Transcription
All right, I'm in my cloud code and it says, "Listening for channel messages from the plugin iMessage." And on my phone right here, I've got iMessage pulled up and I'm going to shoot off this text that says, "Scrape the YouTube comments from my recent video and give me a breakdown." And what you'll see right here on my terminal is that we have iMessage and it says, "Scrape the YouTube comments blah blah blah." So, this is the exact text that I just sent off. And now, Cloud Code is acting as if I just typed this message right here locally on my machine. So, it's able to use all of the skills that I've got in here. It's able to look through all of these different folders and files. It's able to use my API keys and things like that. And we're able to on our terminal watch all of this happening. And as you can see, what it did is it used my YouTube analyzer skill in order to achieve this for us. So that skill finished up and it sent the reply back to myself in iMessage. You can see that it was able to scrape 511 comments across six recent videos with some biggest themes and some top video requests. And so right here in my iMessage, you can see here it is. We have the top themes, feature access frustration, token usage limit, anxiety, end pivot, backlash, open claw versus cloud code, all this kind of stuff. We have strongest video requests like manisai, cloud code plus APIs, blah blah blah. And then we have standout comments. It also ends the message with sent by claude, which is pretty nice. But what you will notice is that because I'm texting myself an iMessage, it's basically going to duplicate every single one of my messages, whether Claude sent it or whether I sent it. There are obviously some fixes here. So, the purpose of this video is to show you guys how this works, how to set it up, and what you need to know. So, let's get into it.
All right, so Cloud Code released channels, which you probably already knew about. This came out about a week ago, but this basically allowed you to start talking to your Cloud Code session through select MCPs. And this started with Telegram and Discord. But it seemed like it was just today that they announced that iMessage is now also available as a channel, which is super exciting. So, just to start off real quick, what is a channel? Basically, it's like giving Cloud Code a phone number. It basically allows us to talk to cloud code through some sort of thirdparty app like telegram, discord or iMessage and it basically sends that through like a tunnel or you know a bridge or a channel and it can send and reply. So as you saw in the demo it basically just takes my message from iMessage and then inserts it into the conversation inside of cloud code. And by the way this mark I burnt myself on my oven the other day. Anyways that's cool because then locally on your computer cloud code acts as if you were sitting there talking to it. So, we're getting more and more to the place where you're able to use your sessions as you want, wherever you are.
Now, one of the biggest downsides to this feature right now is that if that session closes out, so if I go back into my VS Code and I basically go control C, now if I texted my iMessage, nothing would happen. It would not actually access Cloud Code. And so, that can be frustrating if you know you want to be gone for a couple days and you're worried about your laptop turning off or an update restarting or whatever it is. you would have to go back locally, open up a new session, and then you could use that channel again. There are obviously some fixes here, of course. You could host your cloud code on a VPS and keep it running all the time with something like a T-m. But one of the catches here with the iMessage channel is that it's iMessage, meaning wherever you're running Cloud Code has to be on Mac OS. So that is why you could probably tell today I am on my laptop, which is a MacBook. The good news though is that there are some ways that you can have like sort of a MacOSS VPS. And if you wanted to host Cloud Code there or on a Mac Mini, then you'd be all set and you could use this channel 24/7.
Now, the coolest part about this is it might seem like you need to know how to set up like some sort of weird bridge or a tunnel, but it actually couldn't be simpler. You basically just run a few commands, run the plugin, and you're all set. So, let me talk about how this works and maybe a few things that you might run into as far as issues. So, as we know, a channel is an MCP server that pushes events into your running Cloud Code session so that Cloud can react to things that happen while you're not at the terminal, which is great. I'm not going to dive into all the technical details right here, but if you want to go to the documentation, just go to Cloud Code docs and then search for channels or push events into a running session with channels. So, as we know, we have three supported channels right now, and it does require you to install bun. So, I didn't know what that was before looking at all this stuff. All you have to do is, you know, take this link up here, give it to Cloud Code and say, "Hey, I want to set up a channel for Discord or for iMessage." Read this documentation and then help me set up everything and it will basically install everything that you need. So, we've got different steps here for Telegram, Discord, and iMessage, but they basically follow the same pattern of making sure you have the right access, installing the plugin, and then launching Claude with that channel enabled.
