u/Joarhal

It's mini mode. The agent runs on the bottom half of the screen, you put pip on the top.

I've spent the last 13 years in gamedev - mostly Node, Go, and C#. Coding agents took over the typing for me at some point, and the bottleneck shifted: it's not writing the code anymore, it's having room in your head to figure out what to type.

The thing is, that thinking doesn't only happen at the desk. Ideas land when I'm out for a walk, on a train, in bed before sleep. By the time I'm back at the keyboard, half the energy is gone.

I tried the mobile tools that exist - Claude Remote Control, Happy. They're chat-only. You get a model to talk to, you don't get a project. No file tree, no terminals, just a chat window. That's not how I work on the desktop.

So I built Helmrig: a server on your Mac, an iOS app that talks to it. The desktop experience, on a phone.

What's in it:

- Project file tree with editing
- Multiple terminals that live on the server - start one, leave it, pick it up from any device
- One-tap task runs for `just` and `npm` (more runners coming)
- File uploads straight into the project
- Attachments on chat messages for screenshots or logs
- Codex and Claude through their CLIs on your Mac, under your existing subscriptions
- AES-256-GCM end-to-end. Symmetric key gets onto the phone by scanning a QR code once
- Works over Tailscale or LAN

I've worked only through this for the last two months. Most of it is short, throwaway agent chats - tight context, switch fast, kill the chat, start over. Server runs on a MacBook Pro in clamshell at home, another on a Linux VPS.

iOS only for now. TestFlight is open if you want to try it:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/p2KtFEMb