CCGram — Control AI Coding Agents from Telegram

Control AI coding agents from your phone. Walk away mid-session. Keep monitoring and responding from Telegram—without losing terminal access.

Why CCGram?

AI coding agents run in your terminal. Other Telegram bots wrap agent SDKs into isolated API sessions you can't resume in your terminal. CCGram is different. It sits on top of your terminal multiplexer (tmux, herdr, or agterm), not any agent SDK. Your agent process stays exactly where it is—your session is the source of truth.

This means:

• Desktop to phone, mid-conversation — walk away and keep monitoring from Telegram
• Phone back to desktop, anytime — attach to your terminal and you're back with full scrollback
• Multiple sessions in parallel — each Telegram topic maps to a separate tmux window, guarded Herdr agent session, or agterm agent pane

How It Works

graph LR
  subgraph phone["📱 Telegram Topics (Group or Private Chat)"]
    direction TB
    T1["💬 api — Claude"]
    T2["💬 ui — Codex"]
    T3["💬 data — Gemini"]
    T4["💬 ops — Shell"]
    T5["💬 lab — Pi"]
  end

  subgraph bridge["⚡ CCGram"]
    direction TB
    B1["read output\n(transcripts + terminal)"]
    B2["send keystrokes\n(tmux / herdr / agterm)"]
    B3["instant notifications\n(Claude hooks)"]
  end

  subgraph machine["🖥️ Your Machine — tmux / herdr / agterm"]
    direction TB
    W1["window @0 · claude"]
    W2["window @1 · codex"]
    W3["window @2 · gemini"]
    W4["window @3 · bash"]
    W5["window @4 · pi"]
  end

  phone -- "messages / voice" --> bridge
  bridge -- "responses / live view" --> phone
  bridge <--> machine

  style phone fill:#e8f4fd,stroke:#0088cc,stroke-width:2px,color:#333
  style bridge fill:#fff8e1,stroke:#f9a825,stroke-width:2px,color:#333
  style machine fill:#f0faf0,stroke:#2ea44f,stroke-width:2px,color:#333

Each Telegram topic maps to one tmux window. With Herdr, it maps instead to one guarded agent session: agent.list is the sole identity source and CCGram persists only an opaque herdr-session-v1-… target, never a tab, pane, or terminal ID. Every Herdr agent topic is provider-prefixed and pane-qualified as <Provider> ▸ <workspace> ▸ <tab> ▸ <pane>, so Pi, Claude, Codex, and Gemini topics are easy to find while their labels remain stable when siblings join or leave the tab. Every action reads a fresh agent.list record and fails closed for missing, malformed, sessionless, or legacy bindings. Duplicate canonical targets are quarantined while unrelated sessions remain operational. Legacy locator bindings require explicit rebind and are never inferred from names. A session can still change after that guard and before Herdr dispatches, so delivery is not atomic and may be indeterminate after this post-guard race. With agterm, the primary topic retains the session UUID; split peers get separate foreground-guarded targets.

What You Can Do

• Bind agents to topics — one agent per group or private-chat topic; create via directory browser
• Auto-detect providers — Supports Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Pi, and Shell simultaneously
• Monitor live — Terminal screenshots on demand or auto-refresh every 5 seconds
• Topic-aware command panels — Four safe General controls; session-specific CCGram actions and original agent command names in each topic
• Send commands — Slash commands, voice messages (transcribed via Whisper), or raw shell input
• Run multiple agents in parallel — each topic independent; run different agents at once
• Recover gracefully — Resume, continue, or start fresh if a session crashes
• Send workspace files — Share files to Telegram via /send (glob, path, or substring search)
• Action toolbar — Provider-specific buttons for common actions (Screenshot, Mode, Esc, Enter, etc.)
• Direct choices — Answer supported numbered and yes/no agent prompts with one tap

Telegram shares its native slash-command suggestions across topics. CCGram keeps /commands, /sessions, /sync, and /upgrade in that list. /commands opens the current topic’s pinned panel with session-specific actions. See topic command panels.

