I spent more time in Claude Code on my phone this week than at my laptop. That’s a sentence I couldn’t have written a year ago and probably wouldn’t have predicted six months ago. But here I am, building real things from a six-inch screen, and starting to wonder if this is just the shape it stays in.

The setup is dumb-simple. Mac mini at home doing the heavy lifting. Tailscale tunneling me in from anywhere. Claude Code running on the mini, controlled from my phone over a Tailscale URL. The mini compiles. The mini runs the dev server. The mini hosts the database. My phone is just the seat I’m sitting in.

And it works. I’m not patching a broken thing because my laptop happens to be in another room. I’m fully building features from my phone — because the model is doing the writing, the mini is doing the running, and what’s left for me — review, decide, redirect — fits a phone fine.

The pieces aren’t new. The middle is.Link to heading

Five years ago this setup would have been a hack. Two years ago it would have been a weekend project I gave up on. Now it’s just what I do.

None of the pieces are exotic. Tailscale’s been around forever. The Mac mini is a $600 computer. Claude Code on my phone is just a browser tab on a Tailscale URL. The reason any of this works now is the model in the middle — finally good enough to be the thing actually writing the code. Without that, “phone as control surface” collapses into “tiny terminal nobody wants to use.”

But with that, the whole stack rearranges. The laptop stops being the center. The mini becomes the muscle. The phone becomes the seat. And I keep ending up in that seat — at the kitchen counter, on a walk, in line somewhere, in bed before I’m fully awake — because the seat is wherever I am.

What I notice when I check the dayLink to heading

When I think about “needing a laptop,” I mean a screen big enough to scan a forty-file diff. When I think about “needing the Mac mini,” I mean horsepower I can reach from anywhere. When I think about “needing my phone,” I mean basically all the time.

That breakdown wasn’t a decision. I didn’t sit down and design a workflow. It crept in. Six months ago I would have called this a backup mode — laptop is the real thing, phone is for emergencies. Now I’m not sure which one is the backup.

The honest version: my laptop is on my desk right now, closed. I’ll probably open it tonight to review what got built today. But the actual work — the thinking, the iterating, the deciding — happened from my phone while the mini ran flat out at home.

Is this the future or just my current detour?Link to heading

I keep poking at this question and I don’t have a clean answer.

Maybe it’s just where I land for a while. Maybe in two years the agents are good enough that I’m not even checking from my phone — they’re shipping things and pinging me only when something needs a decision. Maybe smart glasses arrive and the phone gets demoted the same way the laptop did. Maybe the model gets unreliable in some new way and pulls me back to the laptop full-time for verification I can’t do glancing at a notification.

What I’m sure of is the direction, not the destination. The center of how I work moved off the laptop and onto (phone + Tailscale + remote machine), and I didn’t notice it happen. That’s the part that feels like something. Big shifts in how I work used to come with a new tool I had to learn. This one came with three tools I already had quietly rearranging themselves into a different shape.

I’ll keep using the laptop. I’ll keep buying laptops, probably. But when I think about upgrading, the question I’m asking has changed. It’s not “what’s my next laptop” anymore. It’s what’s my next mini and what’s my next phone. The laptop is the one I’m not really thinking about.

That feels like something. I’m not sure what yet.