Working with my agent team from my phone

May 11 2026 8 min

Table of Contents

Was out on the Mauerweg the other day — a training ride on a cool Berlin afternoon. Paused for a banana bread break and pulled out my phone to see where my Claude Code agents were at. They run around the clock on my Mac mini.

Asked my team lead agent for a hit list of what needed my attention. Reviewed a draft of this blog post and sent some edit requests. Checked an interactive mockup, left some comments. Looked over some training examples for one of my projects and kicked off the next round. Five minutes later, I was done with my banana bread, and my agents had what they needed for the next chunk of work.

In the past two months in Berlin, I’ve made exploring a priority. But I’ve also wanted to keep my side projects rolling, so I’ve been tuning my agent setup to let me review when my agents need input, and I have time to spare.

What I’ve done with this team in the last six weeks

Here’s what this workflow has helped me do since early April, with around 15 hours a week of hands-on time:

Started getting back in touch with old friends and colleagues. It really has been a joy!
Tested how well Claude can diagnose rare diseases (follow-up to RareArena)
Made my family bike map usable day-to-day in Berlin
Honed my approach for how I spend my time each week
Worked with our H&R Block rep to do our taxes
Set up a personal site and writing workflow. I’ll try to post at least once a week!
Built a way to measure agent-team effectiveness and continuously improve
Planned many activities around Berlin with my boo on Discord
Started helping friends out at a nonprofit with Android development
And…built this agent workflow to meet my needs!

I wanted to share this post as background context. After this, I promise no more agent infrastructure posts for the next two months. I think it’s more interesting to talk about what I try to do with my agents, rather than how the agents are set up.

If you really want to know about my evolving agent workflow, follow along in my open-source repos linked throughout this post…

The agent team

I run a team of long-running Claude Code sessions on a Mac mini at home — one per project I care about, plus a team lead that coordinates them. Claude Code is Anthropic’s coding agent; you can run it on your own machine.

Keeping each session running around the clock means each agent remembers what we’ve been discussing, plus longer-term notes I keep with them in markdown files or Notion docs.

The team today:

A writing assistant for blog posts and my personal site. Also gives guidance to other agents when they need help writing.
A personal assistant — an assistant that Joanna and I both have a Discord chat with. Helps us research things like what to do in Berlin, where to go for Bea’s after-school outings, or how to fix a flat tire on my Helix folding bike.
A personal CRM agent that helps me reconnect with people from the past — I’m finally trying to get better about that.
A finance agent that helps with taxes, donations, and financial planning.
A research team that runs on-demand investigations and scheduled monitoring of high-signal sources I care about.
Half a dozen coding agents for various side projects

flowchart TD
  subgraph User["Phone or laptop"]
    UApp["Claude app or browser"]
  end

  RC["Remote Control"]
  TS["Tailscale"]
  Events["Discord, GitHub, Notion events"]

  subgraph Mac["Mac mini at home"]
    TL["Team lead"]
    PA["Project agents"]
    LF["Live Feedback server"]
    TL <-->|"claude-hive"| PA
    PA -->|"starts review sessions"| LF
  end

  UApp -->|"chat"| RC
  RC --> TL
  RC --> PA
  UApp -->|"review work"| TS
  TS --> LF
  Events -->|"event bridges"| PA

  style User fill:#fef3c7,stroke:#999
  style Mac fill:#e0f2fe,stroke:#999

The weekly rhythm

Each week, the team lead and I plan major goals. The plan goes to Notion. The team lead sends it to the team to vet; I leave comments in Notion; the plan adjusts from there.

When the plan looks good, the team lead kicks off the work.

And then throughout the week, whenever I have time to help, I ask the team lead what needs my attention, and in what order.

The tools that let me work on the go

I don’t sit at the Mac mini anymore. I tap into it from wherever I am. Here are the pieces that make it work:

Remote Control — chat with my agents on the go

Claude Code sessions run around the clock on the Mac mini. To connect from a laptop or phone via the official Claude app, I’ve set Remote Control to on for all sessions in my Claude Code configuration.

