Ways to work · 1 of 3
From your phone
The laptop is closed. You are walking, or on a train, or in the kitchen. The work is on the box, and the box is in the Claude app.
This is the way of working Bettik was built around, and the one everything else on the box is arranged to make possible: a session that runs on your machine, that you drive from wherever you are, by typing or by talking.
What a session on the box is
Once Claude is signed in on your box (quick start, step 1), the box is a device in the Claude app, named <box>.bettik.ai. Start a session there and it runs in the workbench: a real shell, at /work, with git, node and psql, every environment under ~/environments, and your env vars — GH_TOKEN among them, if you set it — already in its environment variables. It is not a chat about your code. It is Claude at a terminal on your computer.
Nothing has to be running for you to start one. The box keeps a small server up that creates sessions on demand; a session you leave keeps its transcript, and opening it again picks up where it was.
A session, by voice
Dictate. The things you need to say are short, because the box already knows the rest — what a session already knows covers what an environment is, how to claim one, and to ask you for names.
You
Go into catan and make the board bigger. Eight by eight.
Claude
Claims catan, moves to ~/environments/catan, reads its .env and CLAUDE.md, finds the board size in projects/app, changes it, and watches the dev server reload.
Bettik
Done — the board is 8×8 at https://catan.home.<handle>.bettik.dev. The dev server reloaded; the page should show it on refresh.
Open the address in the phone's browser. It is the same game, running on the same box, and the URL opens for you because you are signed in — nobody else.
You
Hm. Keep the old one too. Make a copy with the small board and call it catan-classic.
That is a clone: a copy-on-write copy of the whole environment, database included, in a few seconds. Two addresses, two tabs on the phone, side by side.
What is different about working this way
The session is on the machine, not on the phone. Close the app, lose signal in a tunnel, switch phones: the session is still there, and so is whatever it was in the middle of. When you come back it has either finished or is still going.
It asks before the irreversible things. Every tool on the box is pre-approved for a session except destroy_environment, which asks every time. A session running with nobody watching can install, clone, build and bounce as it needs to; it cannot delete your data without a person saying yes.
Names are yours. When a session needs to install or clone something, it asks what to call it and says why: the name becomes an address you will type for months. It does not invent one.
Claims say who is where. A session claims an environment before it edits, so a second session — tomorrow's, or the one on your laptop — sees that this one is here and clones rather than colliding. Claims never expire on their own; a session that has gone quiet has not gone away.
Two things the phone cannot do
Read code comfortably. For that, the same box is one ssh away from a laptop — VS Code Remote SSH opens your home as a folder — and the session you started on the phone is in the same place, working on the same files.
Destroy the box. destroy_box is refused from a session running on the box it names, since that would end the session. It is done from the dashboard, or from a session somewhere else.
Next: in parallel — several of these at once.