So, the first thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to grant full disc access on your local Mac settings. So basically what that means is you're going to open up your settings. You're going to go to privacy and security. You're going to go to full disk access and then add whatever you need as far as where you're using cloud code. So this does have to be used in the terminal. But the good news is you can use this in Visual Studio Code like I've shown in basically all my other YouTube videos. So all I had to do was enable full disk access for Visual Studio Code.
Now the next thing you're going to have to do is you're going to have to install the plugin which once again could not be simpler. You're just going to copy this command right here. You're going to go into your cloud code and for here I'm just going to launch a default version of cloud code. Copy in that plugin and then when I send that off it will basically give you the option to install it. You can see right here I've already installed this globally. And if I go to /plugin I could basically see all these plugins. And you can even see here if I searched for the Discord one I could install the Discord one right there. And if I went to Telegram I could grab the Telegram one right there. But if I go over to the ones that I've actually already installed, you can see right here I have the iMessage plugin which is already connected and enabled.
Now once you've done that, all you have to do is copy this next command which launches a fresh session of Claude, but it does it in this channel mode. So if I exit out of this cloud code and I paste in that way where I'm running Claude code like this, it basically says right away listening for channel messages at iMessage. So then what I could do is I could open up my iMessage. I could just say, "Hey, can you hear me?" And when I shoot that off, we should see that in just a second pop up right here in our cloud code session. And here's a quick example. I didn't launch this one in bypass permissions. So, it says, "Hey, I need to do this. Do you want to let me proceed?" And here is where I would in my local session say yes or no. But it does tell us right here that we could reply on our iMessage. So, I can go yes, mwy. And if I shoot that off, then let's see if Claude's able to get that and actually take action. There we go. So, that's how you're able to approve things from your phone. So, you're not completely blocked off in case you forgot about some sort of permission. And you can also see here that Claude Code is able to send emojis, which is cool. So, right now, I'm texting myself on iMessage. And that's basically how this thing works.
If you want to be able to text yourself from a different number or have other people be able to text your Claude code, then all you have to do is allow different numbers to. But the very first time when you text yourself after this channel's set up, it may pop up right here and say like, "Hey, I'm getting a text from this number. Is this you? Should I allow it?" Blah, blah, blah. And that's where you just say yes. But if you wanted to allow other members to be able to text your cloud code, then all you have to do is / iMessage access allow. And then you can either do a phone number or you could also do an Apple ID. And then that Apple ID or that phone number could also text your cloud code session. So, if you really wanted to get rid of these double texts, then you would just want to text this number. So, right here is, you know, my Nate Herk um Apple ID, and I would just want to text that number or that Apple ID from a different account or from a different number. And then I could just have like basically a one-way conversation that feels more like a human or, you know, an AI agent.
Now, Pro and Max users, that's basically all you have to do is install the plugin and then run Claude Code in that way. But for enterprise users or if you're on a team plan, then you're going to have to make sure the admin allows channel use because by default it will be turned off. But all of the plans should be able to use this once everything's configured correctly. So if that is you, you would basically just go to your admin settings, cloud code, and then channels. So here I am in my organization settings. You can see that I've got a lot of options here that I can turn on like fast mode, remote control. A lot of these are because they're in research preview. Right here at the bottom we have channels and this is where we could actually enable that.
And one final thing that I wanted to cover which I think is a very valid question is the difference because there's lots of ways now that we can control our local sessions from our phone or from you know the go and we have dispatch we have channels and we have remote control. So I basically came to the docs and I said hey what's the difference? And here's what it pulled. Dispatch is message a task from your mobile app. Cloud runs on your machine. It's best for delegating work while you're away with minimal setup. channels means you push events from chat apps like Telegram, Discord, iMessage or your own servers into a running session, which is best for reacting to external events like CI failures or chat messages and remote control drive a running session from cloud.ai/code or the mobile app, which is best for steering in progress work from another device. And so that still might to you sound like it's all basically the same thing. The key difference here is the trigger. Dispatch is messagebased, channels are event-based, and remote control is for direct control of an active session. So hopefully that should clear things up a little bit. They're all very different. They're all kind of similar, but they're all steering us in the direction of Enthropic wanting us to be able to use Cloud Code from anywhere, which I think is obviously great. And I know that this is an iMessage plugin or channel, but even if you're doing your green SMSs, if they're being sent to that number, then Cloud Code should also be able to read those and respond to those as well.
So that is going to do it for this video. If you enjoyed, you learned something new, please give it a like. It helps me out a ton. And as always, I appreciate you guys made it to the end of the video. I'll see you on the next one.