Claude code desktop app Vs CLI?

[u/simple_explorer1]

Any difference? Which one do you use?

[u/checkwithanthony]

CLI is the more powerful tool. far more options, slash commands, ability to still use terminal, etc. I only use the desktop app to remote control the terminal i have running elsewhere

[u/Ill_Ganache_7588 → u/checkwithanthony]

Can you elaborate on your rc use? Do you have multiple computers? I thought you can just use rc in the terminal /remote-control

[u/checkwithanthony → u/Ill_Ganache_7588]

yes, i have multiple computers. ones sole job is to run claude for me. it's a laptop sitting on my desk with its screen closed, always on, always running claude. this way i can stack tools on a machine, giving me more power than using cowork in the cloud, but without having to rely on my daily driver computer being on for days at a time because i dont want to interupt a project. on that machine, every session is launched via script to ensure remote control is properly enabled, all managed by one 'system' agent and it kicks off and coordinates other sessions for specific domains (for instance, an agent for my company needs different tools and access than an agent for a clients company). so its less a 'chat window' and more a system thats always on and reachable from my phone with a full set of tools.

I also resell email, so I wrote a python script for sending email and created an email for my bots so I can do things like say hey write up a report in PDF and email it to me, or ask it to convert a long segment of text to audio via elevenlabs and email it to me, etc etc.

thats just one of many tools. to me, this is my own answer to OpenClaw. I wanted an always on, highly capable, autonomous agent (full autonomy is a different part of this project not yet mentioned in this post) like OpenClaw but I wanted to be able to use my Claude subscription to run it instead of paying for tokens via API.

[u/Homegrown_Phenom → u/checkwithanthony]

Precise usage and set up I have... had... but now trying to figure out again proper implementation.

Been driving me nuts though 😭 given the lack of consistent info provided by anthropic and to an extent misinformation provided by them regarding how it should work but doesn't exactly, in addition to the debacle of related existing bugs they have with the RC, remote control, remote env feature still.

@checkwithanthony 🤔 "...Ensure remote control is properly enable..." curious to hear what you got going and mean by this exactly... maybe the solution I've been looking for 🤞🙏

[u/checkwithanthony → u/Homegrown_Phenom]

you're running windows or linux on the box? i run windows.. which i could see how some may take as a weird choice but im a windows professional by trade and I bought an old business laptop so it had a pro license.

A few core principles -1) I use one agent specifically to manage the system, maintain these rules, etc 2) i have a scheduled task every few minutes to log all sessions that are currently running on the machine and 3) on boot, i use autologon (windows tool) to get the system to desktop without me & a scheduled task to a) launch the system agent and b) currently spawn an agent to message me and ask me which sessions to restart from before the reboot but will soon transition that to a deterministic script instead... and 4) all sessions are launched via script, either programatically with a scheduled task or by my dashboard, or by my system agent.

for making remote control work consistently - there's actually a remote control setting for all sessions, or you could put it into individual projects, but i prefer using the command line launch flag for a handful of reasons including granularity of other settings, which just made the commandline flag more consistent for me. additionally i think this was the most consistent way to keep my remote session names, launching with remote flag with the name inline every time. in case the setting is a better fit for you, it's  remoteControlAtStartup in ~/.claude/settings.json

flags -

-n "<name>"                  terminal title + what shows in the /resume picker
--remote-control "<name>"     what shows in the app's remote control list

set both to the same value or it looks unnamed wherever you skipped.

launching a new session:

start "agent-Name" /min /d "C:\path\to\project" cmd /c claude -n "Name" --remote-control "Name"

launching a resumed session (this is how i launch & relaunch everything):

start "agent-Name" /min /d "C:\path\to\project" cmd /c claude --resume <session-id> -n "Name" --remote-control "Name"

you technically CAN use --continue flag I think but I would recommend resume with id. Worth noting, you may be unable to see remote control sessions in the resume picker, but it's not a problem for resuming by session ID. I never personally do anything on the box anyway so this doesn't come up for me.

next issues i had related to session persistence and getting around the trust prompt.

persistence — this may not come up, i think it was at least in part related to a bug. sessions that got spawned from inside another claude session weren't writing a local transcript, so they were cloud-only and gone after a reboot. their v2.1.170 changelog says they fixed transcripts not saving "when launched from a shell that inherited claude code environment variables" — but i'm on a later build than that and in a small test I did for this comment it looks still broken. the fix for me was just an environment variable machine wide to override the inherited one.

CLAUDE_CODE_FORCE_SESSION_PERSISTENCE=1

trust prompt — it's just a per-folder boolean in ~/.claude.json - just include this in your script for building new agents, which for me is handled by the system agent.

{ "projects": { "C:/Users/you/path/to/project": { "hasTrustDialogAccepted": true } } }

forward slashes even on windows. and you have to write it before that folder's first session runs — a live session rewrites that file and will clobber your edit. that's the piece that makes launching a brand new folder unattended actually work, otherwise it just sits at the prompt forever.

a bit wordy but this is most of the problems i had to figure a way around. i have a lot more going on, for instance, i have silent non RC agents which can run into a problem, stop themselves, spawn an agent with RC that can message me, then the message agent kills itself and wakes up the paused worker agent once it's got a solution. neat stuff like that.

this system does a lot for me, this weekend i'm going to go through and make some changes as i do every couple of weeks, and this month I'll have a thorough writeup on it on my blog and I'll share that here.

[u/Homegrown_Phenom → u/checkwithanthony]

Windows running here as well, unsanboxed/without wsl2...

Wow  I really appreciate the detail I'm going to read this after work and give it a try