AI coding agents quietly changed what people want from a terminal. When Claude Code or Codex grinds away unattended for ten minutes, the real constraint isn't typing — it's being tethered to the Mac that's running them. VibeTunnel inverts that: the terminal follows you, streaming a live local shell into any browser so you can approve a prompt or kill a runaway agent from your phone.
What Sets It Apart
- It forwards a real PTY, not a log tail. Output and input are proxied over WebSocket, so the browser gets a fully interactive session — scrollback, control keys, resizing — rather than a read-only feed.
- The
vtwrapper makes adoption nearly free: prefix any command (vt claude,vt npm run dev) and that session becomes reachable, with no per-tool integration. - Git follow mode keeps a main checkout in sync with whichever worktree branch you switch to, which matters when an agent is hopping between branches while you watch remotely.
- Sessions record to asciinema format, so a long agent run can be replayed and shared instead of scrolling a dead buffer.
Where It Fits
It sits between raw SSH (powerful but clumsy on a phone) and screen-sharing (heavy, not terminal-aware). The menu-bar app on macOS is the polished path; a headless npm package covers Linux servers and CI-style boxes.
Great Fit / Look Elsewhere
Great fit if you run autonomous coding agents or long builds on a Mac and want to supervise them from a browser or phone, or expose one machine's terminal across your network. Look elsewhere if you need Windows (unsupported), an Intel Mac native app (Apple Silicon only), or a hardened multi-user remote-shell service — the iOS app is still work-in-progress and the security model assumes you control the network or tunnel.
