Cross Machine Development with Claude

While working in a Claude Code terminal session on my Windows 11 laptop the other day, I authorized a Claude in Chrome interaction and was surprised to see the new Chrome window open on my MacBook Pro, which was also logged in to Claude with browser control permissions active.

Prior to this, testing my rePhemeral codebase (a tool I designed to change the default screens on a reMarkable Paper Pro tablet) on Mac, Linux and Windows had meant copying and pasting task requirements from the Mac, where my kanban board tool Tanzaku lives, to the other machines, running the tests there myself, and then copying the response back to the Mac so the card could be updated.

But what if I could get my Mac's Claude session to drive the sessions on the Windows and Linux machines directly... with the reMarkable tablet connected to those other machines... to run the tests for edits I'm making on the Mac?

Oops Becomes Eureka

As it turns out, the Chrome tab launching on a different machine had not been a glitch; it was a feature that sent me looking for other ways Claude instances could interact across machines. I had already been using Claude Remote and thought remote control sessions could only be driven by me from within the Claude desktop app, but that turns out not to be the case. Once connected to remote control and given a meaningful name, my Claude session here on the Mac was able to see and communicate directly with my Claude session on Windows.

The two linked up so that the Mac instance could send requirements to the Windows instance, which ran the tests locally against the reMarkable hardware and returned the results directly to the Mac. The Mac instance then documented them in Tanzaku.

How have I been doing this the hard way for days without realizing this was possible? I'm not sure whether I should have expected this capability, but it sure is useful, and it means a lot of tests will get done that might otherwise have been skipped.

How To Do It

Here's the trick... as of this writing, Claude sessions can be made accessible by remote using the /remote-control directive on the command line. Remote sessions currently get different IDs on the machine they're running on and in the remote list in your Anthropic account, so you need to give the session a meaningful name (like "Claude Mac" and "Claude Windows") using the /rename directive... then simply tell the Claude session "Claude Mac" to pass data and give commands to the "Claude Windows" session and receive responses back from it.

You may need to approve some actions directly on the secondary session, particularly if working with local files or doing shell commands, but transferring testing requirements and getting results back now "just works". Give it a try and let me know what new capabilities you unlock.

Email me at alex@authtechnic.com