Docs/Tutorials/The three ways to work
Tutorials

The three ways to work: desk, phone, and any browser

5 min read

Most people meet DevThrottle as a desktop app and assume that is what it is. It is not. The same fleet of agents is reachable three different ways, and which one you reach for has nothing to do with preference - it depends on what you have with you.

Nothing to install and nothing to configure here. This is the five minutes that stops you being stuck at your desk because that is the only place you know how to answer an agent.

At the office: the desktop app

The fastest of the three, and the only one where nothing sits between you and the agent. Every session carries a real terminal, and you can type straight into it - the same Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode session you would have started yourself, with the board wrapped around it rather than in front of it.

Use it when you are actually building. Anything fiddly - a long back-and-forth, an agent that needs correcting mid-thought, a tool that wants a keypress - belongs here. See The Director board.

Out and about: your phone

Your phone does two quite different jobs, and it is worth knowing they are different.

The first is a rescue. An agent stops and needs a yes, or a nudge in another direction, while you are shopping. Thirty seconds, and it is moving again instead of sitting idle until you get home.

The second surprises people: a whole working session, by voice, with no screen at all. It reads each turn out loud and you answer by talking. That is hours of real work from a footpath or a quiet bench. See DevThrottle on your phone.

Away, but at a keyboard: the Cockpit

A hotel laptop, a client's spare desktop, a machine that is not yours. Sign in and your whole fleet is there in a browser tab, with nothing to install on that machine.

It is also where you go when you are not building at all - the end of a week, when the question is what actually happened rather than what to do next. See The Cockpit.

One fleet, three windows

The thing to take away: these are not three copies of your work. Your agents run on your own machines and keep running whichever window you are looking through. Close the laptop and the work does not stop. Pick up your phone an hour later and the same sessions are there, in whatever state they reached while you were gone.

Note
The desktop app is the only one of the three that can hand your keystrokes straight to the agent's terminal. If a tutorial tells you to type into a running agent, that is the window it means.
Tip
Most people end up using all three in the same week without planning to. It is worth setting your phone up before you need it, because the moment you need it you are away from the machine that would let you set it up.

Next

Pick whichever matches where you are right now: straight into an agent's terminal at your desk, pair your phone with your fleet, or your whole fleet in a browser tab.