[buu700]

For me personally, I haven't really found that length per se is what makes something harder to write on mobile vs desktop, but more the level of "complexity". If it's just a matter of banging out a bunch of straightforward linear text, I'll often reach for my phone before my laptop. Mobile swipe typing is actually pretty productive for that sort of thing, in my experience.

Where it starts to become a pain is when the task demands a lot of formatting, symbols/punctuation, uncommon words, non-linear writing/editing, or referencing of outside information. The more I have to multitask, and the less I can just stay in a flow and churn out effectively a stream of consciousness, the more constraining a mobile device is going to feel. But for lots of things it's surprisingly great; sometimes I'll intentionally do the heavy lifting on a longer document from my phone and then handle editing/formatting/proofreading from my laptop.

Anyway, I set up Tailscale and aRDP a few months ago (as well as Termius, but have gravitated more toward aRDP in practice), and it's been a pretty substantial efficiency boost. On one hand, I've sort of experienced the same thing as the parent — not necessarily longer, but more complex prompts often have me putting down the phone and grabbing my laptop. On the other hand, lots of prompts are totally fine from mobile. There are also entire categories of tasks where every few hours I just need to sanity check the current diff, latest commits, and Codex output, then resend some variation of "please continue" from my prompt history and maybe answer some follow-up questions; mobile is perfect for that.

[satvikpendem]

For prompting an LLM specifically, what sort of formatting do you need, as you can just throw a stream of consciousness to it and it'll parse it just fine? For looking up other stuff, sure, but it's not too hard to open up new tabs in the mobile browser. I find it way more useful to be able to make stuff on the go rather than having to sit down every time.

Does the tunnel setup feel clunky to use? That's the main thing that stops me.

[buu700]

I guess it depends on the prompt, but code blocks, lists, block quotes, and horizontal lines all come to mind. Not that formatting is a huge deal (particularly in Markdown), but it's just one of many small things that adds to the feeling that I'll have an easier time producing a given body of text with a full mouse and keyboard.

Another thing I didn't mention is copying to the clipboard, which kind of sucks on mobile in general, but is particularly a hassle within RDP. If I'm going to need to copy a bunch of terminal output, snippets of files from VS Code, maybe some browser console errors, etc., I generally don't bother attempting to put that prompt together from my phone.

Tailscale is fairly polished and seamless to use for creating the actual tunnel to the dev machine. The RDP part may be a bit hacky, but it does everything I need and works well enough that at this point I haven't invested time in trying out alternatives. Using a full Linux desktop from a 6" smartphone is inherently going to be clunky, but the flip side is it's 100% batteries-included. You'll never have to rely on some app to reimplement end-to-end support for your entire dev workflow, because it's already a direct interface to your actual dev box.

aRDP deserves a lot of credit for how practical this is. It's clear that a lot of care was taken to map mobile interaction metaphors to desktop UIs in a way that was as natural as could reasonably be done. For what it is, the UI/UX is surprisingly smooth.

I also tested the new ChatGPT feature. Not a full RDP replacement, but it'll be a super handy companion UI after Plan mode is fully supported.