phone-built

Built on the bus

This website was made
between stops.

No laptop open, no IDE, no terminal in sight. Just a phone, a few sentences — some typed with one thumb, most of them spoken out loud to the mild interest of the man across the aisle — and Claude doing the typing on the other end. Scaffolded, committed, pushed and deployed before my stop came up.

16 Next.jsvoice + one thumb Inputtop deck Desk

What's actually going on

Start with the disappointing part: the phone is a remote control. The real work happens on a computer at home, still plugged in, still doing what computers do. I'm just telling it what to do from the top deck of a bus.

What makes that work is everything that was already in place before I got on. House rules Claude reads at the start of every session. Checklists, so the dull-but-important things never get skipped. A written description of how I want things to look. A catch that won't let one of my identities sign its name on another's. Permissions scoped one at a time — enough freedom to get on with the job, and not one thing more. None of it appeared overnight; it's weeks of writing down what used to live only in my head.

So: the phone isn't the clever part. The preparation is.

For the technical ones

How to do this yourself

The rest of this is for the two or three of you who will want to try it. If that isn't you, you have already read the interesting part — go and look out of the window. You need a machine somewhere with Claude Code installed and logged in to GitHub and Vercel. Then the phone becomes the remote.

  1. 01

    Get a seat

    Top deck, front left if you can get it. Open Claude Code on the phone and start a session against the laptop at home — which is still on the desk, still plugged in, doing nothing in particular.

  2. 02

    Say what you want

    Plain words, typed or spoken: "make a small Next.js app, commit to GitHub, deploy to Vercel." That's the whole brief. Claude checks the tooling, the accounts and the conventions before touching anything.

  3. 03

    Scaffold

    create-next-app, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, a dark-by-default theme, favicons, analytics. The boring-but-important shell gets done the same way every time.

  4. 04

    Write the page

    One decent front page — this one. Fonts chosen, copy written, spacing tuned. You read it back on the phone and ask for tweaks in a sentence.

  5. 05

    Commit & push

    "initial commit" on main, a dev branch for ongoing work, a private repo created with the gh CLI under the right account.

  6. 06

    Ship

    vercel link, connect the repo, deploy. A URL arrives in the chat. You tap it, it works, you put the phone down with two stops to spare.