SSH from your phone to your workstation is the naive answer to “mobile Claude Code”. Works, but falls over the moment 4G flickers, or when your laptop goes to sleep. What I wanted was: type on the phone on a train, sit down at the desk at home, and see the cursor exactly where I left it. One session, four devices, no vendor in the path.

Here’s what that setup looks like. Nothing futuristic — four components, all boring.

The architecture

  1. An LXC container on a Proxmox host. No Claude Code on my workstation; a dedicated container that’s always on, isolated from everything else. One machine responsible for “Claude Code” and nothing else.
  2. Tailscale on every device. No port forwarding, no public IP, no DDNS. My laptop, phone, and the container live on a private tailnet and reach each other by stable names — even through carrier-grade NAT.
  3. tmux inside the container. Sessions outlive SSH disconnects, so phone-back-in-pocket costs me nothing. And — the real feature — multiple clients can attach to the same session at the same time.
  4. Per-device SSH keys. Each device has its own key, labelled in authorized_keys. Losing a phone = one line removed, no rotation of every key.

The killer feature: shared tmux

One session, multiple clients at once. What I type on the phone shows up on the desktop screen in real time. Detach on one client and the others stay put.

# First time, from the desktop
ssh user@container
tmux new -A -s main

# Later, from the phone (SSH app of choice, over the tailnet)
ssh user@container
tmux a -t main

Ctrl-b d detaches just that one client. For independent parallel sessions (e.g. coding separate from log-watching): pick a different -s label and you have two independent sessions in the same container.

Mobile-comfort tip that makes it bearable: set -g mouse on in ~/.tmux.conf. Tapping to switch panes then works the way you’d hope it works.

Provisioning: IaC, not by hand

The container itself is Terraform: one resource, Proxmox provider, done. The inside is Ansible: a handful of roles for SSH hardening, Tailscale install, Node.js, Claude Code itself, and a GitHub identity. Idempotent: re-running is “0 changes” when the container is already in shape.

Concrete consequence: “rebuild a lost container” is a pair of commands instead of an hour of clicking. Second consequence: every change to the inside is a commit, not a sticky note.

The mobile side

On Android I use Termius. I have the keypair generated inside the app — the private key stays on the phone and never leaves it. Add the public key to the Ansible vars, re-run the base role, and the phone is in the container.

Install the Tailscale app on the phone, sign in, done — the device gets a tailnet address and can reach the container by its stable name instead of a shifting mobile IP.

What it costs

  • A Proxmox host. A mini-PC or a beefy Pi is enough — a home-LXC host doesn’t need to be big.
  • Setup time: not weeks, but hours. How many depends on how comfortable you are with Terraform and Ansible.
  • A Tailscale account. Free for personal use. If you really don’t want Tailscale, WireGuard + DDNS is an option — less fun to keep healthy, but doable.

What it isn’t

No cloud magic, no autonomous agent that keeps running on a server without my noticing. It’s a terminal session on my own iron, with good network plumbing and a little luxury for multi-device use. But if you don’t want to hand your code and AI tooling to a third party, and at the same time want to work from any screen — that’s what that means in 2026.