alt Hacker NewsLaunch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere
Hey y’all, Kartik, Ishaan, and Christian from Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) here. We’re building a web and mobile agentic IDE for Claude Code and Codex that lets you run and interact with coding agents from anywhere. Omnara lets you run Claude Code and Codex sessions on your own machine, and exposes those sessions through a web and mobile interface so you can stay involved even when you’re away from your desk. Think of it like Claude Code Desktop or Conductor, except you can continue your sessions on your phone.
Here’s a demo of the web and mobile apps - https://youtu.be/R8Wmy4FLbhQ
We started using Claude Code early last year and quickly ran into a pattern: agents could work for long stretches on their own, but progress would stall whenever they needed follow-up input. If that happened while we were away from our desks, everything just paused. We looked at remote agent solutions like Codex Web and Devin, which were the main options at the time, but they ran in remote VMs, and we wanted our coding agent to run in our own environment. Our first attempt at solving this was a lightweight wrapper that streamed messages from the Claude Code CLI to a mobile app, but that approach ended up being fragile and hard to maintain.
As the Claude Agent SDK matured, it gave us enough control to rewrite Omnara from scratch and run the agent loop directly. We chose to build a GUI across web and mobile instead of a TUI or CLI, because we think GUIs are generally more ergonomic for working with agents and code, especially on mobile. We still preserve the main strength of CLIs and TUIs: running anywhere, including on headless machines.
Omnara keeps that property by running a small headless daemon on the user’s machine (or a remote VM) that hosts the agent loop. The daemon maintains an authenticated, outbound WebSocket connection to our server, which relays messages between the agent running on the user’s machine and any connected web or mobile clients. Because the daemon only makes outbound connections, there’s no need for exposed ports, SSH access, or tunneling on the user’s machine.
In our first version of Omnara, users liked that agent sessions ran in their own environment, but they still depended on the machine staying online. Some users ran Omnara on a remote machine that stayed up, which worked well for them, though most still did most of their work on laptops. In the current version, Omnara can continue an agent session in a hosted remote sandbox when your local machine goes offline.
The conversation state of an agent is already persisted on our server, and you can optionally enable cloud syncing for the working code. When syncing is enabled, Omnara creates git commits at each turn in the conversation and pushes them to our server, so execution can resume from the same state regardless of whether it continues locally or in the cloud. If you continue working in a remote sandbox, you can later pull any changes back into your local environment when you return to your machine. Environment parity in the sandbox isn’t perfect yet, but in practice, missing dependencies are usually easy to resolve by asking the agent to install them.
Another thing we learned from using the initial version of Omnara is that mobile is fine for quick interactions, but not great for extended back-and-forth. Users asked for a hands-free way to keep agents moving while walking, driving, or doing something else, which led us to add a voice agent. Coming from more traditional software engineering backgrounds, we honestly thought coding by talking to a voice agent would be gimmicky and added it mostly as a fallback.
What surprised us is how useful the voice agent ended up being in practice. When working with coding agents, being redundant and overly explicit usually helps, and people naturally give more detail when speaking than when typing. Going back and forth with the agent as the conversation unfolds tends to produce a much more solid plan than trying to one-shot it with a prompt (this could technically also be done over text, but talking and iterating over voice feels easier and more natural). It’s also just fun. Talking through an idea with an agent while out on a walk is a lot more enjoyable than staring at a terminal screen.
To try it out, open your terminal and download Omnara with
curl -fsSL https://omnara.com/install/install.sh | bash
Omnara is free for 10 agent sessions per month, then $20/month for unlimited sessions. When agents run in your own environment, you can use your existing Claude or Codex subscription, so there’s no need to pay us for additional tokens. If you use Claude Code or Codex, we’d love to hear your feedback on Omnara!
Comments
Congrats on the launch. I've been fooling around with using my pipecat MCP(https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat-mcp-server) with WebRTC. The WebRTC is hooked into a Webapp interface and this allows me to "talk" to different containers(projects) on my truenas.
I have just a list of chat sessions on the web app on all my projects. The webapp is modified to launch claude code daemons (borrowed from humanlayer/codelayer) and exposes the outbound STT from the WebRTC into a chat session.
- MCP Auth is via auth0
- Webapp itself is gated by a Bearer token.
This itself gets me pretty far. I am not sure what more this is offering?
My TTS/STT models are local by Kyutai and the voice agent's LLM between STT and TTS is used to determine some basic context: e.g. what project directories, mcp servers to select and what skills to use for launching the daemons.
Can you guys please make an iOS app that replicates the Claude code app to hook into this one problem my hat is that it can’t query live DB etc. all the things we need a persistent client based terminal session for. But the app is really slick, so it would be great to have it with the multiple threads sidebar, etc..
There's a lot of negative feedback in this thread, so let me say I'm really excited to try this! I have caring responsibilities at home that means I'm constantly switching between my laptop and phone. Claude code web has been a very useful tool for this, but it's not a great bit of software. Omnara looks much more configurable and thought out. I've looked for various solutions to this problem that just work, and nothing else mentioned in this thread fits the bill. Your demo looks like it nails it - I'm excited to try!
