ai-cli-anywhere

Use your Claude CLI and Cursor Agent from your phone via Telegram.

Built this for myself — tired of being away from my desk and not being able to continue a session with my AI tools. No cloud API, no walled garden. The AI runs on your machine (or a free cloud VM), with access to your actual projects.

How it works

Your Telegram message
        ↓
Telegram Bot API  (official, event-driven)
        ↓
  voice note?  → transcribed via Whisper (OpenAI) → text
  photo?       → analyzed via Claude Vision → text
  @claude tag? → Claude CLI (your installation, your projects)
  everything else → Cursor Agent
        ↓
  /model ...   → switch AI model on the fly
  /status      → see current config
  /new         → start a fresh session
  /history     → show last exchanges
        ↓
Reply back to Telegram  (streamed live if STREAM_RESPONSES=true)

Conversation memory is persistent across sessions. The bot knows what you talked about yesterday.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/idan3011/ai-cli-anywhere.git
cd ai-cli-anywhere
bash scripts/install.sh

The script walks you through everything — Telegram bot creation, config, and optionally setting up a systemd service so it runs on startup.

Full guide: docs/INSTALL.md

Deployment

systemd (recommended for a Linux server):

cp deploy/ai-cli-anywhere.service /etc/systemd/system/ai-cli-anywhere@.service
systemctl enable --now ai-cli-anywhere@$USER

Docker Compose:

docker compose up -d

See deploy/README.md for full instructions.

Running 24/7 without your laptop

Run it on Oracle Cloud's free tier — 2 Linux VMs, permanently free. Clone your projects there, install Claude CLI and Cursor, run the install script. Your dev tools are then available from your phone at any time.

Switching models

Send /model in chat:

/model claude opus       → Claude Opus
/model claude sonnet     → Claude Sonnet
/model cursor sonnet 4.5 → Cursor model switch (forwarded natively)

When Anthropic releases new versions, update one line in .env — no code changes:

CLAUDE_MODEL_ALIASES=opus:claude-opus-4-6,sonnet:claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929,haiku:claude-haiku-4-5-20251001

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• Claude CLI (install)
• Cursor Agent (optional — leave blank to use Claude for everything)
• A Telegram bot token (@BotFather, free, 2 min)
• OpenAI API key (optional — enables voice transcription via Whisper)
• Anthropic API key (optional — enables image analysis via Claude Vision)

Docs

• Setup guide — step by step, includes Oracle Cloud VM option
• Architecture — how it's built

License

MIT — see LICENSE.