Vibe coding on iPhones

Have you ever wanted to code from your iPhone?

I have, and it’s surprisingly easy to get set up.

My setup is:

1. A remote VPS: Ubuntu 4GB machine on Hetzner (~$15/month)
2. iPhone terminal emulator: Termius (Free)

It took 1hr or so to get setup. You can find lots of helpful guides on the internet. Here’s one.

Besides the novelty, have I gotten any value out of it?

Yes!

Here’s a few recent examples:

1. I had to supervise a long-running autonomous agentic coding eval (I got it to write a Gameboy Emulator from scratch, inspired by GBAEval). So I set up tmux, and monitored it from my iPhone while out for dinner. iPhone terminals are particularly well suited for vibe coding
2. I was on the bus and bored so I installed ghci and completed the first 3 chapters of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good. I often will read articles/books on my phone from Hacker News or lobste.rs, and being able to actually follow along and type code is great. I’m looking forward to getting a portable keyboard to go with this :).