5 ways of using Claude Code remotely - and when to use which

When working with Claude Code, there are at least four official ways of using it remotely without you sitting on your machine. And there is a fifth secret way which I'll also show you. Now, the four official ways that are supported is by using the Claude Code cloud, by using a feature called remote control, by using a feature called dispatch, and by using a feature called channels. And the question obviously is why do we have all these different approaches and why do we need them and which approach? And that's exactly what I'll show you, cloud. Now, this is maybe the one that's easiest to understand even without this video. The idea is that you don't use Claude Code on your machine, but instead, guess what? In the cloud, on servers owned and managed by Anthropic. So you send a task to the cloud, which you can do from the Claude Code CLI, but also from their web interface or their mobile app, and this task then gets executed in the cloud on those servers. For that to work, you need to have your code on a GitHub repository, and you need to connect that to your Claude Code account, your Anthropic account. Give them access to it, of course, so that this code can be downloaded onto the server where the task is being executed, and there are various limitations here, of course. One limitation, obviously, is that anything that is on your system, any global skills, any CLI tools you may rely on in your application or in your build scripts or workflows, all that is not available there on those cloud servers because it isn't your machine. The advantage, of course, is that you can truly execute tasks there without your machine even being turned on because, well, it's not happening on your machine. So if you wanna run some task overnight or if you wanna run multiple tasks in parallel but can't or don't want to use your machine for that, if you're traveling or if you have an unstable internet connection or anything like that, using the cloud may be an interesting alternative to using Cloud Code on your machine. By the way, if you wanna learn more about Cloud Code, I'm showing you here and you wanna dive a bit deeper the most out of Cloud Code, I do have a complete Cloud Code course which may be interesting to you. And right now, we still have our spring sale going on the Academy Pro annual membership for a much lower price than you normally would get it, 169 instead of 249, and this membership gives you access to all the courses we have, as long as you have an active membership, including the Cloud Code course and any future courses we may release, in addition to the extensive course catalog we already have. Links below this video. Now, all remaining approaches here, on the other hand, are about executing Cloud Code on your machine, not on Anthropic's server. So the cloud solution really is kind of a special solution, also be used in conjunction to those other approaches because, of course, nobody's stopping you from executing some tasks in the cloud whilst also working on other features in the same project on your machine. You just have to merge the different changes thereafter. So let's start with remote control then. Remote control is mostly about continuing some task or some work that you maybe started on your system, still on your machine whilst you are leaving your machine. So let's say you're going for lunch or you have to go to a meeting, but your computer, your, your Mac, your PC stays turned on and you want to continue working on a task Now, obviously, Cloud Code will continue you're leaving the machine, as long as your machine doesn't go to But once it's done, it won't continue. Now, with remote control, you can make it continue and you can also start a new task, but your machine needs to be turned on. And not just that, instead, you need to start Cloud Code, the CLI in a special mode, in the remote control mode, or in an interactive session, you need to turn on remote control mode by using the respective slash command. Once the remote control mode is turned on, you can connect your mobile phone with the Cloud mobile app, you need that, to your machine by scanning a QR code, for example, which you can have Cloud Code show you. And then once that connection is established, you can use a chat session. You can send messages to Cloud Code in your mobile app, but those chat messages are then not sent to the cloud or somewhere else, but instead to your connected machine through remote control. So remote control can be very useful, but it has a couple of potential disadvantages. The two most important ones, in my opinion, being to keep your machine turned on, and if it goes to sleep, you lose the connection, so you must ensure it doesn't. And you must start your Cloud Code session in that remote control mode. If you forget this, there is no way for you to send messages to it. So you must set it up first and then you can use itThat is where Dispatch comes into play. With Dispatch, you still need to ensure that your machine doesn't go to sleep, though it gets a bit easier as you'll see, but you don't need to start Claude Code in any special remote control mode first in order to use it. For Dispatch, you need the Claude desktop app, though you need to download and once you did that, you also need to go through a one-time setup process to enable Dispatch. In that Claude desktop app, you can also turn on a