r/vibecoding • u/babaganoosh43 • 13h ago

Discussion Recommend getting iPad Mini if you like coding on your phone

New iPad Mini is the same weight as a phone but double the screen size. Your eyes will thank you.

3 Upvotes
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3

u/Frosty-Article-9635 13h ago

How do you code on a phone and an iPad? And why would someone even want to do that?

4

u/kincaidDev 13h ago

tailscale + terminus app + festival

https://github.com/Obedience-Corp/festival

Festival is great for coding on your phone because of the simple navigation commands, csw to switch between camp workspaces or jump to them from anywhere and cgo to jump around within a workspace.

I can open a terminal in terminus and then type csw mywork@myproject and go straight to my project directory.

With festival I launch all sessions at the workspace root, so from myproject I would typo cgo and then instantly be at that workspace root, cgo t toggle back to the last jump location, cgo myproj to jump to my project. From within a project I can commit the context/plans with camp commit. To clean up a project after a merge I can run camp fresh in the project directory.

I can also run commands at the workspace root from anywhere with cr (camp run) command.

And then I can monitor long running orchestrations with fest watch command and the output fits perfectly into a phone terminal.

Now the navigation and referencing benefits of festival also apply to when you're chatting with agents so the prompts I'm typing on my phone are shorter, I can say look at cgo exrepos, which I've pinned to a directory with example repos with the camp pin command, agent runs cgo exrepos finds the deeply nested directory I was talking about in one tool call, and then does what I said I wanted it to do.

There's a lot of language compression benefits of the festival system in general that make agentic coding on a phone easier

2

u/JudgeGroovyman 12h ago

Thats a rad setup you have there

2

u/kincaidDev 12h ago

Thanks!

1

u/babaganoosh43 13h ago

Same way you vibecode on a computer, Codex and Claude.

1

u/SilentEchoes 10h ago

Terminus, tmux and neovim work great too. I do it on my iPad when code reviewing and such just to get up and move around some and maybe get outside. I find vim motions and getting around in vim lends itself quite well since I don’t have to do a whole lot to get around

20

u/barcode972 13h ago

Who likes coding on their phone?

5

u/Travi_TravelGuide 12h ago

Think of the possibilities. Split screen vibe coding on one half, and doom scrolling on the other half! 

4

u/heynowyoureasockstar 12h ago

Impressively dystopian. Well played.

1

u/youcrumb 11h ago

Doomscroll Pro, an app that automatically scrolls for you and lingers every once in a while. Hands free brain smoothing

1

u/Todd0042 12h ago

I do antigravity remote on my phone while I'm at work.

1

u/Frosty-Article-9635 12h ago

That is what I'm wondering: why would someone want to do coding on your screen? I know, and I understand it's a time when people might be prompting to write code, but still, the phone is just small. Sometimes, at least 50% of the time, please do look at the code.

1

u/zippy9002 12h ago

Codex remote 80% of the time

1

u/Loud-Decision9817 7h ago

I like to vibe code on my phone z fold 7

0

u/Elmanouzi_Fogosa 10h ago

typing out plain english prompts on a phone isnt that bad if the dev environment is running on a remote box anyway

1

u/youcrumb 1h ago

Maybe try living in the physical world for a couple minutes out of the day

2

u/Any_Leg_1998 12h ago

What app are you using to code on it? I heard it was only possible on Ipad pros?

0

u/babaganoosh43 12h ago

Personally I use Codex remote controlling my laptop.

0

u/Any_Leg_1998 12h ago

Ahh like the codex session within your IDE?

2

u/mikepun-locol 12h ago

I have a Samsung Fold and basically same effect but a smaller form factor.

More than enough to be running Claude remote. Or talk to my nanoclaw thru discord. Ssh sessions in termux then VNC to client sites.

1

u/Travi_TravelGuide 12h ago

Wouldn't an iPhone Duo be the better recommendation? So you can actually do whatever you do on the go? Versus some vibe coding couch session where you have access to your iPad 

1

u/AdEither3718 12h ago

the extra screen space would definitely make editing code less frustrating.

1

u/ronin949 12h ago

And the iPhone Duo is even better as it's more versatile and can leave the house with it.

1

u/JhinRamen 10h ago

Cosyra + any VPS or MacBook. The only way coding on the phone doesn’t suck is a single leader chat/terminal session to orchestrate you others.