Ask HN: Do you code remotely from your phone?

3 points·chunpaiyang··7 comments

Do you code remotely from your phone or tablet when you are away from your desk ? I find myself have such need but I am wondering other people do too ?

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If you do, how the heck do you handle all the extra cognitive burden of one finger (or at most, two thumb) typing on tiny keyboards? Programming languages have lots of punctuation which is typically only accessible via extra key presses which switch keyboards - another distraction. And then there's the 'L' or 'M' problem: whatever virtual key a particular keyboard image puts next to "delete" or "backspace" ends up causing significant number of mistaken previous-character-deletes. There's a lot of extra (maybe unconscious) cognition going on when using a phone's keyboard that prevents me from typing coherent thoughts, much less code that merely compiles.

This. Even with a great keyboard app and LLMs there is no way I want to be typing much code on a phone. Quite apart from the tiny screen.

With vibe coding you don't really type code anymore. You just tell AI what to do in plain words(voice input helps a lot on phone) and it writes the code for you.

Would that make you reconsider coding remotely from your phone ?

I don't consider vibe coding to be coding :)

Unless, of course, you're reviewing and editing the code, in which case..... back to the problem of the phone.

I generally prefer doing operational stuff (checking traffic, making small configuration, checking logs etc) rather than writing code.

What do you use for that? Any specific iOS/Android app ?

No, too harmful for my eyes...

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