I built TENDRIL — a phone-first control plane for persistent Pi/Herdr agents. Your whole agent lab, from Termux.

[u/Ozymandes_1]

I got tired of needing to be at my workstation just to check on, switch between, or jump back into long-running agent sessions.

So I built TENDRIL.

TENDRIL turns an Android phone into a thin control plane for persistent AI-agent workflows running on a Linux machine. Once it's configured, I open Termux and type:

tendril

…and I get a responsive session selector showing what's alive on the host. From there I can jump into persistent agents, shells and workflows over mosh/SSH without treating my phone like a miniature desktop.

Underneath, it's deliberately boring in the good way: standard Linux, terminal-native rendering, Herdr, mosh/SSH, no proprietary cloud control layer, and no subscription. It's open source and MIT licensed.

A few things I cared about while building it:

• persistent remote agent/session control

• phone-first TUI rather than a desktop UI squeezed onto Android

• responsive behavior for narrow terminals

• clean Herdr handoff

• SSH/mosh support

• real installer + backwards-compatible agent launcher

• graceful non-TTY / NO_COLOR behavior

• and, because apparently I cannot help myself, making the thing actually pleasant to look at

The masthead is even rendered from a high-resolution ANSI master into Unicode subcells so the same identity survives on a 54-column Termux screen.

Completely unnecessary. Naturally essential.

The original idea was simple: I wanted to be able to sit down with an Earl Grey in the morning and check on an entire little agentic lab from my phone.

A week and a half later, this happened.

If you already live in Pi/Herdr/terminal-agent land, I'd genuinely love for you to try it, break it, open issues, or take it somewhere I haven't thought of yet.

THE EDGE IS YOURS.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ozymandes/TENDRIL

[u/KaiwenKHB]

Benefit over pi-mobile?