Create anywhere, continue anywhere

Set up the primary Mac

This machine does everything. It runs the app, holds your files, and keeps every session alive. The other two devices need almost nothing by comparison.

Get Claude Code running

Download the Claude desktop app from claude.ai/download, install it, and sign in with your account. Claude Code comes with it, so there is nothing separate to install. Open a folder and start a session.

A new Mac will be missing a few things underneath. Let Claude Code find and fix them:

This is a brand new Mac. Check whether everything you need is in place — the Xcode command line tools, git, Homebrew and Node — and install or walk me through anything that's missing. Then confirm you can read and write a file in my home directory. Keep it brief and tell me when I'm good to go.

Once that comes back clean, everything below is either a prompt you paste in or a setting you click.

Turn on Remote Control

Add "remoteControlAtStartup": true at the top level of my ~/.claude/settings.json. Read the file first and preserve everything already in it, then confirm the result is valid JSON and show me what you changed.

Restart Claude Code afterwards so it picks the setting up.

Stop it sleeping

Three changes, all by hand. You will need your administrator password.

1. System Settings › Energy. Turn on: prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off, wake for network access, and start up automatically after a power failure.
2. Terminal. Run sudo pmset -a sleep 0 disksleep 0 womp 1 autorestart 1 and enter your password.
3. System Settings › Users & Groups. Set “Automatically log in as” to your account, so a reboot comes back to a working state with nobody present.

Automatic login needs FileVault off: System Settings › Privacy & Security › FileVault. If you leave it on, the Mac is unreachable after any reboot until someone unlocks it in person.

Memory: 16GB minimum, 24GB better.

Set up the laptop

Install Claude Code and sign in with the same account, then turn on the same setting. It is stored per-machine, so the laptop needs its own copy.

Add "remoteControlAtStartup": true at the top level of my ~/.claude/settings.json. Read the file first and preserve everything already in it, then confirm the result is valid JSON and show me what you changed.

Restart, then open the desktop app. The Mac’s sessions appear in the sidebar grouped by folder, and they are fully interactive: you are typing into a session executing on the other machine.

Sessions you start on the laptop still stop when you close it. That is the whole reason to keep work on the Mac. The laptop is a window, not a workshop.

Set up the phone

Almost nothing to do here, because the phone runs no sessions of its own.

1. Install the Claude app from the App Store or Play Store.
2. Sign in with the same account you use on the Mac.
3. Open your Code sessions. Everything running on the Mac is listed and can be driven from the phone.

Worth one more thing while you are at it: have the Mac push you a notification when a session is waiting on an answer, so you find out instead of having to check.

Set "inputNeededNotifEnabled": true and "agentPushNotifEnabled": true at the top level of my ~/.claude/settings.json so my phone gets a push when a session is waiting on me. Read the file first, preserve everything already in it, and confirm the result is valid JSON.

The phone is for steering rather than building: read what happened, answer a question, approve a direction, then pick it back up at a real keyboard.

Keep your history longer

Transcripts are deleted after 30 days by default. Older sessions stay listed but can no longer be opened. Raise the limit on the Mac:

Set "cleanupPeriodDays": 365 at the top level of my ~/.claude/settings.json so my session transcripts are kept for a year instead of 30 days. Read the file first, preserve everything already in it, and confirm the result is valid JSON.

Do this early. It only protects sessions from here on; anything already past 30 days is gone.