Show HN: Pocketty – iPhone SSH terminal that pings you when an agent is blocked

lukeed 27 points 13 comments October 08, 2026
pocketty.app · View on Hacker News

Hello~! pocketty is an SSH terminal for iPhone and iPad, made for herdr. herdr keeps your agent panes alive on your computer and knows the state of each one: working, needs you, or done. I made this in anger/desperation for the latter half of my recent paternity leave. Nap traps are sweet, but there's only so much doom-scrolling and movie-watching I can handle... In any event, I've been using it for the last couple months and no longer have to be my desk anymore to be productive. Now the nap-traps are still productive (when i want them to be) ! How it works: - The app talks to your computer directly over plain SSH. Tailscale is the easy way to reach it from anywhere but any SSH host you can reach works. - A small Rust daemon on the host watches herdr. When a pane needs you, it seals the alert to your phone's key with HPKE (X25519, ChaCha20-Poly1305). A stateless relay (pocketty's) on Cloudflare Workers passes the sealed bytes to APNs (Apple Push Notification servers), and a notification extension opens them on the phone. The relay can't read them and keeps nothing. - Your SSH key is made in the Secure Enclave and can't be exported. - The terminal uses libghostty-vt for state and draws with wgpu on Metal, so full-screen TUIs look like they do on your desk, albeit narrower. - Diffs for each agent turn, a file browser, and previews of `localhost` dev servers your agent starts, all through the same SSH connection. No port forwarding to set up. herdr and the daemon are optional. Without them, it's a normal SSH client. There's no account to set up and no analytics or tracking in the app. The app runs a 14-day free trial, with full feature access. Then, if you're as happy as I am with it, then it can be yours forever with a one-time purchase: $99 for the first two weeks (launch promo) then $129 after that. Happy to answer anything about the sealed push setup or running libghostty on iOS.

Discussion Highlights (7 comments)

1123581321

Neat. Thought about syncing the key with iCloud Keychain towards supporting any of the user’s devices connecting? Optionally; I understand the appeal of the current storage method.

worldisaduck

right after connecting to my workstation it says: “herdr is not installed on this host” while it clearly is. Running it in shell directly works, but it’s impossible to scroll inside herdr session like that. What exactly should I pay 99 for?

sailfast

Nice! I did something like this running tailscale to my laptop with a TUI and it worked well for awhile. And then I realized I didn't want to be notified when my agents weren't working because I'd had enough. Enjoy your nap traps! They don't last very long.

antoniomika

Was looking for something like this but stumbled upon herdr-web-ui [0] first. They seem to do the same thing, but herdr-web-ui is completely free and self hosted and sets up as a PWA with webpush support. Seems to work decently well and it’s under heavy development. Will have to try this too! [0] https://github.com/devswha/herdr-web-ui

topaz0

Does it also help alleviate wealth inequality?

metamitya

very interesting. seems like lots of people trying to turn the agent chat push into a feed pull. basically have the agents reach out to you instead of you to them. interesting take on the problem

amber71de

Of the trials started so far, how many have bought at $99?

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