Anthropic shipped Claude Code Channels today, letting you control a Claude Code session from Telegram. I set it up this afternoon. The pitch is irresistible: DM your bot from your phone, Claude executes on your Mac. MacStories built an entire iOS project wirelessly and the demo is genuinely impressive.

Then you start using it for real.

Messages get silently dropped. The bot shows "typing..." and nothing arrives. Close your terminal and the bot dies, messages lost permanently, no queue. Need to approve a permission prompt? Walk to your Mac. A version upgrade broke group messages with zero error output. This feels familiar for anyone who's watched Claude become load-bearing infrastructure and then buckle.

The concept is genuinely exciting. The execution is research preview in the truest sense. I'll keep it installed because when it works, nothing else comes close. But I won't trust it with anything I can't afford to re-send.

Sources: