The pass in your pocket.
Cookbox.ai is an Android control surface for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and plain shell sessions running on machines you already own. It connects straight to them over SSH. There is no Cookbox account and no Cookbox relay.
What runs where
Nothing of yours runs on our infrastructure. The agent, the multiplexer and your code stay on your host; the phone is a client that connects to them and shows what they are doing.
| Piece | Lives on | Job |
|---|---|---|
| Cookbox.ai app | Your Android phone | Holds the SSH keys, draws the terminals, buzzes when a turn ends. |
| tmux or zellij | Your host | Keeps sessions alive between connections, so closing the app ends nothing. |
| Claude Code, Codex, Cursor | Your host | Does the work, under your own subscription and credentials. |
mps (moshpit) | Your host, optional | UDP transport with local echo, so typing survives a weak link and a roam. |
What the app does
- Saves SSH hosts and keys, pins each host key on first use, and refuses a changed one.
- Lists, creates, renames, resumes, detaches and closes tmux and zellij sessions.
- Shows what each agent is doing — working, waiting for you, or idle — and usage where the CLI exposes it.
- Keeps several terminals connected at once, reconnects them, and notifies when a watched agent stops.
- Uploads images and audio, takes dictation, and forwards a remote web service into the app or your browser.
- Lists what pm2 is running on the host, with CPU, memory, uptime and restarts per app, and start/stop/restart on each — plus the box's own load average and free disk.
- Speaks English, German and Russian, in a dark theme (Steam) and a light one (Bento).
What it does not do
SSH is the control path for discovery, uploads, forwarding and moshpit setup; only interactive terminal traffic uses moshpit, and the terminal says mp or ssh so a fallback is never a mystery. Beyond that:
- No account, no ad SDK, no product-analytics SDK, no relay that sees your terminals. See the privacy policy.
- No hosted agent and no hosted machine — you bring the host and the agent subscription.
- No iOS build yet, and no notifications for hosts other than the connected one.
What you need
- Android 7.0 or newer.
- A Linux host you can reach by SSH. WSL 2 works when SSH terminates inside Linux; macOS runs as a reduced preview, without agent-state and port discovery.
- tmux or zellij on that host, and at least one agent CLI if you want more than a shell.
The installer handles all of it, including agent CLIs and the private network route, in one command. Agent authentication is always separate and always yours: run claude, codex or cursor-agent login on the host afterwards.
Getting started
- Install the app from Google Play.
- Prepare the host — server setup is the whole story, and QR pairing is the short version of it.
- Save the connection and compare the host-key fingerprint the first time.
- Open a session, and keep the navigation cheat sheet nearby for the first week.
--yolo, which disables Codex approvals and sandboxing. If that policy does not suit a host, start Codex there yourself and let Cookbox attach to the session instead.Known limits
- Agent state is read from Linux
/procand the terminal screen. It is a good heuristic, not an API; usage meters disappear rather than guess. - Notifications ride on polling: a turn that starts and finishes between two polls can be missed, and Android Doze applies.
- Private keys live in the app's private storage, not in Android Keystore.
- Uploads stay in
~/.cookbox/uploadson the host until you remove them. - A non-text file opened in another app is copied into Cookbox's own storage first, and only the most recent copy is kept — opening the next one clears it.
- In-app forwarded pages are an iframe with no history of their own — use the browser action for anything that navigates.