PocketVeto: Bluetooth AI agent control from your phone

PocketVeto is a Bluetooth-mediated approval gate and live progress dashboard for AI coding agents, released at v1 status under an MIT license and available via GitHub.

The problem it solves is straightforward: when you are away from your PC or your screen is off, your AI coding agents may want to run risky tools — shell commands, file writes, or MCP (Model Context Protocol) calls — and you want to approve or deny them without interrupting your workflow. PocketVeto enables that by letting you send approval or denial decisions from your phone over Bluetooth Classic, with no internet connection and no LAN routing required. This design also means the system continues to work in WiFi environments with access point isolation, where local network communication may be blocked or restricted.

The tool consists of three components. On the host machine, a hook (installed into Cursor's .cursor/hooks.json or Claude Code's .claude/settings.json) intercepts every tool call and lifecycle event from the agents, reads the stdin JSON, auto-detects the host, and communicates with a local server over HTTP on 127.0.0.1:38475. The server itself is a single Rust binary running an axum HTTP API, a SQLite audit log for persisting every event and approval, and a Bluetooth bridge task that forwards frames to the phone. On the phone, an Android app holds an RFCOMM socket open via a foreground service, surfaces approval requests as action-button notifications, and renders a live dashboard showing cards for each running agent.

Platform support at v1 includes Windows, native Linux, and Linux devcontainers (using a host-sidecar pattern). macOS Bluetooth support is deferred to post-v1, though the non-Bluetooth portions of the binary compile and run on macOS, allowing a Mac to host agents that gate against a Linux or Windows server. Installation is a single shell command to download the binary; setup then requires running pocket-veto init (which pairs Bluetooth, writes ~/.pocket-veto/config.toml, installs hooks into the agent configuration files, and registers the server as a system service), installing the Android app by sideloading the APK from the latest GitHub release, and granting runtime permissions. Full setup instructions are available in docs/setup.md, with variants for Windows, build-from-source, and devcontainer deployments.

PocketVeto addresses a specific pain point for developers who use AI coding agents: the need to authorize potentially dangerous operations (like running shell commands or writing files) without being tethered to their workstation. By moving approval decisions to a phone via Bluetooth, the tool removes friction from remote supervision while preserving security — the Bluetooth-only design ensures that approval requests work even in corporate or isolated WiFi environments where local network traffic is blocked or unreliable.

The architecture is straightforward: a Rust server binary on the host machine runs an HTTP API, SQLite audit log, and Bluetooth bridge; the Android app holds an open socket and displays notifications and a live dashboard. Integration is direct — the tool hooks into Cursor and Claude Code's native extension points (hook.json configuration files) so agents automatically send approval requests before executing risky operations. This means no modification to the agents themselves is needed.

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