How to Control Amp (Sourcegraph) from Your iPhone — No SSH Required

Amp is Sourcegraph's AI coding agent. It became publicly available recently, which means most of the internet has not yet caught up — the guides that exist are mostly about SSH workarounds that involve Tailscale, port forwarding, or keeping a terminal client open on your phone full-time.

Tactic Remote already supports Amp natively. The same iOS app that connects to Claude Code and Codex can connect to an Amp session running on your Mac, Linux machine, or Windows PC. This guide covers the five-minute setup — and is honest about what the current limits are.

What Amp is and why controlling it from a phone matters

Amp is a terminal agent. Like Claude Code and Codex, it runs on your development machine inside a PTY, reads your codebase, edits files, runs shell commands, and asks for your approval before doing anything risky. You do not install it in your IDE; you run it in a terminal and talk to it with natural language.

The implication is the same one that applies to all terminal agents: the job starts on your machine, but you do not need to be watching your machine the whole time. A refactor can run for twenty minutes. A test suite can be getting debugged for an hour. During that time, Amp only actually needs you at a handful of decision points: whether to delete a file, whether a proposed function looks right, whether to keep going down a particular path.

Watching a terminal on a laptop for those few moments is a bad use of time. Having your phone surface them as push notifications — and letting you respond with a tap — is a much better loop. That is what Tactic Remote is built around.

The limits of the SSH + Tailscale workaround

The current workaround for "Amp from phone" is to SSH into your machine using a client like Termius or Blink, then attach to a tmux or screen session where Amp is running. Add Tailscale or a VPN if you want access from outside your local network.

It works. But it has friction that compounds quickly:

• No push notifications. Your iPhone will not buzz when Amp finishes or stops waiting for you. You have to manually reattach and look.
• Approval requires typing. When Amp asks "Delete src/legacy/auth.ts? (y/n)", you tap into a phone keyboard and type a character in a tiny terminal window. That is the full experience.
• iOS kills background SSH. If your phone goes to sleep or you switch apps, many SSH clients disconnect or stop rendering. You need the phone open, screen on, in front of you — which defeats most of the point.
• No readable output. Amp's output is ANSI-formatted for a large terminal. On a 6-inch phone screen, reading streaming diffs and file paths in raw monospace is tiring fast.
• No multi-agent awareness. If you run Claude Code in one tmux window and Amp in another, your SSH client does not understand that distinction. You manage it all manually.

None of these are blockers if you only check on Amp occasionally. But if you want to actually work from a phone — launch a task, leave your desk, respond to prompts, then come back to review what the agent produced — the workaround falls apart.

Connect Amp via Tactic Remote — 5-minute LAN setup

The fastest path: your Mac or Linux machine and your iPhone are on the same Wi-Fi network.

Step 1: Start the Tactic Remote server on your host machine.

On macOS, the menu bar companion app is the easiest option. Download it from tacticremote.com/download, install it, and click Start Server. The status panel shows your local IP and port 8765, and a QR code for pairing.

Alternatively, from any terminal on macOS or Linux:

npx tacticremote

This starts the server immediately. No installation step, no configuration file, no WSL2 required. The same command works on Windows as well — see the Windows setup guide for Windows-specific details.

Step 2: Open the Tactic Remote iOS app and pair.

Download the app from the App Store (search "Tactic Remote" or use this link). It is free. Open it, and either tap the nearby device that appears automatically via mDNS discovery, or tap the QR scanner and point it at the code on your desktop. Pairing usually completes in a few seconds.

Your iPhone and your Mac or Linux machine do not need to share an Apple ID. Discovery is handled entirely by mDNS/Bonjour over the local network.

Step 3: Create a new session and pick Amp.

Inside the app, tap New Session. A per-session picker lets you choose the agent: Claude Code, Codex, or Amp. Select Amp. The server launches Amp in a PTY on your host machine, exactly as if you had started it in a terminal yourself. From here, you are in control.

Send a prompt from your phone and watch Amp get to work. Output appears in Chat Mode as readable bubbles — tool calls (file edits, shell commands, reads) are iconified so they do not flood the view, and long Thinking sections collapse. If you want the raw ANSI stream, switch to Terminal Mode at any time.

