VibeTunnel

About

VibeTunnel turns any web browser into a terminal for your Mac or Linux machine. Start it from the menu bar, open the dashboard on your phone, tablet or another computer, and you can watch output scroll live, type commands and spawn new shells. It was made for people who run AI coding agents like Claude Code or Codex and want to check on them from the couch or the road, but it works just as well for keeping an eye on a long build or sharing a session with a colleague. The app comes from three well-known developers, Peter Steinberger, Mario Zechner and Armin Ronacher, and its website proudly says it was built by humans and agents. Steinberger documented the process: in its first month the project grew from about 4,000 to more than 147,000 lines of code across nearly 2,900 commits, mostly written by AI coding agents, and even switched server backends between Rust, Go and Node along the way. It became a much-cited example that a sizable, polished app can be built this way. Highlights: • Control terminal sessions from any device with a browser, no SSH keys or port forwarding • Native macOS menu bar app, plus an npm package for Linux and headless servers • Session activity indicators show which shells are busy or idle • Git follow mode keeps the terminal on the branch your editor switches to • The vt command can rename sessions so you can track parallel agents • Sessions are recorded in asciinema format for later playback • Remote access through Tailscale or ngrok, with several authentication modes VibeTunnel is free and open source under the MIT license; you can support the team with a pay-what-you-want contribution on Polar. The macOS app needs macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon, while the npm package runs on Linux and Intel Macs. Windows is not supported yet, and the iOS app is still a work in progress.

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