How to check on Claude Code running on your Mac mini from your iPhone

, The Lumzoi team

Short answer: run the agent in a terminal on the Mac mini that survives disconnects, and reach that terminal from your phone. With Lumzoi Desk the shell lives on the Mac in your session, so you can close the app, lose signal or switch networks, and the agent keeps working. Open the session on your iPhone later and the shell is there with everything it printed.

Why a Mac mini

Coding agents like Claude Code and Codex do their work in a terminal: they read files, run tests, edit code and commit. A task can take twenty minutes or two hours. A Mac mini that stays on at home is a quiet, cheap place to let that happen, instead of keeping your laptop open on the train.

The catch is checking on it. The agent stops to ask before running a command, finishes while you’re out, or fails halfway. You want to see that from wherever you are.

The usual way: SSH and tmux

The classic setup is to turn on Remote Login on the Mac, run the agent inside tmux, and connect from an SSH app on your phone. It works, with some homework:

  • Reaching the Mac from outside. Your router has to forward a port to the Mac, or you set up a VPN. Hotel and office Wi-Fi often block both.
  • Remembering tmux. Start the agent outside tmux once and a dropped connection ends it.
  • Typing on a phone. Escape, Control and the arrow keys are awkward on a touch keyboard, and agents ask for them.

With Lumzoi Desk

  1. On the Mac mini, install Desk Host. It runs in the menu bar. Open it, give it the two permissions macOS asks for, and note its Desk ID. In System Settings, open Energy and turn on Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off, so the Mac stays awake while the agent works.
  2. On your iPhone, install Lumzoi Desk, enter the Desk ID and approve your phone on the Mac. You choose what it may do. After that, the Mac lets your phone back in without asking again, for what you allowed.
  3. Open the terminal from the Mac mini’s session and start the agent as you normally would, in your project folder. The shell runs as you, with your login environment, so the agent finds your tools and settings.
  4. Leave. Close the app or put the phone away. The shell keeps running on the Mac, like a tmux session you didn’t have to start. Sessions are kept for up to 7 days, or until you end them.
  5. Check in. Open the session on your iPhone. Every shell is a tab, with what it printed while you were away. The key row has Esc, Tab, Control and the arrows for answering the agent’s questions.

There’s no port forwarding and no Remote Login: Lumzoi Desk connects directly when the network allows it and through its relay when it doesn’t, encrypted end to end either way.

Review the work before you merge

Reading a diff in a phone terminal only goes so far. In the same session you can open the Mac mini’s full desktop on your iPhone or iPad, read the change in your editor and click through it in a browser. On iPad, a keyboard and trackpad work as they do on a Mac.

If you’re on your MacBook instead, open a tunnel to the dev server the agent is running. The site answers on your laptop at localhost, as if it ran there, without exposing anything to the internet.

Things to know

  • Lumzoi Desk doesn’t include or change Claude Code or Codex. They run on your Mac with your own account.
  • Shells survive disconnects and network changes, not restarts. If the Mac restarts, its shells stop, as in any terminal.
  • The Mac has to be awake and online. A Mac mini with sleep turned off is the simplest way.

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