When Amp stops and asks for your approval, your phone buzzes with a push notification. Tap it, read the proposed action, and approve or reject with one tap. Amp continues. You never had to be watching.

Access from anywhere with Cloudflare Tunnel

LAN pairing works when you are on the same network as your development machine. For everything else — working from a different room, a coffee shop, or traveling — enable Cloudflare Tunnel.

In the macOS companion app, flip the Cloudflare Tunnel toggle. The app negotiates an outbound connection to Cloudflare (no router ports opened, no firewall exceptions needed), generates a temporary public address, and folds it into the pairing QR code. On your iPhone, scan the code, and the connection is encrypted end to end through Cloudflare.

From the CLI, pass the flag:

npx tacticremote --cloudflare-tunnel

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Cloudflare does not store your session content. There is no Tactic Remote cloud relay in the middle — the tunnel is a direct path from your phone to your machine through Cloudflare's edge.

For shared setups or always-on machines, enable API Key auth in the app settings and enter the key when pairing on iPhone. This lets you keep a server running without an interactive QR flow every time.

Running Amp alongside Claude Code and Codex

Tactic Remote treats each session independently, with its own agent. You can have an Amp session running on one branch and a Claude Code session running on another, and switch between them with a single tap from the sessions sidebar.

The practical use case: parallel exploration. If you are trying to fix a gnarly TypeScript type error and want to see two different approaches simultaneously, you can:

1. Create two Git worktrees on separate branches from the same repository.
2. Open a Claude Code session pointed at the first worktree.
3. Open an Amp session pointed at the second.
4. Send the same initial prompt to both.
5. Walk away. Your phone will notify you when either agent stops for approval or finishes.

When you come back, you are not sorting through two messy terminal windows. You have two sessions in Tactic Remote, each with its own readable output stream, its own diff summary in Mobile Git Review, and its own approval queue. You review both and decide which direction is closer to what you want.

This is the workflow that raw SSH simply cannot structure. There is no SSH client that knows these are two parallel Amp and Claude Code runs against the same repo, with notifications tied to each one.

What is working and what the current limits are

Tactic Remote's Amp support uses the same PTY bridge as Claude Code and Codex, so the core flow is solid:

• Session creation, Chat Mode, Terminal Mode — all working.
• Push notifications for finish / approval / exit — working.
• Quick Prompts (saved one-tap instructions you reuse across sessions) — working.
• Mobile Git Review (see changed files and diffs) — working.
• Cloudflare Tunnel, API Key auth — working.
• Multi-session and multi-agent switching — working.

The honest limits:

Amp is new. The agent itself is a very recent release. As Sourcegraph ships updates to its CLI behavior, there may be edge cases in how Amp's output is parsed and displayed in Chat Mode. If you see something unexpected, the raw terminal (Terminal Mode) always shows you exactly what Amp is outputting.

Windows is a Preview. The Windows companion app (available since 1.8.0) is stable for Claude Code and Codex; Amp on Windows has the same underlying support, but has seen less real-world usage than the macOS and Linux paths. If Amp runs cleanly in your Windows terminal, it will run in Tactic Remote, but report anything unusual.

Multi-agent agent-specific UI. Tactic Remote deliberately keeps the mobile interface consistent across agents rather than building bespoke UI for each one. You do not get Amp-specific panels or Sourcegraph-specific views. The tradeoff is a stable, learnable interface that ages better as agents evolve.

One paired host at a time per device. Tactic Remote connects your iPhone to one host at a time. If you need to control agents on two separate machines, you would switch between connections. This is a deliberate design choice for simplicity; fleet management is a different use case.

Get started

The iOS app is free on the App Store. The server — companion app or npx tacticremote — is also free. Pro pricing ($2.99/month or $19.99/year) unlocks advanced features; the core connection flow including Amp support is available on the free tier.

Five minutes to pair. If you already have Amp installed and running on your machine, the only new thing you need is the Tactic Remote server and the iOS app. The agent itself stays exactly where it is.

Related reading:

• How to run Claude Code from your iPhone — the foundational setup guide for the full Tactic Remote workflow
• Remote-controlling Claude Code, Codex, and Amp on Windows — Windows-specific setup including the companion app and ConPTY troubleshooting
• Cloudflare Tunnel setup — deeper guide to encrypted remote access without opening router ports