Your Own Computer's Agent, From Anywhere: You Can Put Remote Desktop Away 🛰️

A familiar routine: you start Claude Code or Codex on the computer at your desk, give it a long task, and leave. Later, on the train or on the sofa, you want to know how it is going. So you open a remote desktop app on your phone, wait for a picture of your whole desktop to arrive, pinch-zoom into a terminal window, and try to type a reply on a phone keyboard into a screen that was made for a 27-inch monitor.

It works, more or less. It is also the wrong tool for the job. You do not need to see your desktop. You need to talk to the agent that is running on it.

That is what AgentAura does with your own Mac, and increasingly with your Windows PC: the agent keeps running on your computer, with your files and your own Claude Code or Codex login, and you talk to it from your phone as a chat.

---

🖥️ What Remote Desktop Is Really Doing

A remote desktop app copies your computer's screen to your phone as a video stream and sends your taps back as mouse and keyboard events. For an agent conversation, that means:

• Reading a terminal through a video feed. Text arrives as pixels, sized for a big monitor, on a six-inch screen.
• Typing into a remote window. Every character goes from the phone keyboard into a terminal that has no idea it is being used from a phone.
• Paying for the whole screen. The stream carries everything that changes on the desktop, which is heavy on a mobile connection and on your battery.
• Keeping a desktop session open. The computer has to stay logged in and visible for there to be anything to stream.

None of that is a criticism of remote desktop. It is the right tool for driving a graphical app you cannot reach any other way. It is just a long way round for a conversation.

---

💬 Talk to the Agent, Not to the Screen

On a Mac, AgentAura can run the agent as a local process on the machine itself. In the app this is Run the agent on this Mac:

• It uses the Claude Code and Codex installed on your Mac, unmodified, signed in with your own account. Your login stays on the Mac; AgentAura does not hold it or pass it anywhere.
• It picks up the conversations already stored on the Mac. A session you started in Terminal or in your editor shows up in AgentAura's history, and you can continue it.
• It costs nothing in AgentAura. There is no server to rent; your Claude or Codex plan is your own.

Then one switch makes it reachable from your other devices. On the Mac's card, the Other devices row starts out as "Off — this agent is only reachable on this Mac". Press Turn on, and the Mac registers with your AgentAura account and becomes reachable through a Cloudflare Tunnel. Your iPhone or iPad, signed in to the same account, now lists My Mac next to any other agents, and you chat with it the same way.

When your phone and your Mac are on the same Wi-Fi, the app connects to the Mac directly over the local network instead of going through the tunnel, which makes the history and replies noticeably quicker.

---

🔄 Why There Is Nothing to Wait For

When your phone talks to My Mac, it is not looking at a copy. It is asking the Mac:

• The conversation list is the Mac's. It comes from the Claude Code and Codex history on the Mac, so a session you started at your desk five minutes ago is already there.
• The work happens on the Mac. The agent reads and edits files on the Mac, runs commands there, and uses the memory files that live there.
• The conversation stays in the Mac's own history. What you say from the phone is part of the same Claude Code or Codex session on the Mac, so it is still there when you sit back down.

So the practical loop is simple. Start a task in Terminal before you leave. Check on it and steer it from your phone on the way. Continue at your desk when you are back.

---

🛠️ Setting It Up on a Mac

You need:

Then:

1. Open AgentAura on the Mac, choose Run the agent on this Mac, and press Start the local agent.
2. On the Mac's card, find Other devices and press Turn on. When it shows Reachable, it is ready.
3. On your iPhone or iPad, open AgentAura with the same account. My Mac is in the list; open it and start talking.

A few things worth knowing:

• The Mac has to be awake, with the app running. It is your computer doing the work, so a Mac that is asleep or shut down has nobody home. When it wakes, it checks back in by itself.
• Up to five computers per account. A computer registered this way does not take up your free agent slot and does not need Pro.
• Turn off on the same row removes the Mac from your account; your phone stops listing it.

---

🪟 What You Can Do With a Windows PC Today

The Windows app runs the agent on the PC too: press Use This PC (it needs Node.js and npm, and Claude Code or Codex installed). What it does not have yet is the Other devices switch, so your phone cannot talk to the Windows PC's own agent directly the way it can with a Mac. What it can do is make sure your work on the PC follows you:

• Soul: conversations, backed up to your own storage. Connect a storage bucket of your own (an S3-compatible one such as Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3) and the PC's conversations are backed up to it as you go. They appear under Soul on your other devices, where you can open one and carry on with the agent you use there: your Mac, or a server.
• Memory: the agents' memory files, backed up beside them. With Back up this computer's memory automatically on, the PC backs up its agents' memory files every 30 minutes. You can restore them onto another computer, with a preview of anything that would conflict before it is applied.
• From a Mac: Other computers. In the Mac app's history, Add a computer scans another computer's Claude Code and Codex conversations over SSH and lets you continue them on the Mac. It uses key-based login only, so run ssh-copy-id to the PC first if it asks for a password.

The Mac app has the same Soul and Memory backups, so a Mac and a Windows PC can carry each other's conversations and memory through your bucket.

---

🔐 Where Everything Goes

• Between your phone and your Mac, the connection runs through Cloudflare's network unless the two are on the same local network. Either way, the Mac's agent only answers requests that carry your account's token.
• Your Claude Code and Codex logins stay on your computer. The local agent runs the CLIs as they are, with the sign-in already on the machine.
• Soul and Memory go to your own bucket, under your storage account, not to ours.

---

🧭 When Remote Desktop Still Earns Its Place

Keep it for what it is good at: clicking through a graphical app, changing a setting that only has a window, helping someone see what is on their screen. For checking on an agent, answering its questions, and pushing a task along while you are away from your desk, a conversation with the agent itself is the better tool, and it is the one this update puts on your phone.

New to AgentAura? Start with the quick start. If you would rather run your agent on a server than on your own computer, see Getting a Server for AgentAura.