Feels expensive for something that an engineer can hack in a couple of ours with tailscale and Claude Code. Has potential though. At $9 I'd be totally in, but moving from CC's Max plan at $100, adding $20 makes me wanna just hack an alternative. Maybe I'm just cheap.
Pretty cool was just thinking about this yesterday if I could Claude code from my phone on the couch on side projects would be awesome
Why don’t use Happy Code? It’s open source and free to use: https://github.com/slopus/happy
Been looking for something like this - I feel like I lose a lot of work during lunch runs and on the commute home.
Woah, I had this exact idea, down to the tunneling and local machine! I basically just coded up a Tailscale + caffeinate harness for my agents and it's been working super well. Your UI looks great though, glad to see more players in this space!
I don't quite see the appeal, because Claude Code already supports something similar. They spin up container to make the changes in and then open a PR. I can just use the Claude iOS app to do this. My computer doesn't need to be running or exposed to the internet.
This project seems like a good idea that didn't have enough of a moat. I'd suggest trying to narrow your target customer from "engineers that want to manage agents on their phone" to "people trying to do some particular kind of task," so you can bake in more value add and automation. You're not going to beat the labs on general tools, but they're not going to be willing to narrow their target customer, so you'll always be able to win at the margins.
If you can see the messages unfortunately thats a deal breaker for me. If its encrypted end-to-end than I’m in.
I think the native Claude and Codex apps already do this for free. They even have the voice input.
I have been hungry to do more work from my cell phone. It's ridiculous to be forced to sit in front of a computer to work with AI.
My current solution is to have claude (--dangerously-skip-permissions) listen for messages in my slack DMs to myself and take action in response to those messages.
I would happily switch to something better.
Why is Omnara better?
How does this compare to Happy Coder? https://github.com/slopus/happy
How is this different from VibeTunnel which is not limited to just Claude and Codex, but brings your terminals with you on your phone using tailscale?
There's also Happy, Coder/Mux, and so many others that actually started out open-source and stayed that way and I can be sure my chats are not going to a 3rd party?
OpenCode is free and has an excellent front end for this kind of work
Built something like this that’s open source and free: https://github.com/saadnvd1/agent-os
I see the need and I'll probably give it a go, but how does Omnara handle users' data? Do you store my tokens, stuff about my project, etc.?
If I paste in something confidential, and Omnara suffers a breach tomorrow - will my conversation data be a part of it?
How does it compare to https://hapi.run/ ?
I have been pretty satisfied with it, and it’s free with unlimited sessions, so I need a good reason to switch
getting this error trying to connect github: github_unauthorized: GitHub OAuth error: The redirect_uri MUST match the registered callback URL for this application.
I think someone should also mention Happy (https://happy.engineering), which has decent mobile clients and is currently MIT-licensed.
Although I must say that Omnara's UI looks absolutely fantastic. Well done!
Open Source alternative: https://github.com/inercia/mitto
There's certainly something to the "mass delegation" trend. My best rn is on email: https://ai-chat.email
how is this a company?
i don't get all the hate in this thread. I literally was about to build this today, using my home server, tailscale, and some kind of web frontend. thanks for saving me time :)
just use spoq.dev
Another option that does all this and more for open code: https://github.com/btriapitsyn/openchamber
Not affiliated with that project, but have been using it for a few weeks and it blows every other 'GUI for the CLI agents' I've tried out of the water in terms of both features and just working snappily/consistently.
Also totally free, and actively being improved by the solo maintainer and an active community of contributors.
Omnara providing a tunnel for you is nice, but considering Tailscale is dead simple and free, feels hard to justify $20 a month for what looks like considerably less features than openchamber
great product.
try spoq.dev , it's free
I don't really understand the market for handoff of your vibe-coding session. Considering there's a need, does this use-case warrant a full blown SaaS solution?
Sidenote - is this novel enough to be backed by YC? Just seems like a feature that Anthropic/OpenAI could release any day.
So you're just a Claude Code wrapper? Question to YC: how did this get funded?
Its hilarious how there's 50 clones of the same thing in the comment section, yall need to go watch Peter Thiels talk at YC from 2011 or whenever. Be contrarian, stop building the obvious thing.
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I’ve been SSHing into my dev server off of my phone to run Claude Code while commuting, so this is a product that I would love to switch to. I can’t use the Claude iOS app due to the testing set up I have. That said I do have a couple of questions:
- Is it possible to completely disable or not use the remote sandbox features? I would never use them and would prefer my code stays on my device.
- For those of us that are using subscriptions, does it show our remaining usage? I would hate to run out of tokens in the middle of a session.
- One feature of the CC TUI I sorely missed on mobile is the ability to look up and directly reference files via “@“. Is any functionality like this planned?
- (This likely won’t affect my decision to use the service as I’ll just put it on a company card.) $20 per month for a service that runs CC on a remote machine in a convenient matter is steep but doable. Asking that same amount for a running code on my own server seems a bit unjustified, especially since this is pricier than the cost of a Claude pro subscription. Are there any plans to offer a cheaper tier for those of us that just want to run this on our own machines?