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Posted by kmansm27 7 hours ago

Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere

Hey y’all, Kartik, Ishaan, and Christian from Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) here. We’re building a web and mobile agentic IDE for Claude Code and Codex that lets you run and interact with coding agents from anywhere. Omnara lets you run Claude Code and Codex sessions on your own machine, and exposes those sessions through a web and mobile interface so you can stay involved even when you’re away from your desk. Think of it like Claude Code Desktop or Conductor, except you can continue your sessions on your phone.

Here’s a demo of the web and mobile apps - https://youtu.be/R8Wmy4FLbhQ

We started using Claude Code early last year and quickly ran into a pattern: agents could work for long stretches on their own, but progress would stall whenever they needed follow-up input. If that happened while we were away from our desks, everything just paused. We looked at remote agent solutions like Codex Web and Devin, which were the main options at the time, but they ran in remote VMs, and we wanted our coding agent to run in our own environment. Our first attempt at solving this was a lightweight wrapper that streamed messages from the Claude Code CLI to a mobile app, but that approach ended up being fragile and hard to maintain.

As the Claude Agent SDK matured, it gave us enough control to rewrite Omnara from scratch and run the agent loop directly. We chose to build a GUI across web and mobile instead of a TUI or CLI, because we think GUIs are generally more ergonomic for working with agents and code, especially on mobile. We still preserve the main strength of CLIs and TUIs: running anywhere, including on headless machines.

Omnara keeps that property by running a small headless daemon on the user’s machine (or a remote VM) that hosts the agent loop. The daemon maintains an authenticated, outbound WebSocket connection to our server, which relays messages between the agent running on the user’s machine and any connected web or mobile clients. Because the daemon only makes outbound connections, there’s no need for exposed ports, SSH access, or tunneling on the user’s machine.

In our first version of Omnara, users liked that agent sessions ran in their own environment, but they still depended on the machine staying online. Some users ran Omnara on a remote machine that stayed up, which worked well for them, though most still did most of their work on laptops. In the current version, Omnara can continue an agent session in a hosted remote sandbox when your local machine goes offline.

The conversation state of an agent is already persisted on our server, and you can optionally enable cloud syncing for the working code. When syncing is enabled, Omnara creates git commits at each turn in the conversation and pushes them to our server, so execution can resume from the same state regardless of whether it continues locally or in the cloud. If you continue working in a remote sandbox, you can later pull any changes back into your local environment when you return to your machine. Environment parity in the sandbox isn’t perfect yet, but in practice, missing dependencies are usually easy to resolve by asking the agent to install them.

Another thing we learned from using the initial version of Omnara is that mobile is fine for quick interactions, but not great for extended back-and-forth. Users asked for a hands-free way to keep agents moving while walking, driving, or doing something else, which led us to add a voice agent. Coming from more traditional software engineering backgrounds, we honestly thought coding by talking to a voice agent would be gimmicky and added it mostly as a fallback.

What surprised us is how useful the voice agent ended up being in practice. When working with coding agents, being redundant and overly explicit usually helps, and people naturally give more detail when speaking than when typing. Going back and forth with the agent as the conversation unfolds tends to produce a much more solid plan than trying to one-shot it with a prompt (this could technically also be done over text, but talking and iterating over voice feels easier and more natural). It’s also just fun. Talking through an idea with an agent while out on a walk is a lot more enjoyable than staring at a terminal screen.

To try it out, open your terminal and download Omnara with

  curl -fsSL https://omnara.com/install/install.sh | bash
then run omnara inside any git repository. This starts a headless Claude Code or Codex session in that repo, which immediately appears in the Omnara web and mobile apps. From there, you can continue that session or start new ones remotely (with or without worktrees) and switch between the web and mobile clients without interrupting the agent.

Omnara is free for 10 agent sessions per month, then $20/month for unlimited sessions. When agents run in your own environment, you can use your existing Claude or Codex subscription, so there’s no need to pay us for additional tokens. If you use Claude Code or Codex, we’d love to hear your feedback on Omnara!

83 points | 112 commentspage 2
jdmoreira 6 hours ago|
If you can see the messages unfortunately thats a deal breaker for me. If its encrypted end-to-end than I’m in.
isehgal 6 hours ago|
Fair concern. We don't have true E2EE yet because our service needs access to message content for cross-device sync, notifications, and agent execution. Everything is encrypted in transit and at rest, and all repo operations happen locally on your machine.

