Coding 2026 Meta

Tailscale + Tmux + Claude Code + Your Smartphone

If you've ever played competitive online games like League of Legends or Dota, you're probably familiar with the term "meta." In gaming, meta (short for "metagame") refers to the most effective strategies, tools, or playstyles at any given time - what the top players are using to win. It shifts as new patches drop or players discover better approaches.

In Software Development, meta changes as the new tools, IDEs (e.g. Cursor, Antigravity) and coding models (e.g. Claude, GPT) drop

CLI Tools

As of January 2026, the meta revolves around CLI tools, especially Claude Code. But IMO it doesn't matter that much what CLI tool you use - Codex, Gemini CLI or CC.

Claude Code

Probably the best for now.

Codex

Codex from OpenAI gives the same results as CC, but does it slower. When you type "write hello world" it feels like Codex could think for 20 minutes. Claude Code seems to think short on short tasks and long on long tasks. Both Codex and Opus deliver on the long tasks.

Gemini

I haven't really tried Gemini. It scores very good on the benchmarks. The most useful, simple and objective benchmark is LMArena. Gemini is free for students—so if you're a student, use Gemini.

Do not "lock in" into one vendor. If OpenAI releases best model in a week, or if Google makes Gemini 10x cheaper in a month, you should be able to pivot fast - just change api key or type 'codex' instead of 'claude' in terminal.

You might want to check OpenCode because of that. Or even better build your own agent.

Usage

You can download Claude Code, ask it to generate whatever app you need, and it will do it for you. If you're a runner or want to max your bench press, you've probably tried apps like Strava to track your progress. I don't think that makes sense anymore. These apps still have benefits like cloud sync, but we can overcome that using Tailscale ->

Tailscale

To get the benefits of cloud sync, you can use Tailscale. Tailscale is a "connectivity platform for devs, IT, and security teams." But syncing app data isn't the main benefit for coding.

The most important benefit is the ability to connect your phone and PC and use your terminal from your phone. It's the beginning of the year and you might have some New Year's resolution about working out. You have no excuse anymore. You can program from the gym between sets, easily:

1. Install Tailscale on your pc and phone

$ curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh

$ brew install tailscale

# Download from https://tailscale.com/download/windows

2. Add your devices to your Tailnet

$ sudo tailscale up

This opens a browser to authenticate. Do the same on your phone after installing the Tailscale app.

3. Enable ssh on your pc

$ sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on

$ sudo apt install openssh-server
$ sudo systemctl enable --now ssh

Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name OpenSSH.Server
Start-Service sshd
Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType Automatic

4. Install SSH tool on your phone. E.g. Termius on iOS or Termux on Android

5. You have terminal access from your phone now - ask your agent to do stuff on your PC when you work out or play Minecraft

6. To track progress and work on multiple tasks at once, use Tmux ->

Tmux

Tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It lets you run multiple terminal sessions inside one window and keeps them running after you disconnect.

It's uncomfortable to use terminal on phone and without Tmux I would lose track of my tasks easily.

If you want to work on task 1 and task 2, create two named session. Lets say Task 1 is fixing UI bug and Task 2 is adding a feature to send order confirmation email to your customers.

1. Init tmux sessions on your pc like that:

$ tmux new -s fix-ui-bug
$ tmux new -s add-order-confirmation

2. Connect from your phone via Termius or Termux and attach to a session:

$ tmux attach -t fix-ui-bug

3. Describe the task for Claude or Gemini or whatever,

$ claude "fix UI bug when user orders too many items"
# you might need to approve commands a lot for your agent or use —dangerously-skip-permissions flag. It's unlikely but possibleit will wipe out everything on your computer or do smth like this. Very unlikely if you ask for e.g. UI bug fix but have that in mind 

4. then detach with ctrl+b d and go do something else.

$ tmux detach # or ctrl+b d on pc

You can treat list of tmux sessions like TODO list for your agents

Tips

Bad UX as of today

Tmux doesn't work perfectly with Claude Code yet. Sometimes I get issues with scrolling. If you have these issues too, press 'ctrl+b [' to enter tmux copy mode

Verify fast

QA is important, E2E tests are important. Make verification easy and fast. Stuff like TDD started making sense. Write good tests and make your agent work until tests are passing. Measure stuff and ask agents "Make it execute faster, verify your result by running meter.sh"

Avoid super verbosity

Prompt "minimal code that does the job, avoid overusing defensive programming patterns, fail early code, avoid external dependencies and frameworks". This is very important at least for me. Otherwise it will generate stuff like in the bad example:

# Good
words = open(file).read().split(',')

# Bad
import logging
from pathlib import Path

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

def safely_read_and_split_words(file_path: str = None) -> list:
    """Safely reads a text file and splits content by commas."""
    if file_path is None:
        logger.warning("No file path provided")
        return []

    path = Path(file_path)
    if not path.exists():
        logger.error(f"File not found: {path}")
        return []

    try:
        with open(path, "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
            content = f.read()
            return [w.strip() for w in content.split(',') if w.strip()]
    except IOError as e:
        logger.error(f"Error reading file: {e}")
        return []

Learn from others

Observe most efficient people (~ the ones with highest income) on social media (X, HackerNews, Bluesky, similiar to how you would watch streamers if you wanted to get better at Lol, Dota or Chess. But observing Magnus Carlsen wouldn't make you better at chess. You must do stuff actively

Examples: primeagen, levelsio, Andrej Karpathy

Interesting fact: As I wrote this I found the similiar setup discussed on hackernews. Only difference is no TMUX mention

Roll your own stuff

Creating your own setup is like building your own lightsaber, it's part of the training.

Make it fun

Have fun when you do stuff like this. It will make you do it more. Listen to your favorite music when coding. Use a lot of caffeine

Use big computer

You obviously can't rely just on the phone yet. Sometimes you need to sit down and compare git diffs, write some code manually and big computer is just the best for it.

Use git

Git is very important. Make your agents use it.

Note

Note a lot. Especially stuff that is not in the code. E.g. note down where you store your API keys, why did you use this tool and not the other one.. I like Obsidian for this, because of File Over App philosophy. "File over App" is generally important

No sleep

Your computer should be always turned on, do not log out and no sleep mode. It's okay to use old laptop or raspberry pi