Coding agents are at their best on long tasks, and long tasks are exactly the ones you don’t want to sit and watch. The catch is that agents stop to ask things. Claude Code wants permission to run a command, finishes a turn and waits for the next instruction, or hits an error. If you are in a meeting or out for lunch, the agent sits idle until you are back at your desk.
Controlling Claude Code from your phone fixes that gap. In this post I show how I do it with Telegram and AgentVera: notifications that tell you what happened, approvals with one tap, starting new agents from the chat, and handing off bigger jobs with /team and /night.
What you can do from your phone
Here is what the Telegram connection covers, so you know what to expect before setting it up:
| From your phone | How |
|---|---|
| Know when an agent finishes or fails | A notification with a short excerpt of its reply |
| Approve or deny a request | ✅ Approve and ✖️ Deny buttons on the message |
| Write to a running agent | Write in its topic or reply to its notification |
| See what changed | 🧾 Changes sends the diff as a file |
| Start a new agent | /new with a project and a task |
| Run a parallel team | /team, then approve the plan |
| Queue work for the night | /night, then ➕ Add task |
The agents still run on your computer in the desktop app. The phone is a remote: it sends instructions and receives updates, so the app has to stay open and the computer awake.
Connecting the bot
Setup takes a minute:
- Sign in to your AgentVera account in the desktop app (Settings → Account). A free account is enough.
- Go to Settings → Notifications → Phone notifications and choose Connect with the AgentVera bot.
- Click Connect Telegram. The app shows a t.me link and a QR code.
- Open the link or scan the code on your phone and tap Start in Telegram.
- Use Send test to make sure a message arrives.
The link is valid for 10 minutes and works once. A few things about privacy are worth knowing:
- Nothing is stored on the way. Messages pass through the AgentVera server and wait only in memory until the desktop app picks them up.
- Private chat only. The bot works only in a private chat with you and never joins groups.
- Only you control it. Both the chat and the sender are checked, so only the paired account can control your agents.
If you would rather run your own bot, choose I want to use my own bot and paste its token. The token is kept encrypted in your system keychain and messages go straight to Telegram.
The bot writes in the desktop app’s language, English or Turkish. Its commands also have Turkish aliases, such as /ajanlar and /yeni.
Notifications that are worth getting
A notification is only useful if it tells you whether you need to act. The notifications settings let you pick which events reach your phone. All of these are on by default:
- Agent finished its turn
- Agent failed
- Pending approvals
- An important code review finding
- Parallel team updates
- Account and limit alerts
- A scheduled task failed
Two settings shape how noisy it gets:
- A minimum turn length. By default only turns of at least 60 seconds send a “finished” message. Quick back-and-forth turns stay quiet.
- Include a short excerpt of the agent’s reply. On by default. Turn it off and the phone only learns that a turn finished, with no code or project content.
With A separate topic per agent turned on (the default), each agent gets its own topic in the bot chat, so a long day with several agents doesn’t turn into one endless thread.
Approving requests with one tap
When an agent asks for permission, the message arrives with ✅ Approve and ✖️ Deny buttons. If auto-approval is on in the desktop app, you also get an always-allow button, for example ♾️ Always allow: … for a command or ♾️ Always allow edits in the project. The phone never turns auto-approval on by itself; that stays a desktop decision.
If you miss a request, AgentVera reminds you. Reminders start after 5 minutes and repeat every 15 minutes, at most three times, and they reach Telegram with the same buttons. Approvals from flows arrive the same way.
Talking to agents from the chat
Use /agents to list your running agents. Each one comes as a card with buttons:
- 📄 Last reply shows what the agent said last.
- 🧾 Changes sends the current changes as a
changes.difffile. - ⏸ Pause interrupts the current turn, and ▶️ Continue tells it to carry on.
- ↩️ Undo last turn rolls back the files from the last turn, after a confirmation.
- ✍️ Write sends the agent a message.
- ⏹ Close agent closes it.
