June 21, 2026
Remote control... of the drama
Show HN: Pulse – Dashboard for Claude Code, approve tool calls from your phone
A clever phone helper for Claude lands — and the comments instantly yell, “It already does that!”
TLDR: Pulse is a new local dashboard for Claude Code that lets people monitor activity, recover sessions, and approve actions from a phone. The community reaction was immediate: several people said Claude already does this, while others argued Pulse matters because the official phone notifications don’t always work.
A new Hacker News demo called Pulse is trying to become the ultimate sidekick for Claude Code, the coding assistant that can ask permission before doing certain actions. The pitch is simple and weirdly appealing: watch what Claude is doing, track how much it’s costing, recover lost sessions, search old chats, and most importantly, approve requests from your phone. It’s all local, private, and doesn’t send your data anywhere. There’s even an “ambient office” mode with a tiny mascot silently working on a second screen, which feels like the kind of feature people pretend to laugh at right before becoming obsessed with it.
But the real show wasn’t the product page — it was the comment section dogpile. Multiple users jumped in with the same buzzy correction: Claude Code already has a built-in remote control feature. One commenter basically hit the thread with a hall monitor whistle, while another even dropped the official remote control docs like courtroom evidence. Still, not everyone was dunking. One user said the official mobile alerts had stopped working on Android, suddenly turning Pulse from “duplicate app drama” into “actually useful backup plan.” Another gave the classic internet blessing, “very cool,” while one more tossed in a casual plug for their own similar tool, because of course they did.
So the vibe was peak tech-community chaos: part launch, part fact-check, part rival tool roll call. Pulse may have arrived as a handy dashboard, but the comments turned it into a referendum on whether people want better tools, different tools, or just one that actually pings their phone when it matters.
Key Points
- •Pulse is described as a local dashboard for Claude Code that reads session files in read-only mode and keeps data on the user’s machine.
- •The tool provides live views of Claude Code activity, token spend, context fill, full-text session search, and phone or desktop approval prompts for tool calls.
- •Setup requires Node 18+, a GitHub clone, and optional hook installation to enable notifications and approval actions.
- •Pulse can run detached in the background, supports start/status/stop/restart commands, and offers macOS login-service installation.
- •The article says Pulse can recover recent sessions, auto-snapshot active ones, and export all session history into lightweight markdown or gzipped files.