Claude Code felt like magic when I used it for the first time (14 months ago?). And then it felt like magic again when the models got good at code at the end of the year.

But then I wanted to be able to vibe code entirely from my phone, one handed on vacation, while sipping a fruity drink and playing beach soccer with the kiddos, which brought me to exe.dev and Shelley. Shelley is great because its batteries included, all the tools you need out of the box to do web development.

Of course after that it started to feel clunky. The UI is a power tool of options, compaction is disruptive at a time when most agents are smoothing that experience out, exe.dev is still primarily focusing on it’s magic SSH setup experience, but I’m on my phone, and the phone based ssh/terminal clients feel like the increasingly baroque products of an evolutionary dead end.

So now I’m using “Claude Code for Web for iOS” (I think that really is the product name), and it’s simple and elegant, that nice soothing color palette of Anthropics, fewer things shoved in than the web experience, and it’s just “chat with your repo”, no vestigial or distracting UI elements.

Kiddo and I took some photos of sketches she made and started building a game together on the subway ride to school. She’s the artist and art director, I’m holding the phone with Claude on it in one hand, and the pole in the other.

But the tools are surprisingly weak.

  • There’s no built in hosting option, surprising given Claude for Web has had artifacts forever, I’m reduced to using githack to get live previews of the work (and with some fiddly caching issues).

  • It can’t see your work, no VLM, no screenshot tools, no Playwright/Chrome Dev Tools skills. Certainly nothing as sophisticated as the Shelley tools around mobile web emulation, profiling, accessibility, etc. (also when is Claude get video support a la Gemini?)

Off the train, with two hands and a spare minute exe.dev/Shelley looks a lot more compelling (and the price differential between Anthropic’s subsidized accounts is getting smaller as the subsidies get smaller). But rising expectations mean none of it is feeling magical anymore, just all tools and compromises, and TODO: FIXME. Which is, in and of itself, wild.