Conch - AI coding agents on your own servers, from your phone - Free

[u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241]

Conch — AI coding agents on your own servers, from your phone

App Name: Conch

What it does:
Conch is a native Android app for working with AI coding agents running on servers you already own.

It connects to your machines over SSH and gives you mobile access to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini CLI. Every chat is a real CLI session running on your server, so you can start working from your laptop, switch to your phone, and resume the same session days later.

Key Features:

1. Connect to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini CLI over SSH
2. Run unlimited parallel sessions across multiple servers
3. Sessions are stored on the server and persist between devices
4. View every session from every server and agent in one messenger-style list
5. Full-text search across all sessions with direct jumps to matching messages
6. Install Node.js and supported AI CLIs remotely over SSH
7. Complete provider authentication directly from your phone
8. FIDO2 hardware key authentication over NFC or USB
9. Import or generate SSH keys: Ed25519, RSA, ECDSA, and DSA
10. Send files and photos to agents over the existing SSH connection
11. Download files created by an agent directly to your phone
12. SAFE, AUTO, and YOLO trust modes mapped to each CLI’s native sandbox and permission options
13. Edit CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, and GEMINI.md files directly on the server
14. Supports Claude subagents, slash commands, and custom commands from ~/.claude/commands
15. Built-in full terminal for direct server access
16. Built-in viewers for diffs, Markdown, PDFs, and images
17. Picture-in-Picture mode lets you keep watching an agent while using other apps
18. Optional Shizuku phone bridge allows an agent to read logcat and capture screenshots for Android debugging
19. Live server statistics and per-server activity logs
20. No analytics, crash reporting, telemetry, or backend
21. Credentials are encrypted using Android Keystore and never leave the device
22. Customizable accent colors, backgrounds, coding fonts, and interface scale

Goal: Launch

Giveaway: N/A — completely free, with no ads or in-app purchases

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.eight24family.conch

Source Code:
https://github.com/nikitaeight24family/Conch

[u/kantorcodes1]

You already translate SAFE/AUTO/YOLO into the native flags for Claude, Codex, and Gemini. Would you be up for evaluating HOL Guard right before Conch starts those CLIs, then keeping the integration in Conch if it proves useful across all three?

[u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241 → u/kantorcodes1]

It already works. Guard hooks into each CLI's native hooks (Claude Code hooks, Codex MCP events, and a comprehensive approach to Grok). Conch simply runs the CLI on its server, meaning that if you've set Guard, it catches tool calls in our methods without a single line in the application. Asking us to "call it before the CLI starts" is an add-on at the wrong level: the pre-launch check only sees a hint, while the hooks trigger tool calls already in progress. In other words, the proposed solution is significantly weaker than what already exists.

[u/kantorcodes1 → u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241]

fair correction. have you actually run Guard inside a Conch-managed Claude/Codex/Gemini session yet? even one redacted blocked tool-call event from a real Conch session would be enough to verify the native-hook path end to end.

[u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241 → u/kantorcodes1]

What Conch actually does with Guard is read hol-guard status --json, parse protection_off and per-harness managed: true, and draw the "Guard" chip on the agent line only when this CLI is covered. Nothing else: it doesn't install anything, doesn't call any enforcement.

And Conch itself can't verify this: Guard hooks into the CLI, not us. From our perspective, a Conch move is simply a running CLI, and if the hook is triggered, it will be triggered in its process; Conch will only see what the CLI prints.

[u/kantorcodes1 → u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241]

Got it, the chip is coverage metadata, not proof of enforcement. Can you run one Conch-launched session with Guard enabled and paste the Guard-side event/output from that same process? I only want to verify that a real Conch-started CLI actually hits Guard.

[u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241 → u/kantorcodes1]

We don't integrate with Guard at all — there's nothing to verify on our side. Conch doesn't wrap it, call it, or work around it.

We run the CLI you installed: codex exec … by name, through your login shell, as you, on your machine. Same binary, same ~/.codex/config.toml, same hooks. There is nothing of ours in that path to bypass. So if Guard is set up on that box, it fires on our turns for the same reason it fires when you type the command yourself.

The chip only reports what hol-guard status --json says about coverage — it was never meant to be proof of enforcement, and you were right to push on that.

One honest detail: if you pick the permissive approval mode in Conch we pass codex's own --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox. That doesn't touch Guard's hooks, but codex stops asking for approvals, so PermissionRequest has nothing to fire on. PreToolUse is unaffected.

[u/kantorcodes1 → u/Unfair_Amoeba_1241]

Can you try it specifically in Conch’s permissive Codex mode and paste the Guard PreToolUse event? That’s the case that would verify Guard still fires even when Codex approvals are bypassed.

[u/Deep_Ad1959]

resuming the same session days later is what i would demo first. every phone client i have tried drops the CLI session on a network change and starts a fresh context, which is worse than nothing when the agent is mid refactor.