Your first session

Your host is set up and your phone is paired. This page gets you from there to an agent that is actually working.

1. Pick a workspace

A workspace is one folder on the host, with its own board and its own sessions. Press + next to Workspaces in the sidebar and choose one of three doors: browse the host’s File System, pick an Existing Project your agents already touched, or clone a Remote Repository onto the host.

It does not have to be a git repository. If the folder you pick happens to sit inside one, Offsite snaps the workspace to the repository root, because that is almost always what you meant. Otherwise the folder itself is the workspace. See Workspaces.

2. Start a session

On an empty board, Start a new session…. Pick a tool:

Tool	What you get
Claude	the real claude CLI
Codex	the real codex CLI
Grok	the real grok CLI
Terminal	a plain login shell

The session opens as a card. It runs on the host, in the workspace folder, with your shell environment: the same PATH, the same config, the same MCP servers and skills the CLI would find if you had typed the command yourself.

If a tool is missing from the list, its CLI is not installed on that host. See Install & set up, step 3.

3. Work

Type into the card. There is no send button and no separate prompt box, because the card is the terminal.

While the agent runs, the card shows what it is doing. When it stops, you get a notification on whichever devices you allowed. See Notifications.

4. Add the cards you actually want

Use New Card to put more on the board. Beyond sessions there are four built-in card types:

• Git — the workspace’s changes, stage, commit, push.
• Files — browse and edit files on the host.
• Browser — a tunnelled web target, usually your dev server.
• Simulator — a mirrored iOS Simulator running on the host.

Drag cards to move them, drag their edges to resize. Tidy board puts everything back into an even grid.

5. Walk away

Close the app. Shut the lid. Get on a train.

The session belongs to the host, not to the app, and it runs in tmux there. When you open Offsite again, on the Mac or on the phone, the card is where you left it and the output arrived while you were gone.

Try it once on purpose: start something long, quit the app, come back.

Next

• Workspaces — what a workspace is and is not
• The board — cards, tabs, focus mode, keyboard control
• Agent sessions — permission modes, models, resume

Details

• Workspaces are stored per host in ~/.offsite/workspaces.json; the workspace id is its absolute root path.
• Existing Projects lists folders your agents already ran in plus git repositories under your home directory. That is only a suggestion list — File System accepts any directory, and Remote Repository clones one onto the host (see Workspaces).
• Card types on the wire are terminal, browser, mirror, diff and files. Session tools are claude, codex, grok, terminal, browser and mirror.
• A session gets OFFSITE_SESSION_ID, OFFSITE_WORKSPACE_ID and OFFSITE_TOOL in its environment. Agents can read those and call the offsite CLI with them.