Provider Switching

Topic titles retain their status icon and show a short provider prefix: Pi · task, Claude · task, or Term · workspace. A confirmed automatic switch produces one silent notice; startup, repeated polling, and short-lived intermediate providers do not. Manual changes use the /agent reply instead of a second notice.

/agent shows the topic name, selected provider, and Auto or Manual mode. A manual choice is accepted only when it matches the live foreground process; it cannot launch, stop, or redirect an agent. Auto follows detection again. Manual selection filters out hooks from other providers. A switch reconciles the existing session-map entry against the live destination: matching entries are retained, mismatches removed, and later matching hooks are admitted while pinned. Auto rechecks and cleans the entry before releasing the pin. Manual mode excludes queued transcript replies from other providers, but keeps tail replies across /new or /clear within the selected provider; an already in-flight send may finish. An exited agent keeps its recovery flow rather than silently turning ordinary chat into shell commands.

Delivery and Sync Safety

CCGram losslessly combines only eligible consecutive transcript text deliveries for the same chat, topic, window, role, and source session. It preserves each item's formatting and keeps tool updates, media, status updates, and other boundaries separate. The status bubble shows queue progress; at a severe backlog (100 pending items or an oldest item aged 5 minutes), its inline Jump to live action requires confirmation and posts a skipped-range notice. The raw provider transcript is never deleted. Delivery is at-least-once, so a Telegram failure or restart before acknowledgement can repeat a transcript message rather than silently losing it.

Topics and their history are deleted as soon as CCGram confirms that the terminal session has closed. Set CCGRAM_AUTODELETE_DEAD_TOPICS=false to keep a dead session's topic and its binding instead: the recovery banner still answers the next message there, and a later restart can re-link the topic to a re-keyed session. Failed deletions survive restarts and are retried automatically. /sync immediately cleans up locally known stale and retired topics; active or rebound topics are protected. It cannot discover topics whose IDs CCGram no longer knows. See the Sync cleanup guide for retries and Telegram admin permissions.

Topics remain protected while their sessions are being created, including slow startup and recovery flows. Creation ownership is saved before remote operations; after a restart, CCGram checks the recorded target before binding or deleting its topic. An unavailable backend or an unresolved creation outcome never counts as a closed session.

Quick Start

Install:

uv tool install ccgram          # recommended
# or: pipx install ccgram | brew install alexei-led/tap/ccgram

Telegram setup:

1. Create a bot via @BotFather — full instructions
2. Choose one topic setup:
   • Private chat: Enable Topics for the bot in BotFather. Topic 1 is the control topic.
   • Group: Add the bot to a Topics-enabled group and promote it to Admin.
3. Create ~/.ccgram/.env:

TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=your_bot_token_here
ALLOWED_USERS=your_telegram_user_id
# Group setup only:
CCGRAM_GROUP_ID=your_telegram_group_id

Get your user ID from @userinfobot. For a group, get its ID via @RawDataBot and prefix the Peer ID with -100.

Run:

ccgram

Open the configured group or private bot chat. Create a topic and send a message. The directory browser appears. Pick a project directory and an agent (Claude, Codex, Gemini, Pi, or Shell).

Prerequisites: Python 3.14+, tmux, herdr, or agterm, and one agent CLI. CCGram does not modify agent SDKs.

Herdr setup

CCGram supports Herdr protocols 14–22 and uses the public socket API for operations, so a newer CLI can coexist with an older running server. Set HERDR_SOCKET_PATH for an explicit endpoint; otherwise herdr status --json discovers it. Future protocol numbers are attempted with a warning, extra response fields are tolerated, and required session identities remain strictly validated. Telegram rate limiting uses a protected PTB adapter seam and is therefore tested against and constrained to python-telegram-bot>=22.8,<22.9. Install Herdr's integration before launching an agent that needs a native session identity:

herdr integration install pi
herdr integration install antigravity-cli

Restart an already-running agent after installation. Antigravity receives a native Herdr session identity after its first prompt creates a conversation.

Start new agents, or restart already-running agents, after installing the integration so they publish their agent_session identity. Then set CCGRAM_MULTIPLEXER=herdr and run ccgram hook --install as usual.

agterm setup

agterm is macOS-native. Install [agterm](https: