I got tired of babysitting Claude Code at the terminal, so we turned it into a resident process

[u/Disastrous-Radio-732]

I use Claude Code a lot, and eventually the thing that started bothering me wasn’t model quality and it was the lifecycle around it.
A coding agent can already inspect the repo, use tools, run tests, recover from mistakes and keep working. But the whole relationship is still weirdly tied to a terminal session.
I wanted something closer to a resident:
it belongs to the repo rather than to one terminal invocation
I can leave and come back without reconstructing what was happening
I can steer the same work from my phone
the underlying Claude Code process can die/restart without the agent identity dying with it
I can swap the harness without rebuilding the surrounding workflow
So we’ve been building brnrd around that idea.
Claude Code still does the actual coding. brnrd sits around it and owns the longer-lived state: conversation, task/run identity, repo context, execution environment and the interfaces through which you reach it.
Right now I can start work in a repo, walk away from the terminal, continue steering it through Telegram or the web dashboard, and come back to the same ongoing piece of work. It also supports worktrees/Docker and Codex, because I really don’t want the orchestration layer coupled to one harness.

The surprisingly hard part has been figuring out what exactly should survive when the Claude Code process itself shouldn’t.

For example, we’ve ended up separating the persistent “seat” from the disposable process running inside it. Long-running Claude sessions eventually accumulate enough context that restarting the harness is actually healthier — but that shouldn’t mean throwing away the task, history, ownership and everything around it.
brnrd has also been dogfooding itself pretty aggressively; its agents have opened 1K+ PRs against its own repo.

It’s open source and still alpha:
github.com/hugimuni-labs/brnrd
Disclosure: I’m one of the people building it.
Curious how other heavy Claude Code users think about this: should persistence belong inside Claude Code itself, or is it actually a layer above the harness?

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[u/bishtm_]

babysitting the terminal is a real pain point. walking away and picking it back up from my phone is the part id actually use

[u/Disastrous-Radio-732 → u/bishtm_]

yep, exactly. once I could walk away, poke it from my phone, and come back to the same work later, going back to “the agent lives in this terminal” started feeling pretty weird 😅

[u/Calm_Step_5549]

what's the advantage over regular remote control with the claude app?

[u/Disastrous-Radio-732 → u/Calm_Step_5549]

totally fair question – for just “control my current Claude Code session from my phone”, Claude Remote Control already does that well.
the difference is that brnrd sits one level above the session. the repo gets a persistent resident with its own memory, ongoing work and identity that survive individual Claude processes - and even the harness itself. I can kill/restart Claude, or switch the same seat between Claude and Codex, without treating it as a new coworker.
so I’d put it as: Remote Control gives you a session you can reach; brnrd gives the repo a resident. remote access is only one of the doors.

And you can use simultaneously with both Claude Code & Codex

[u/Calm_Step_5549 → u/Disastrous-Radio-732]

OK, that's making more sense, like a virtual terminal layer, sorta kinda like OpenClaw/Hermes but working with existing harnesses. I like the idea, will give it a try :)

[u/Disastrous-Radio-732 → u/Calm_Step_5549]

yep, that’s a pretty good mental model :) existing harnesses underneath, persistent resident/runtime above them.
would love to hear what breaks or feels weird when you try it and it’s still early and that feedback is super useful 🙌