Pocketty is a $99 iPhone SSH app that watches coding agents
Pocketty is a $99 one-time iPhone and iPad SSH terminal built on Ghostty's engine and the herdr agent manager, which lets a developer answer a blocked coding agent from a phone and receive encrypted push notifications when one needs attention.
Image: Pocketty
Why it mattersA team that leaves long-running coding agents on a laptop now has a way to answer them from a phone, so an agent can finish its task while the developer is away from the desk instead of pausing until they return.
A coding agent that runs for an hour on a laptop sits idle whenever it stops to ask a question, and the person who runs it is often not at the desk when it does.
Pocketty is an SSH terminal for iPhone and iPad announced on Hacker News this week, where the Show HN post has 28 points. The author is Luke Edwards, who says he built it on paternity leave so he could answer coding agents during short gaps in the day. It costs $99 as a one-time purchase during the launch window, $129 after, with a 14-day free trial and every future update included. No subscription, no account and no email are required.
What it does
The app opens a direct SSH connection from the phone to a computer the owner already runs, with no Pocketty server in the keystroke path. It renders the terminal with Ghostty's engine drawn through Metal, supports Nerd Fonts and ligatures, and takes real keyboard input for Ctrl, Alt, Escape, Tab, arrow keys and the symbols a terminal needs. A file browser with syntax colouring, a localhost port preview and diffs by agent turn, session or uncommitted change let a review happen on the phone before the agent is allowed to continue.
A separate daemon integrates with herdr, an agent pane manager, and shows each agent's state as working, blocked, done or idle. Pocketty lists Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Grok, Qwen Code, Kimi Code, Devin, Hermes and Antigravity as supported, and says it installs no hooks into any of their configuration files.
How the notifications stay private
The notification path is where Pocketty differs from a plain SSH client. The computer at home seals each alert with HPKE (X25519 and ChaCha20), a Cloudflare Worker relay forwards the sealed bytes without being able to read them, Apple Push Notification Service delivers to the phone, and a notification extension on the phone decrypts the message locally. Pocketty says the notifications never contain the text that was in the agent's pane. SSH keys are generated inside the iPhone's Secure Enclave, Face ID can gate their use, and host keys are pinned with manual approval for any change.
A developer who left an agent planning a refactor can be alerted the moment it blocks on a question, open the pane on a phone, type the answer in a real terminal and leave again. The $99 one-time price is cheaper than one month of most agent subscriptions, which makes trying it a small decision for a team. The limits are stated on the page: iOS and iPadOS only, Android not yet, and the notification channel needs either the Pocketty daemon or plain SSH already in place.
Source
Pocketty and the Show HN discussion.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
Get AI News in your inbox
New developer tools, model and agent releases, and how teams are actually using them to release software. Short, and only when there is something worth reading.
