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Follow your agents from your iPhone

In this tutorial you put Agents on your iPhone, find the agent you started in Your first agent, and start a second one from the phone. It takes about ten minutes. The same steps work on an iPad.

What you'll have at the end: your Mac's projects and agents on your phone, and a second agent started and finished from the phone without going back to the Mac.

The project on the phone, with two finished agents under Complete

Before you start

  • You have finished Your first agent, so your Mac has a project with an agent in it.
  • Agents Host runs on your Mac, and the Agents window is paired with it. See Set up Agents on this Mac.
  • Your iPhone and your Mac are on the same Wi-Fi network.
  • You have Xcode and a free Apple developer account, so that Xcode can put an app on your own phone.

1. Put Agents on your iPhone

Agents is not in the App Store yet, so you build it onto your phone from the same copy of the source you built the Mac app from.

  1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac with a cable, and unlock it.
  2. In Xcode, choose the Remote scheme, then choose your iPhone as the destination.
  3. Choose Product ▸ Run.

The first time, Xcode asks you to pick a team for signing. Pick your own. Your phone may also ask you to trust the developer, under Settings ▸ General ▸ VPN & Device Management.

You should see Agents open on your phone and say Connect to your agents.

2. Show a code on your Mac

The phone reaches your agents through your control plane, the one Agents Host runs on your Mac. Only a device you have paired can reach it, and you pair it once, by scanning a code.

In the Agents window on your Mac, open Settings ▸ Control plane, click Show beside Clients, and click Pair a Device….

You should see a code to scan, good for five minutes.

3. Pair the phone

On your phone, tap Scan the Code and point the camera at the code. The first time, the phone asks to use the camera; allow it.

You should see your phone listed under Clients on the Mac, as a Device, and the phone show Projects, with the project you made in the first tutorial.

4. Find your first agent

Tap your project.

You should see the agent from the first tutorial in the Complete group, with its summary under its name.

The weather-app project on the phone, with the first agent under Complete

Tap it to read the whole conversation, exactly as it is on the Mac: the summary, the agent's explanation, and the fix it suggests you commit next.

The finished conversation on the phone

5. Start an agent from the phone

  1. Go back to the list, tap the project to unfold it, and tap New session, the first row under it.
  2. Leave Runtime as it is. It is the runtime your Mac has set up. If you open the row, the runtimes are in two runs, Available and Out, with what is wrong with each out one said under its name, exactly as the Mac's own chooser shows them. An out one is still there to pick: a session on it takes the message and the runtime says no until its plan is back.

  3. In What should it do?, type:

    Add a test for the low temperature in Celsius, and run the tests.

  4. Tap the arrow to start it.

The new agent form: Runtime, Worktree, Mode, Model and Effort, above the prompt

You should see the new agent appear under Working, and its conversation fill in as it reads the code.

6. Watch it finish, and answer it if it asks

Whether the agent stops to ask before it changes a file depends on Mode on the form. With Auto, as in the picture above, Claude goes ahead with changes inside the project without asking. With a mode that asks, a card appears in its conversation naming what it wants to do, and you tap Yes, just as you clicked it on the Mac.

You should see the agent end in Complete, with what it added and a suggestion of what to say next. On the Mac, the same agent shows the same conversation.

The second agent's finished conversation on the phone

7. Take it with you

Away from home, the phone reaches the control plane at its address when it can. When it cannot, because the control plane is on your Mac at home, it can go through the relay instead, through your own iCloud account, and says Away — slower, through iCloud. In this build Agents Host cannot switch the relay on yet; see How the phone and iPad reach your agents.

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