To write to an agent, type in its topic or reply to one of its notifications. If the agent is busy, it gets the message when its turn ends. You can also send it photos and documents up to 20 MB, such as a screenshot of a bug. Voice messages and video are not supported.
Going the other way, agents can send files to your phone with the phone_send tool when Let agents send to your phone is on. They can only send files from their own folder, and secrets such as .env files and keys are blocked.
Starting new work: /new, /team and /night
/new: one agent, one task
/new asks you to pick a recent project and then write the task. It starts a Claude Code agent named after the task, with a 📱 in front so you can tell it came from your phone. If you know the project name, /new Project: task does it in one message.
/team: a parallel team from your phone
For bigger jobs, /team starts a parallel team. Pick a project and describe the request in detail. The bot replies that it is preparing the plan, and when it is ready you get a 🧩 Plan ready message with the parts, how many run at once and the final check command. Nothing runs until you tap 🚀 Start the team.
While it runs, you hear about the moments that matter:
- A part that needs a hand comes with 🔁 Retry, ⏭ Skip and 📥 Accept buttons.
- When the team finishes, you get how many parts merged, the branch name and, if there is no pull request yet, a 🔀 Open PR button.
- If the team stops, you get told that too.
If you want to understand what happens inside a parallel run, Parallel coding agents and Git worktrees for parallel agents explain the idea.
/night: queue work for the night shift
/night shows the state of the night shift: whether it is on and its hours, plus the tasks in the queue. ➕ Add task asks for a project and a task, and ▶️ Start now starts the queue right away if the shift is not already running.
Overnight, agents commit their work but don’t push, and approval requests are not approved for you. In the morning you get a desktop notification and a short summary on Telegram with the counts. The night shift is part of the Pro plan.
/status, /help and /cancel
/status lists running agents briefly, /help explains what the bot can do, and /cancel drops a question the bot is waiting on.
Telegram or the AgentVera mobile app?
AgentVera also has a mobile app for iOS and Android. Both reach the agents on your computer through the AgentVera server, and you can use both at once.
- Telegram is for quick work: a notification, a one-tap approval, a short reply, a new task with /new.
- The mobile app is the full remote: a chat, terminal and diff for every agent, files, photos and voice messages, Git and Docker, undo, tasks and the night shift. Turn on Control from your phone in the desktop app’s settings and sign in to the app with the same account.
The AgentVera mobile app guide walks through setting it up and what each screen does.
Common mistakes
- Letting the computer sleep. The agents run on your machine. If it sleeps, nothing happens until you wake it.
- Turning on every notification and then muting the chat. Keep the minimum turn length and turn off what you never act on, so the messages you get are worth opening.
- Sending vague tasks from the phone. Typing on a phone pushes you toward short tasks. “Fix the login” is not enough for /new or /team; name the file, the bug and how to check it.
- Approving blind. Before you tap Approve on a command you don’t recognize, open 📄 Last reply or 🧾 Changes to see what the agent is doing.
- Expecting Telegram to replace the desktop. Reviewing a large diff or resolving a conflict is a job for the desk, or at least for the mobile app’s diff view. Telegram keeps the agents moving until you get there.
Checklist
- Signed in to AgentVera in the desktop app
- Bot connected and Send test received
- Notification events picked, minimum turn length set
- Reply excerpt on or off, depending on what you’re comfortable sending
- A separate topic per agent turned on
- Computer set not to sleep while agents work
Wrapping up
Controlling Claude Code from your phone is less about coding on a small screen and more about not leaving agents waiting. Notifications tell you when something needs you, approvals take one tap, and /new, /team and /night let you hand off the next job while you are away. It isn’t limited to Claude Code either: /agents lists the Codex and other agents you run in AgentVera too, with the same cards. If you’d like to build something with Telegram rather than use it as a remote, see Build a Telegram bot with AI.
You can start with AgentVera for free and check the plans when you need the night shift or parallel teams.