setting that prevents your machine from going to sleep whilst the app is up and running, though, so that eliminates this my machine went to sleep and now my session broke or was canceled problem. Now, with Dispatch then set up, you can use the Claude mobile app again, and there, the Dispatch feature to send messages to And the big difference now is that you don't need to start a Claude Code session through the CLI first or anything like that. Instead, you just need to have the desktop app up and that is it. Now, you can send messages to Claude on your machine, and it goes ahead and executes them. Now, what's important here, though, is that Dispatch was originally a feature released for Claude Cowork, which is their more general AI assistant, not specifically focused on coding, and therefore, at least right now when I'm recording this, your Dispatch messages are not connected to a specific project, which, on the other hand, with Remote Control was the case since you deliberately interactive session. With Dispatch, you're just sending a message to Claude on your machine, and it needs to figure out what to do with that message. That message could be totally unrelated to if you want to invoke Claude Code to do some work in one of your projects, well, then, you will need to tell it in that Dispatch message where to find that project, give it some hints regarding the folder to So, that can be a bit inconvenient here, but it is doable, of course, and then you can start or continue sessions from anywhere through the mobile app with Dispatch feature. And then last, but not least, we have Channels, and you would kind of see Channels as maybe the connection of Remote Control and Dispatch, and also, Channels is essentially Anthropic's way of trying to merge Claude Code or their Claude offering general into an OpenClaw alternative, kind of. Many features OpenClaw has are missing, but Channels is, in the end, a- a way for you to connect any kind of messaging channel to Claude Code. And by default, Anthropic gives you an official Telegram channel connector you can set up, which makes it quite easy and straightforward to use Telegram to communicate with your Claude Code session. You still need to go through a one-time setup process and enable Channels, and you also need to start a Claude session with the channel you wanna use enabled, so you need to do that just as you had to do it with Remote Control. But once you did that, you can use that channel to send messages to Claude Code. So, you're then no longer limited to just the mobile app. Instead, you can use your channel, and of course, could start a Claude session that you keep on running forever, essentially, with that channel connected, and therefore, you can keep on pushing messages to Claude Code there and work on a broad variety of tasks. And of course, you could also start Claude Code not connected to one specific project, but in general on your machine with Channels enabled, and then kind of use it as an OpenClaw alternative by asking it to do all kinds of things on your machine. You could also do that with Remote Control, and with Dispatch, as mentioned, it's the default, simply allows you to use any communication channel of your choice. And of course, therefore, on the other hand, and with the setup process you have to go through with Remote Control, then you can just keep on using that, and you don't need Channels It's also noting that this Channel's feature right now when I'm recording this is in research preview, and therefore, both the setup process and the- the feature set may, of course, change over time. I also mentioned a- a fifth, uh, secret way of remotely talking to Claude Code, and this is actually simply a way that you could use with any tool you have installed on your machine, not just with Claude Code. If you're running Claude Code on a machine which you could access via SSH, so which is exposed to a network or the internet, then, of course, you can connect to that machine via SSH. And for example, you could have a VPS up and running, which you maybe use for development work instead of your Mac or your PC, and when that is exposed to a network, to, uh, to the internet, uh, preferably, of course, secured with, for example, a VPN solution like Tailscale, then you can connect to it via SSH. And you cannot just do that from your Mac, which doesn't really give you a huge You still have to be you on your machine for that, but you could also use an app like Terminus on your mobile phone, make sure that this is connected to this machine through a key pair preferably, and then, of course, you can start a session there and simply invoke any command on that machine because it's just a SSH session, and that, of course, therefore, includes Claude Code, and you can then start sessions from there. Now, it's worth noting that depending on your operating system and so on, when you close that app, the SSH session gets, uh, terminated, and therefore, the Claude Code session, uh, will stop But still, it is a way of quickly invoking certain one-off tasks, and of course, you can use a solution like Tmux to kind of decouple your connected session from the session on the machine and keep those sessions going. That is all something you could also look And that's, therefore, how you can use and control Claude Code remotely on your machine or a VPS. And as mentioned, if you wanna learn more, that offer I mentioned before