I haven't gone a day without talking to Claude Code.
That sounds dramatic until you check your own terminal history. Mine is a wall of claude commands going back months — sometimes shipping a feature, sometimes just rubber-ducking a bug on the train. At some point Claude Code stopped being a tool I opened and became something closer to a coworker I check in with. The kind of coworker who waits 20 minutes for you to approve a file edit while you're at lunch.
That waiting is the part nobody warned me about. When you live with an AI coding agent, the bottleneck isn't typing — it's being away from your Mac. Every time I stepped out for coffee, every train ride, every meeting that ran long, Claude Code was sitting there, blocked on a one-key approval, while I was holding the only computer that could unblock it: my phone.
So I started trying iOS terminals.
Every option failed me in a different way
I won't name names because the people building these are working hard, but here's what I hit, over and over:
- Subscriptions for a fundamentally simple tool. A terminal is plumbing. I do not want a recurring charge for plumbing.
- No real Mosh. SSH on a phone dies the second you switch from Wi-Fi to LTE. You re-connect, you lose your tmux pane state, you lose your scrollback, you swear quietly. Mosh fixes this — and almost no iOS app actually ships a real Mosh implementation.
-
tmux on mobile is a nightmare. Prefix keys (
Ctrl+B, then a letter) are fine on a hardware keyboard. They are miserable on a touchscreen. Switching panes shouldn't take three taps and a finger gymnastic. - No notifications when an agent needs you. This is the killer. Claude Code is built to wait for you, but none of the terminals I tried surfaced "your agent needs input" anywhere I'd actually see it.
I kept thinking someone would fix this. After about a year of waiting, I decided that someone was me.
What I built (in six weeks of nights and weekends)
The app is MT — Mosh Terminal. The whole thing is organized around one idea: the moment Claude Code needs me, my phone should know.
A few decisions that fell out of that (the full technical deep-dive is in my Show DEV post, this is the short version):
- Real Mosh, written from scratch. Not a wrapper. I wanted to control how aggressively the client retries on a flaky LTE handoff, because that's the difference between "session survived the subway" and "session died at the platform."
- One-tap tmux. Fifteen of the operations I do constantly — split, swap, zoom, kill, swipe between sessions — are now single taps from a bottom action bar. No prefix keys, no muscle memory, no leaving the home row when I do have a keyboard.
-
System-level push notifications via Claude Code Hooks. You paste two hook entries into your
~/.claude/settings.json, and that's it. When Claude Code needs an approval, my phone buzzes. Tap the notification → MT instantly resumes the exact tmux session over Mosh. Host, user, session name — all matched automatically. Apple Watch notifications too, because sometimes my phone is in another room. - Keyboard-first on iPad. With a Magic Keyboard or a split ergo board, iPad becomes a real terminal machine. Tabs, splits, ⌘1–9 to switch panes, drag tabs to tile them. I can run an entire dev session without lifting a finger to the screen.
The thing I did not expect is how often I now reach for my iPad mini before I reach for my MacBook. A 300-gram tablet plus a folding keyboard is somehow a faster Claude Code workstation than a 1.5 kg laptop, because I can pull it out anywhere and it's already paired to my home Mac via Tailscale. I genuinely did not see this coming.
Why one-time, not a subscription
MT is $14.99, one time. No monthly fee, no Pro tier I'm hiding the good stuff behind, no "trial." You buy it, you own it, you keep it.
This is partly philosophy and partly a promise to myself: if I'm building plumbing, I'm not going to charge rent on it. If you want to support continued development there's an optional MT Pro tier later, but everything in this post — Mosh, tmux, push notifications, iPad keyboard support — ships in the base app.
If this resonates
If you've ever stared at your phone in a coffee shop knowing your AI agent is blocked on you, MT was built for that exact feeling. The frustration that made me build it is probably the same frustration that brought you to this article.
→ MT — Mosh Terminal on the App Store
I'd love to know what your "Claude Code is waiting for me" moment looks like — drop it in the comments, or find me on X at @jaga_farm. I read everything.
I'm a solo iOS developer. I write about gadgets and dev tools at jaga-farm.com. MT — Mosh Terminal is my first App Store release. Find me on X at @jaga_farm.
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