I code from my phone now — Cline does the typing

Backseat — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:55:06 +0000

My coding setup used to have a hard requirement: me, at my desk. Cline is a great driver, but somebody had to sit in the car. Last week I got tired of that and built the thing I actually wanted: a way to backseat-drive my coding agent from my phone.

Here's the setup. There's a VS Code extension — Backseat — and a private GitHub repo that acts as the task queue. I text my personal AI what I want ("add an AI opponent to the Blokus game, with scoring"), and it writes that up as a task file: tasks/pending/something.json. The extension on my PC polls the repo, picks it up, and runs it in Cline's sidebar. I watch it work in the chat, from wherever I am. When Cline finishes, it writes a done file, the extension files the result, and I get my summary.

The mental model that makes it click: I'm the backseat driver. I do architecture in plain language — "no, the AI should prefer big pieces, and pass automatically when it has no moves" — and Cline does the typing. A real build becomes a text conversation spread across the day: a message on the train, a message in line for coffee.

Under the hood it's deliberately boring: the queue is JSON files moving through pending → active → done, Cline is driven through its extension API so everything stays visible in the sidebar, and completion is a file handshake. The interesting work was all in failure handling — retrying provider errors instead of stalling, re-adopting the Cline session after a VS Code restart, cancelling a runaway task from my phone. I know, because every one of those broke live while I was dogfooding it, and each one is now a feature.

The proof: yesterday I architected a complete Blokus game — board, placement rules, an AI opponent, scoring — without touching a keyboard. Just texts.

It's open source (MIT) and very much still being tested in production, which is exactly why it works: https://github.com/darek225/backseat

VS Code Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=darek.backseat

If you're setting up Muse for the first time to try Backseat, my referral code is 4T6Z5L.

If you try it, I'd genuinely love to know what breaks. That's been the whole development process so far.

DEV Community: Backseat

I code from my phone now — Cline does the typing