We've heard this from other users and it's on our roadmap. The challenge is we're building features like voice coding agents and hosted sandboxes that require plaintext inputs, so we'd need two execution models. Doable, but adds complexity for our team size.

That said, it's something we're prioritizing as we grow. No promises on timing, but it's coming.

If you want to discuss specific requirements or a local-only mode, happy to chat: https://discord.gg/Dc46sYk6e3

kovek 5 hours ago||
https://happy.engineering/ says that they have E2E encryption. Is that true?
kmansm27 5 hours ago||
Yes, they have E2EE, but it comes with some limitations in the features they're able to provide.
kovek 4 hours ago||
Like what? I like it a lot...
kmansm27 3 hours ago|||
Replying to your latest comment here:

What do you mean by syncing? Happy coder syncs sessions between all my happy coder clients. I can even see in real time how happy coder in my browser's conversations progress as well as on my phone, in parallel.

Omnara also displays realtime conversations between all Omnara clients. What I mean by syncing is syncing your conversation and code changes to a cloud sandbox, which is useful if you're using Omnara on your laptop and you close your computer (as explained in the original post). If you run your agents on a persistent cloud VM, then this is less of a value add.

I can voice chat with Happy coder.

We use https://docs.livekit.io/agents/ which runs the voice agent in the cloud (to enable the above use case, and a better experience when you're using your phone when it's off), whereas I believe happy runs a client-side voice agent.

kovek 3 hours ago||
Thanks for answering my questions! I see that Happy Coder is not far from Omnara. I hope Omnara can be not too far from E2E encryption. The lack of E2E encryption was why I didn't chose Omnara.
kmansm27 4 hours ago|||
Two of the main feature's we're investing heavily into are remote sandboxes + syncing, and voice agent support, wouldn't work with E2EE.
kovek 4 hours ago||
I can voice chat with Happy coder. Also, I run happy coder in a sandbox of mine on my computer. What do you mean by syncing? Happy coder syncs sessions between all my happy coder clients. I can even see in real time how happy coder in my browser's conversations progress as well as on my phone, in parallel.
kgc 6 hours ago||
I think the native Claude and Codex apps already do this for free. They even have the voice input.
kmansm27 6 hours ago|
They currently don't have the ability to use a local session from your phone, and they only have voice input, not voice input and output for completely hands free usage.
CharlesW 6 hours ago||
> They currently don't have the ability to use a local session from your phone…

Claude Code will help you set this up using tmux. Voice input and output personally seems like a gimmick, but OS accessibilty features should work fine for this.

elxr 1 hour ago|||
> Voice input and output personally seems like a gimmick

Nice to have when cooking and I want to use my laptop without wiping my hands dry constantly.

kmansm27 5 hours ago|||
Voice input + output sounds gimmicky (as I admit in the post), but it's quite useful for mobile coding. It's not as trivial as just printing out whatever Claude Code outputs.

"Claude Code will help you set this up using tmux" - I don't think that you can connect to tmux sessions running in Claude Code/Codex remote VMs using their mobile apps. Their mobile apps don't provide a terminal emulator afaik

CharlesW 5 hours ago||
> Their mobile apps don't provide a terminal emulator afaik

Right, this requires using a terminal app.

RobMurray 6 hours ago||
How does this compare to Happy Coder? https://github.com/slopus/happy
cmsparks 6 hours ago|
Anecdotally from some Omnara users who have used both, I've heard that reliability and latency when sending messaages is better in Omnara

We try to provide a decent chunk of features on top as well, including (but not limited to):

* web support

* worktrees

* sandboxing

* richer git management (richer diffs, checkpoints, git operations)

* preview URLs

groovetandon 3 hours ago||
Been looking for something like this - I feel like I lose a lot of work during lunch runs and on the commute home.
njarecki 2 hours ago||
Can you guys please make an iOS app that replicates the Claude code app to hook into this one problem my hat is that it can’t query live DB etc. all the things we need a persistent client based terminal session for. But the app is really slick, so it would be great to have it with the multiple threads sidebar, etc..
kmansm27 2 hours ago|
You should be able to use Omnara for that use case, unless I'm misunderstanding something
zomglings 7 hours ago||
I have been hungry to do more work from my cell phone. It's ridiculous to be forced to sit in front of a computer to work with AI.

