Fair point technically, but I think the value proposition isn't the persistent session, rathere it's the abstraction layer. Screen/tmux assumes you know what commands to run. This assumes you know what outcome you want. For someone like me who came to coding late and doesn't have 20 years of muscle memory with terminal tools, the inefficiency in transport is more than offset by the efficiency in intent. Different tools for different people.

tmux/screen is literally less work to use than this thing.

You need to learn to type less than a dozen total characters including the command.

Not to mention a lot of terminals automatically integrate with tmux so you don’t have to do anything but open the terminal.

Sure, different tools for different people. And if you want to use a new fangled triangular wheel they just invented, no one’s going to stop you

It’s still a triangular wheel at the end of the day

Fair enough mate, I should learn tmux properly regardless. My point was less about this specific tool and more that the barrier to entry for dev tooling I feel keeps dropping, which I think is net positive even if it means some inefficient abstractions along the way. Appreciate the nudge.

Well it DOES have less storage than a Nomad (hence lame), but this way you don't need to pay for a public IP address, or for a VPS to run Wireguard on, or for a commercial VPN solution, and then install a terminal emulator on your phone and set up SSH keys.

That’s not at all how this works. Commands are relayed through Anthropic’s servers with a client polling mechanism.

Yes, that's a significantly less efficient way to manage persistent sessions

I'm pretty sure "how do we disallow running our agents in screen sessions" is on a jira board at some places

Right, that's the "most inefficient way possible" (though personally I disagree, there are more inefficient ways to be found).

You could put the transport protocol on the blockchain, I suppose

You are making me more creative.

we can upload snapshot of zip files to blockchain, then notify customer via servers

I'm probably 10 years out of date. Are ethereum smart contracts still a thing? I'm sure you could deploy one of those for every agent session to handle the notifications

Even better, train an entirely new LLM with your prompt added to its data set. It will be imbued with its own latent sense of purpose. All you need to do after that is type "let there be light!"

I’m running the agent in tmux in a colo. When I’m at a computer I use that, when I’m on the go the RC app is more convenient

People tried reinventing terminals, SSH, and tmux for phones. It's a pretty terrible experience using your thumbs. And it takes significant know-how to set up.

And in modern stacks, it almost necessitates a man in the middle - tailscale is common but it's still a central provider. So is it really the most inefficient way possible?