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Cover image for Control Claude Code from Telegram — Hermes IDE Just Made It a Checkbox
Gabriel Anhaia
Gabriel Anhaia

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Control Claude Code from Telegram — Hermes IDE Just Made It a Checkbox

#claudecode #ai #opensource #telegram

You fire off a build before heading out. Twenty minutes later, you're in line at a coffee shop, wondering if it passed. You could SSH in, but that's a pain. You could wait until you're back at your desk, but that kills the flow.

What if you could just... message your IDE?

That's exactly what the new Telegram Channels feature in Hermes IDE makes possible — and it takes one checkbox to enable.

What is Hermes IDE?

Hermes IDE is a free, open-source AI-powered shell wrapper that acts as a unified launcher for AI coding agents: Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Aider, OpenAI Codex, and GitHub Copilot. Instead of juggling terminal windows and flags, you get a clean TUI session manager with project context, hotkeys, and now — external channel support.

GitHub: hermes-hq/hermes-ide

The New Feature: Telegram Channels

Anthropic released Claude Code Channels on March 20, 2026 — a plugin system that lets Claude Code receive and respond to messages from external services like Telegram and Discord while a session is running locally.

Hermes IDE v1.x ships with this integrated directly into the New Session wizard. No config files. No manual flag wiring. You check a box and you're done.

How it works

Your Claude Code session runs locally on your machine with full filesystem, MCP, and git access. Telegram is just a window into it — a phone-shaped terminal, essentially.

Your Phone (Telegram)
       |
       v
  Telegram Bot  <-->  Claude Code Channel Plugin
                              |
                              v
                    Your Local Hermes Session
                    (files, git, shell, MCP)
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Your code never leaves your machine. The bot token authenticates the channel; a pairing code locks it to your specific Telegram account. Any unpaired sender is ignored.

Setting it up in Hermes IDE

Step 1 — Create your Telegram bot

  1. Open Telegram and search for @botfather (look for the blue verified checkmark)
  2. Send /start to begin, then /newbot to create a new bot
  3. Give it a display name (e.g. Claude Code) and a unique username ending in bot (e.g. my_claude_bot)
  4. BotFather replies with your HTTP API token — it looks like 7123456789:AAH_some-long-string
  5. Copy that token — you'll need it in the next step

If you ever lose the token, go back to @botfather → /mybots → select your bot → API Token.

Step 2 — Enable Telegram in the New Session wizard

  1. Open Hermes IDE and press Cmd+N (or click New Session)
  2. In Step 1 of 3, scroll to the CHANNELS section at the bottom
  3. Check the Telegram checkbox — it will highlight in orange
  4. Select your AI agent (Claude, Gemini, Aider, etc.) and hit Next

Step 3 — Paste your bot token

Hermes will prompt you for the Telegram bot token from Step 1. Paste it in and continue through the wizard.

Step 4 — Pair your Telegram account

  1. Start the session — Hermes launches your AI agent with Telegram support active
  2. Open Telegram and send any message to your bot (e.g. hello)
  3. The bot replies with a pairing code
  4. Enter that code back in Hermes to lock the channel to your Telegram account only

From this point on, every message you send to the bot is forwarded to your running Claude Code session — and every response comes back to your phone.

What you can actually do from Telegram

Once connected, anything you'd type into a Claude Code session works over Telegram:

  • Ask Claude to review a file or explain a function
  • Trigger a build or run tests and get the output back
  • Do git operations: status, diff, commit, push
  • Have Claude fix a failing test and commit the result
  • Check logs or debug a running service
  • Send a task before bed and wake up to a finished PR

The --dangerously-skip-permissions flag

By default, if Claude Code hits a permission gate mid-task, it pauses and waits — but there's no way to grant that permission from Telegram. You'd need to be at your terminal.

If you want full async/mobile-first operation, you can enable Auto-approve all actions in the Hermes wizard (the checkbox above Channels). This maps to --dangerously-skip-permissions and lets Claude read, write, and execute without stopping to ask. Use it on trusted projects where you understand the scope.

Why this matters

AI coding agents are increasingly capable of running long, multi-step tasks autonomously. The bottleneck has been access — you need to be at your desk, watching a terminal.

Telegram Channels breaks that constraint. Your session runs on your hardware, with your credentials and your codebase, but you can interact with it from anywhere. It's a small UX change with a big workflow impact.

Try it

It's free, open-source, and the Telegram channel support is available in the current release. Give it a spin and let us know what you build with it.

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