Top
Best
New

Posted by kmansm27 9 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!

93 points | 123 commentspage 3
njarecki 4 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 4 hours ago|
You should be able to use Omnara for that use case, unless I'm misunderstanding something
theturtletalks 7 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 7 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 7 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 6 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.
tmshapland 6 hours ago||
Congrats the launch, guys!
kmansm27 4 hours ago|
Thanks!
TheOnlyWayUp 7 hours ago||
I see the need and I'll probably give it a go, but how does Omnara handle users' data? Do you store my tokens, stuff about my project, etc.?

If I paste in something confidential, and Omnara suffers a breach tomorrow - will my conversation data be a part of it?

isehgal 7 hours ago||
Good question. We don't have E2EE yet (it's on the roadmap), so some level of trust in Omnara is required today. All repo operations happen locally on your machine. For messages/chat history: we store those encrypted at rest because we need access to sync across devices, send notifications, and resume agents. Cloud sandboxing is opt-in and would require syncing codebase state.
saadn92 7 hours ago||
Built something like this that’s open source and free: https://github.com/saadnvd1/agent-os
hmokiguess 7 hours ago||
How does it compare to https://hapi.run/ ?

I have been pretty satisfied with it, and it’s free with unlimited sessions, so I need a good reason to switch

kmansm27 7 hours ago||
I haven't tried out https://hapi.run/, but I've tried similar things and in my experience Omnara is much more reliable than the other solutions, as well as I enjoy the UX of Omnara much more. Give it a try, it's one command to set up and the free tier gives you everything that the paid tier does, so you can decide if you like it before paying!
hmokiguess 6 hours ago||
when you say reliable what do you mean? hapi never once failed for me, it’s self hosted + tailscale so pretty robust

reliability is not big selling point given the high cost on unlimited sessions which I use quite a bunch

kmansm27 6 hours ago||
I mean messages drop or stall, or syncing doesn't work, or I can't get through setup at all. But I'm sure all these solutions have improved greatly since I've tried them, I tried these things much earlier on. If hapi works perfectly for you, then maybe Omnara wouldn't be much of a value add. Are there any pain points you face with hapi?
hmokiguess 5 hours ago||
Yeah none of these issues happen to me, so if Omnara has no other value add then I don't see a reason to pay for it.

I was curious if it had something Hapi didn't have, but sounds like it doesn't.

Thanks for your help!

inercia 7 hours ago||
Open Source alternative: https://github.com/inercia/mitto
keepamovin 8 hours ago||
There's certainly something to the "mass delegation" trend. My best rn is on email: https://ai-chat.email
cmsparks 8 hours ago|
Yeah we've definitely taken some inspiration from everyone who building an agent orchestrator/delegation app right now!
wiseowise 2 hours ago||
"You're walking in the park when an idea for a new feature hits just..." stop thinking about this shit and focus on the walk in the fucking park. Jesus.
mchusma 6 hours ago|
getting this error trying to connect github: github_unauthorized: GitHub OAuth error: The redirect_uri MUST match the registered callback URL for this application.
kmansm27 5 hours ago|
Looking into this, will fix this soon! GitHub auth should be working on the web app, if you try there (assuming you got this error on mobile). You can continue to use Omnara normally without signing into GitHub, you just won't be able to use the cloud syncning feature til you auth with GitHub.
More comments...