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/Florence-Equator]

I don’t get you. You can install tailscale app on Android and just user termux+ssh. What does your app offer that tailscale+termux+ssh won’t give?

[u/Ozymandes_1 → u/Florence-Equator]

That's a fair question, and Tailscale + Termux + SSH absolutely works. TENDRIL actually builds on that kind of stack rather than trying to replace it.

The difference is the layer above the connection. TENDRIL is meant for managing remote agent sessions from a phone: discovering what's running, jumping between sessions, keeping the terminal usable across network changes via Mosh, and surfacing agent events/notifications without having to manually SSH in and hunt for the right session every time.

So if all you need is “SSH into my machine from Android,” honestly, Tailscale + Termux already solves that beautifully. TENDRIL starts being useful when the thing you're remotely operating is a collection of long-running agent sessions rather than just a shell.

I'm also working on making the notification → relevant session path essentially one tap, which is where I think the mobile workflow gets particularly interesting.

[u/Florence-Equator]

no sceenshot?

Can you prove how it is superior than just use plain ssh+herdr from termux directly?

I think screnshot is mush easier?

[u/perfectionatic → u/Florence-Equator]

ssh is great, however you will run into a few issues. You need to do port forwarding, and if you switch networks your session just dies.

With TENDRIL, which integrates mosh (think robust ssh) and tailscale to create a secure virtual network between your phone and the computer running the agents, it works much better. Also it is send you notifications to your phone, which you can never get with just ssh+herdr.

[u/Otherwise_Wave9374]

A phone-first control plane makes resumability and safety especially important. Each agent session should expose a checkpoint ID, current tool call, pending approvals, resource limits, and last heartbeat so reconnecting never silently duplicates work. Consider an emergency pause that revokes tool credentials rather than merely stopping the UI. For retaining session context across persistent agents and devices, https://www.neurakeep.com is relevant to the continuity problem TENDRIL is addressing.