My current solution is to have claude (--dangerously-skip-permissions) listen for messages in my slack DMs to myself and take action in response to those messages.

I would happily switch to something better.

Why is Omnara better?

kmansm27 7 hours ago|
There's a lot of solutions that people are hacking together to be able to use coding agents from their phone (e.g. terminal emulator + tailscale, slack, whatsapp, telegram). I enjoy Omnara more than those solutions because it's a native experience tailored for coding agents, e.g. you can select models/harnesses, spin up new sessions, create worktrees, view code changes, see tool calls, have live previews, have voice agent support, and on and on. Omnara is a solution meant to interact with coding agents from your phone, so we're able to add a lot of nice UX features to our app that those other solutions can't.
tmshapland 4 hours ago||
Congrats the launch, guys!
kmansm27 2 hours ago|
Thanks!
devinbernosky 7 hours ago||
OpenCode is free and has an excellent front end for this kind of work
cmsparks 7 hours ago|
OpenCode is great and `opencode serve` in particular is very cool. Though I think the main thing is that you need to manage the OpenCode server yourself and expose it via tailscale or something like that. Our goal is to provide managed infrastructure around the coding agent harness with features like mobile, sandboxes, preview urls, etc.

Our goal is to be harness agnostic as well, so eventually we will be adding support for running OpenCode sessions in Omnara.

qwesr123 2 hours ago||
How do you plan to be harness agnostic if you design requires using the agent SDKs (Claude Agent SDK, etc.)?
theturtletalks 5 hours ago||
How is this different from VibeTunnel which is not limited to just Claude and Codex, but brings your terminals with you on your phone using tailscale?

There's also Happy, Coder/Mux, and so many others that actually started out open-source and stayed that way and I can be sure my chats are not going to a 3rd party?

kmansm27 5 hours ago|
We think that terminal interfaces, especially on mobile, are not going to be the way people end up interacting with agents in the long run, which is a big reason we built Omnara.

And Omnara chats are stored in our DB, which is how we're able to enable our voice agent, cloud syncing, and ability to see all your chats while your machine is offline. Basically anything you see in the web and mobile clients is being proxied/persisted through our server, until you delete the chat.

theturtletalks 5 hours ago||
Good point, but Happy also has parsers to turn terminal output into "chat bubbles" but with how often Claude Code and Codex change that output, that parser has to be updated every time. With new terminal agents coming into the fray, wouldn't you forever have to parse new agents to make them available?
kmansm27 5 hours ago||
We use the Claude Agent SDK and the Codex App server, which makes it easier to maintain (we used to parse out the literal terminal when we first launched, which was not maintainable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878650). There's also ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com/get-started/introduction) which we'll probably integrate eventually, which should make it easier to manage all the harnesses.
p-a_58213 6 hours ago|
I think someone should also mention Happy (https://happy.engineering), which has decent mobile clients and is currently MIT-licensed.

Although I must say that Omnara's UI looks absolutely fantastic. Well done!

isehgal 6 hours ago||
Thanks for the shout! Happy looks solid - always great to see more options here. Anecdotally from users who've tried both, we've heard Omnara has better reliability and latency. We also layer on some features like web support, worktrees, sandboxing, richer git management (diffs, checkpoints), and preview URLs. Would love to hear what you think if you give it a spin :)
faramarz 6 hours ago||
I use this everyday, and even have the Happy server on my home Mac to skip the cloud relay.

I think I will only explore an alternative if the UI on the mobile is dramatically better (something to explore) but im trying my best to only pay for the model these day and avoid any other tooling subscription, and doing pretty great thus far.

isehgal 6 hours ago||
Totally get it, we're trying to minimize subscriptions too. Free tier gives you 10 sessions/month with no length limits, so you can actually get a decent amount done before deciding if it's worth paying
faramarz 4 hours ago||
Just watched your walkthrough video and have to say kudos, that looks like a really tight release. will give it proper test drive.

cheers and congrats on the launch!

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