Claude Code Remote Control: Drive Your Own PC From Your Phone
Remote Control connects the Claude mobile app or claude.ai/code to a Claude Code session already running on your own machine, and the point most explanations miss is that nothing moves to the cloud: code execution and filesystem access stay local the whole time, and the phone is only a window into that session. This article works through what that design buys you and what it costs. Your local filesystem, MCP servers, tools and project configuration all stay available (typing @ autocompletes paths from the local project), the conversation and subagent progress stay in sync across terminal, browser and phone, and a sleeping laptop or a dropped connection is survivable because Claude Code reconnects and delivers queued updates once it recovers. The requirements are stricter than they look: Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise (API keys are not supported), a claude.ai login rather than a setup-token, a direct connection to api.anthropic.com, and none of the four telemetry-disabling environment variables set, which is why privacy-minded users who set DO_NOT_TRACK are told the feature is not enabled on their account. Three entry points are covered (/remote-control to carry over the current conversation, claude --remote-control, and server mode with its --spawn, --capacity 32 and --continue flags), along with the split between slash commands that work remotely and the local-only ones such as /resume, the five-minute dialog expiry that does not apply to permission prompts, and the two push-notification toggles. On security, the article is deliberate: no inbound port is ever opened, so the network attack surface all but vanishes and the risk moves to the account, the QR code is a shortcut rather than authentication, and the default gate is exactly one signed-in account, which makes a passkey the highest-value step. Transcript retention (5 years or 30 days), what to do if the phone is lost, Trusted Devices with its 18-hour sign-in window, the ten-minute server-mode timeout, the four-hour resume window, the tmux requirement on remote machines, a troubleshooting table keyed to the actual error messages, and a comparison with Dispatch round it out.