Comment by magospietato | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magospietato | Hacker News Reader

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 was Claude scanning my network for active ports using nmap, fuzzing those ports with cURL, documenting its findings, self-directing web searches for API/SDK docs for my Hue bridge and ancient Samsung TV, then building a set of scripts to control my lighting system and a fully functional HTML+JS remote for my TV.

The most entertaining part was Claude prompting _me_ to pop into the living room and press the button on the Hue bridge so it could fetch an API key.

The most valuable part? The understanding I gained secondary to generative act. I now understand the button on a Hue bridge literally just tells the device to issue a new API key at the next request. I understand how Entertainment mode works, and why. I understand how Samsung SmartThings is mediated via websockets - and just how insecure decade old Samsung TVs are.

Around 500 words to gain all this? I hate to buy into the hype, but it feels inflectional.

I read the Readme. So this is all just stuff you can do with Claude's cli interface? It edits files and runs utilities? And it does this with few enough errors that you can be productive by just chatting with it over ssh? Is Claude the only one that can do this?

Probably Claude Code and Codex are the currently best ones, Claude Code a bit faster, Codex a lot more precise and "engineering" focused.

As long as you figure out how to verify that the built thing actually does what it's supposed to, ideally with automated tests, it's almost fire-and-forget if you're good at explaining what you want and need.

Possibly Codex, but I've only used Claude Code so far.

Worth pointing out I'm not SSHing to a different device. Claude Code installed and running directly in Android terminal on my phone.

I've built ASP.NET Core APIs on-device this way. Install dotnet in the terminal and Claude can write code, build, run unit tests, and even run the API on localhost. Then use `git` and `gh` to commit, push and raise a PR.

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, ...

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

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

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.

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