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 session
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, each topic maps to one durable agterm session UUID.
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
- 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
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 for confirmed closed terminal sessions are deleted after the dead-session timer (10 minutes by default). Failed deletions survive restarts and are retried automatically. /sync also offers bulk cleanup of locally recorded closed topics; active or rebound topics are protected. It cannot discover topics whose IDs CCGram no longer knows. See the Sync cleanup guide for timing and Telegram admin permissions.
Quick Start
Install:
uv tool install ccgram # recommended
# or: pipx install ccgram | brew install alexei-led/tap/ccgram
Telegram setup:
- Create a bot via @BotFather — full instructions
- 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.
- 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 socket protocols 14–20. Later and otherwise unknown protocol versions are attempted with a warning for forward compatibility; individual command failures still surface if the protocol is not usable. Telegram rate limiting uses a protected PTB adapter seam and is therefore tested against and constrained to python-telegram-bot>=22.6,<22.7. 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, then use Help > Install Command Line Tool to put agtermctl on PATH. Start agterm and confirm that agtermctl can reach its control socket. Set AGTERM_SOCKET only when the default socket is not the one to use.
Set CCGRAM_MULTIPLEXER=agterm. CCGram adopts sessions from the ccgram workspace by default; set CCGRAM_AGTERM_WORKSPACES to a comma-separated list of workspace names, or * for all workspaces. Run ccgram doctor to verify the CLI and control socket.
Platform Support
CCGram supports Linux, macOS, and WSL2. Native Windows is not supported. The agterm backend is macOS-native.
On Windows, install and run CCGram inside WSL2. Install tmux or herdr and the agent CLI inside the WSL distribution; use agterm only on macOS.
Native Windows does not provide the Unix file locking, signal handling, and terminal multiplexer features that CCGram requires.
Documentation
- Guides — CLI reference, configuration, delivery/backlog safety,
/sync, voice transcription, multi-instance setup, session recovery, testing - Providers — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Pi, Shell; transcript delivery, session modes, LLM config, custom commands, git worktrees
- Architecture — delivery queue, transcript watermark, and provider/three-backend multiplexer design
Optional Features
Web Dashboard — Live terminal (xterm.js), transcript search, multi-pane grid in Telegram. Disabled by default. Enable here.
Development
git clone https://github.com/alexei-led/ccgram.git && cd ccgram
uv sync --extra dev
make check # lint, format, typecheck, test
make test-e2e # end-to-end tests (requires agent CLIs; see docs/guides.md#e2e-tests)