in another post—built a simulator of an LLM meditating.

I’ve created more and had more fun doing it than any time I can remember.

All from a phone.

In the same way I learned Vim by disabling the mouse and arrow keys on my computer; using a coding agent in an environment where using Vim is incredibly painful has forced me to get really good at that interaction model.

I never looked back from Vim and I can’t imagine ever looking back from this.

If you haven’t tried it, I thoroughly recommend having a go banning yourself from your editor and working only through an agent for a few weeks.