harnsy · harnsy Max
Your agents on your phone.
With harnsy Max, install the dashboard on your phone as an app. A question or a permission request from an agent reaches you as a push notification, and you answer from the phone, even with the app closed. It is a web app you install from the browser, not an app from a store.
Install it from the browser.
Open your dashboard on the phone through access from outside and use the browser’s “Add to Home screen” (or “Install”). The dashboard then opens like an app, with its own icon.
A push when an agent waits for you.
Questions and permission requests reach the phone even when the app is closed. The notification names the project and the team and never shows the question, so nothing private sits on a lock screen. Press it and it opens that agent’s terminal, or the list of who waits if the agent has none.
A terminal that fits a phone.
The phone terminal fills the screen and adds a row of keys that a phone keyboard lacks (Esc, Tab, the arrows, Enter and Ctrl+C). You scroll its history by touch. Typing into an agent from outside stays off until you switch full control on on the machine itself. It turns itself off after two hours by default, and you can set anything from 1 to 24 hours.
No public address? The relay connects your phone anyway.
Most home computers and laptops cannot be reached from the internet. With harnsy Max, your machine reaches out to a relay instead, and your phone goes in through it. You open no port and need no public IP address. The hosted relay is in beta.
The connection is end-to-end encrypted: TLS runs from your phone to your own machine, and our relay only forwards encrypted bytes. It holds no key that can read them.
One caveat: we run the name service for your address, so in theory we could obtain a certificate for it. harnsy checks the public certificate logs every 6 hours and warns you if one appears. It detects such an attack; it cannot prevent it.
harnsy
shop-lead asks a question
acme-shop · shop
TLS runs from your phone to your machine and ends there. The relay only passes encrypted bytes.
1. Your machine dials out.
harnsy on your machine opens a connection to our relay and keeps it open. It is an outgoing connection, like opening any web page, so nothing changes on your router.
2. Your phone opens your address.
Your machine has a web address of its own. The phone opens it like any site and reaches the relay.
3. The relay joins the two.
The relay connects the phone’s stream to the connection your machine kept open, and passes the bytes between them.
4. Your machine answers.
The secure connection (TLS) ends on your machine, with a key that stays there. The sign-in and the passkey check happen there too, not at the relay.
5. You are in.
The phone shows your dashboard, as at your desk. The relay itself never gets in.
What the relay sees, and what it does not.
The relay reads only the name of the address your phone asks for, and passes the rest along as scrambled (encrypted) data. It knows roughly where the connection came from (not the full address), which machine and license (only as short codes), when, for how long and how much data. It does not record content, page addresses, cookies, names or emails.
Is it safe?
From the internet, every door is closed. Nobody gets in without authorization: you give access to each person and device yourself.
And even someone you let in can look but not act: starting, stopping or typing into your agents needs your passkey, and typing also needs one more switch on your own computer.
The details, and where the limits are.
- There are no passwords. You sign in with a one-time QR code made only on your own dashboard (valid 5 minutes, once). Then you confirm on the phone with your fingerprint, face or PIN: that is the passkey.
- Anything that changes something (starting or stopping agents, typing into them, changing settings) asks for your fingerprint, face or PIN again if the last check was more than 15 minutes ago. Signing out, push settings, creating the passkey and just viewing a terminal do not ask.
- Right after the QR code, the phone can look at everything in your dashboard for 24 hours (agents, tasks, messages, files, a live view of terminals), but it can change almost nothing until you create the passkey. Treat the QR code like a key and create the passkey at once.
- Typing into your agents from outside is off until you switch it on at the computer itself, and it switches off again after 2 hours (you can set 1 to 24). A phone you have not used for 7 days is signed out, and any phone is signed out after 30 days.
- If someone learns the address of your dashboard, they see only the sign-in page and nothing else. They cannot guess their way in: after 5 failed tries they must wait 30 seconds, then a minute, then two, and so on up to an hour.
- Two other ways in exist, both narrow, and both are made by you. A public link opens one file you chose to share, until it expires. A computer you joined to your cluster gets in with its own token.
- Your agents already run with your user’s rights, so a phone that is signed in can give them orders. Lock its screen, and sign a lost device out at once.
The hosted relay is in beta and is part of harnsy Max. A relay of your own can serve the phone too when it is started with a web zone. With your own domain there is no relay: your machine, or a forwarder in front of it, must then be reachable on port 443. The guide covers both.
How the relay works between your machines →The full security brief →Set up access from outside →
Notifications in the browser too.
On a computer, if you turn it on in that browser, harnsy shows a notification when an agent asks a question, asks for a permission or waits for you while the harnsy tab is in the background. It names the project and the team and never shows the question. Press it and it opens that agent’s terminal, or the list of who waits if the agent has none. This part is in every harnsy build.
Or answer from a chat.
If you live in Telegram or Discord, a bot per project brings the questions of the project’s lead and of the Assistant to your private chat as buttons. Permission requests come there only if you switch that on (off by default). Bots are harnsy Max. See Messengers.
Limits, honestly
- It is an installable web app, not an app from a store.
- The phone app and push need harnsy Max. Only a phone needs access from outside switched on; a push to the computer itself does not.
- A phone signed in from outside can give orders to your agents: treat it like the keys to the machine, with a screen lock.
- A notification never shows the question: open it to read and answer.
- The hosted relay is in beta. Your machine must be on and running harnsy for the phone to reach it.
Your first team is one prompt away.
Installing takes one sentence to your agent. To open agents for you, harnsy drives a terminal: tmux on Linux and macOS, its own terminal host on Windows.
Install harnsy following https://harnsy.dev/llms.txt