The team lead coordinates the fleet

One of those Claude Code sessions is the team lead. It works with me each week to set shared goals across the whole agent team. And then the team lead keeps everyone moving on tasks, troubleshoots issues, and relays context between teammates. That makes it easier for me to work on the go since I can write a brief request to the team lead, and it handles the rest.

The team lead also helps the team reflect and improve using months of Claude Code transcripts.

The closest existing tool is Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s agentic tool for non-technical users. My team lead running in Claude Code is more customizable.

Open source team lead: fryanpan/ai-team-lead

Under the hood, the team lead and agents on the team use claude-hive to message each other.

Live Feedback — review docs, mockups, and dev servers from any device

Before this plugin, reviewing what Claude sent me was tedious. Claude would send me markdown docs or interactive mockups during planning, or dev server links while implementing and testing. I’d have to figure out how to access these links remotely, and then jump between the link and chatting with Claude to give feedback.

My live feedback plugin collapses that loop. Now I can comment directly on the doc, running app, or mockup; the agent on the other side makes updates, and they show up immediately while I’m still reviewing.

Open source feedback plugin: fryanpan/claude-live-feedback-plugin

The plugin uses Claude Channels (Anthropic’s real-time notification feature), released in March 2026, for pushing notifications into a running Claude session.

Tailscale — the private network underneath

Tailscale is a private mesh network between my devices. My phone, laptop, and the Mac mini all show up on the same network without a public tunnel between them. Live Feedback and any dev servers I spin up on the Mac mini are reachable from anywhere I am. No port-forwarding, no public exposure, no surprise scanners.

Responding to Other Events: Discord, GitHub

Three other pieces let the team pick up events and kick off work on their own, without me having to relay a prompt.

A Discord plugin lets Joanna and me chat with the personal assistant agent from anywhere.
A GitHub event bridge lets coding agents take a feature all the way from code review through addressing reviewer comments to merging and deploying — similar to Claude’s Automerge feature but covering more steps.
A Notion bridge lets the agents listen to pages or whole sections in Notion and react to comments and edits on those pages.

What this setup gives me

This setup lets me work from anywhere and give input in batches — no more constantly juggling open chats.

It does not, however, make me any more productive. I’ve measured my team’s output using historical transcripts. For each hour of hands-on effort I put in, my agents produce about the same as they would if I only worked from my desk — the setup doesn’t change the per-hour ratio, it just lets me work on the move.

What’s still hard

Multi-agent setups introduce flakiness. This is more stable than my March setup (custom-built agents running on cloud servers, chatted to through Slack, before Remote Control and Dispatch existed), but it still pulls 1–2 hours of orchestration and maintenance time out of my week. The hive messaging went down a few days ago due to a bad configuration change; for a few hours, all my agents were sending each other messages with no deliveries, which led to mass confusion until I asked the team lead what was up and went to fix it. Plus, several Claude components I depend on, like Remote Control or Channels, are flaky too and seem to fail once a week or so. Over time, I’ll make these pieces more stable, or hopefully, can depend on 3rd parties to build more robust versions!

Managing the agents’ memory is an ongoing challenge. With sessions running for days, the conversation history piles up. That history costs money, plus it isn’t organized in a way that will work as I dump more knowledge in. When I feel this is painful enough, I’ll bring in more complicated memory structures — everyone seems to be working on these.

What’s next

I’m happy so far with how smoothly this setup lets me work on the go. In the coming weeks, I’ll keep reviewing with the team to see what’s worth improving next.

A few areas already on my list:

Making as-good-or-better decisions with less hands-on time from me
Organizing my work so I stay in flow and focus on one area at a time
Measuring and honing how the team delivers value (this will be hard!)
Fixing infrastructure reliability or usability

I’ll start writing more about what I’ve been doing with my agents — rare disease diagnosis is probably up next.