Posted by kmansm27 13 hours ago
Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere
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
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!
Sidenote - is this novel enough to be backed by YC? Just seems like a feature that Anthropic/OpenAI could release any day.
And for your sidenote, we'll see when Anthropic/OpenAI release something similar. For now it's pretty useful, and we're making it better every day.
It's interesting to me that YC has managed to dilute this prestige to a large extent. I don't think it's an inevitable result of scale: look at Google. I think "Xoogler" prestige has diminished, but it's not nearly as bad as what has happened to the YC label.
My theory is: YC never figured out their formula. The whole formula is essentially Paul Graham, who had a knack for trusting his gut (and sometimes his wife) when everything else in his "system" was saying NO.
Once they lost that, they had to rely on what was left, and it simply wasn't competitive anymore. It's like Apple in their John Sculley era. While Sculley is credited with growing Apple's revenue from $800 million to $8 billion, his approach created a "mess of dull SKUs" that eventually confused customers and diluted the brand.
They also have a (bad) habit of removing access to bookface for all the founders who aren't "active", decimating their network and in some ways discarding valuable knowledge around what didn't work.