Much of our development now happens in Claude Code sessions that run for a long time: implementing an issue, running the tests, fixing what broke, opening the result for review. They don’t need someone watching every step. They do need someone to answer occasional questions and approve anything risky.
Remote Control is how we stop those sessions stalling every time we leave the desk.
What it is
Running /remote-control in a Claude Code session connects it to your Claude account. You can then see the session and keep talking to it from the Claude app on your phone or from a browser. The session itself keeps running on the original machine, with the same files, tools and permission rules.
How we use it
- Start at the desk, check in later. Kick off a well-scoped issue before lunch and look in from a phone: is it done, stuck, or waiting on a decision?
- Answer the questions that matter. Our agents are told to stop and ask when a decision is genuinely the owner’s: a product trade-off, a price, a name. Those questions used to wait hours for someone to sit back down. Now they get answered within minutes, from wherever we are.
- Approve risky actions deliberately. Pushing to a branch that deploys, deleting something, publishing content: anything hard to undo still needs a human yes. Remote Control means that yes doesn’t require being at the keyboard. It doesn’t mean saying yes faster than you would at a desk.
What makes async work actually work
The tool is the easy part. Sessions that run well unattended share a few habits:
- Well-scoped work. An issue with a clear goal, acceptance criteria and known constraints finishes on its own. “Improve the dashboard” comes back with questions.
- Rules written down. Each repository has a
CLAUDE.mdwith what an agent must never do: don’t push to the deploying branch without approval, never wipe the shared test database, never touch another session’s uncommitted files. An unattended session follows them because they’re in the context, not because someone is watching. - Verification built in. Builds, type checks, link checks and tests let a session check its own work. A session that can’t verify its work is a session you have to review line by line.
- Short, factual reports. We ask for what changed, what was verified and what’s still open, so a check-in from a phone takes thirty seconds.
The limits
Some work still wants a big screen: visual design review, a tricky code review, anything where you need to see a lot at once. And a phone makes it easy to approve things without reading them, which is a habit worth resisting. We treat a remote approval exactly like one at the desk: if it’s not clear what’s being approved, the answer is “explain first”.
Used that way, Remote Control turns hours of waiting into minutes. That matters most for a small studio, where the person answering the questions is also doing everything else.