Supervise your agents from your phone

Updated August 10, 2026

Goal: keep a long run moving while you’re away from the desk, without leaving your agents blocked for an hour.

What you need

  • An iPhone running iOS 16 or later, with crystl from the App Store.
  • A Mac running crystl. There’s no account and no sign-in.
  • On the same Wi-Fi, the app is free: watching, sending input, approving tools, and merging a session all work at no cost. Connecting from outside your home network goes through the encrypted relay and is part of Guild.

Steps

  1. Pair once. On the Mac, open Window → pair device. crystl shows a QR code, plus a remote-access toggle if you’ll be connecting from outside your network.
  2. In the app, tap scan and point the phone at the code. Or enter the host, port, and token by hand. The token goes into your iPhone’s Keychain.
  3. Turn on notifications so the phone alerts you when an agent wants a tool approved, asks a question, or finishes.
  4. Answer from the conversation. Multiple-choice questions appear inline, tap to answer. Approval requests surface above the message box with allow, always, and deny, or review them all from the Approvals tab.
  5. Steer when you need to. Type a reply, dictate one, or send a photo from your camera. A terminal key row (enter, esc, ctrl-c, arrows, tab) drives full-screen terminal UIs.

What you’ll see when it works

Every open gem and its shards, each with a live status. Tap a session to read the structured transcript of the agent’s turns, or switch to the live terminal screen. You can browse your Mac’s project folders and open a new gem from the phone too.

If a quest is running it gets its own tab: the party chat as it happens, each hero speaking under its name and role. You can chime in to the whole party. Tapping an individual hero routes you back to the party chat on purpose, so a stray message can’t break the agents’ coordination.

Notifications carry only short labels, the project, session, and tool names, so you know what’s waiting. They never contain your messages, terminal output, or code. Everything else travels directly between your two devices, over your local network or the encrypted relay, and nothing is stored on a server.

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