Control Claude Code from your phone without SSH or Tailscale

The usual way to reach your dev machine from your phone is a small mountain of plumbing: stand up an SSH server, generate keys, then bolt on Tailscale or a VPN — or forward ports on your router and hope your IP doesn’t change. It works, but it’s a lot to maintain just to glance at what Claude Code is doing.

CodeMote skips all of it. You pair with a QR scanover a Microsoft dev tunnel — no SSH, no Tailscale, no port forwarding — and you’re driving Claude Code on your real machine in under a minute.

Why no SSH or Tailscale?

A dev tunnel is an outboundconnection from your computer to a relay, so there’s nothing to expose on your home network — no open ports, no firewall holes, no static IP. Your phone connects to the same tunnel and the two meet in the middle. That’s the whole reason SSH, VPNs and Tailscale become unnecessary.

What you need

• VS Code on your computer with the CodeMote extension.
• Microsoft’s free devtunnel CLI installed once.
• The CodeMote app on your iPhone or iPad.

Step 1 — Install devtunnel

One command, then sign in with a GitHub or Microsoft account:

On Windows use winget install Microsoft.devtunnel; on Linux use the install script. If you hit devtunnel: command not found, the install guide has the fix.

Step 2 — Start a session and scan

Open your project in VS Code and run CodeMote: Start Mobile Session from the Command Palette. Scan the QR code with the app — pairing is local and single-use, and nothing about your code leaves your machine.

Step 3 — Launch and supervise Claude Code

Open a terminal in CodeMote and start the agent as usual:

The terminal streams live. When Claude Code pauses for a decision you approve, redirect or stop it — by thumb or by voice — and because the shell runs on your computer, it keeps going when you background the app.

That’s the no-plumbing path to running Claude Code from your pocket. See the full tutorial, the comparison with Claude’s built-in Remote Control, or the FAQ.