Remote shell access, now with push notifications

What it does

Collie is a Progressive Web App that acts as a mobile control panel for Herdr, an AI agent orchestration tool. It serves a React-based dashboard over your Tailscale tailnet, letting you see which agent is waiting for input, reply with your phone’s keyboard (including voice dictation), send images, trigger slash commands, and even inject special keys like Esc or Ctrl+C into terminal panes. Everything runs locally on the host via a loopback bind — no cloud accounts, no external hosting.

The interesting bit

The dashboard ranks agents by who needs you rather than by recency, turning a terminal multiplexing problem into a priority inbox. The author is refreshingly blunt about the security model: this is remote shell access by design, and the README spends more time warning you about the dangers of tailscale funnel than it does on the color scheme.

Key highlights

• Push notifications fire the moment an agent blocks on user input
• Claude’s AskUserQuestion prompts render as tappable quick-action buttons
• A special-keys pad sends combinable modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Shift) and arrows without memorizing chords
• Switch between Herdr sessions from the phone without touching the host
• Runs entirely offline on your own machine; installs to the home screen as a PWA

Caveats

• Single-user by design: one operator, one tailnet, no multi-tenant auth or shared access
• Effectively grants remote shell access as your user; the README warns that an unlocked or stolen phone on the tailnet is an open shell
• Every local user on the host can reach the TCP port, though a per-device gate closes the write half

Verdict

Worth a look if you run Herdr agents and want to approve prompts or kill runaway tasks from your couch. Skip it if you need team access, public hosting, or a tool that doesn’t require treating your phone like a root login.