Coding agents like Claude Code and Codex are fast, yet a lot of wall-clock time goes to them waiting on a person. They stop in three places:
If you're away from the keyboard, each of those turns minutes into half an hour. Kiteline, an open-source desktop app (Mac, Windows, Linux) with an iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch companion, puts all three on the phone. Here's how it's designed. The three waits need different judgments, so they render as three different cards rather than one "needs attention" banner:
In the session list, sessions waiting on you sort to the top and say what they're waiting for. All three kinds push a notification, and the Apple Watch can approve too.
Earlier versions delivered a phone action by bringing VS Code to the front and simulating paste and keystrokes. That interrupted whatever you were doing on the computer and could misfire when focus moved.
Current versions hand messages, approvals, answers and interrupts directly to the Claude Code session process: no window switching, no synthetic keys, and it works while the computer is locked. The VS Code dialog still shows, so whichever side answers first wins.
Other agents connect through signed plugins, each declaring what it can do. Codex and OpenCode support full control. Kimi Code, CodeBuddy Code, Grok Build, Hermes and the Antigravity CLI can be replied to and approved from the phone when they run inside tmux. Apps without an external control interface, such as the WorkBuddy desktop app, are view-only, and the plugin page lists each gap with the reason.
Two small features make leaving an agent running less nerve-wracking: new tasks can be scheduled to start later, and the usage page totals requests and tokens per project and model, with an optional daily spend alert and daily spend cap.
Kiteline doesn't use your API keys or change agent settings. The desktop side is on GitHub under AGPL-3.0; the iPhone app is on the App Store as "Kiteline".