clipbeam

Give your remote coding agent eyes and an inbox. Beam a screenshot, file, or message straight onto a headless box — over the SSH you already have, or Tailscale. It lands a real file on the box's disk and prints the absolute path, so your agent just reads it. No cloud, no account.

Built for coding agents: every command is --json-able and self-describing.

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What it solves

You run a coding agent (Claude Code, OpenClaw, Hermes, aider, …) on a headless Linux box — a Hostinger / Vultr / homelab VPS — and you SSH in to drive it. Then you hit the wall: you have a screenshot or a file on your laptop, and you cannot paste it into that remote TUI. The terminal reads your local machine's clipboard, and there is no shared pasteboard across the SSH boundary. The only thing a remote agent can actually ingest is a real file on the box's disk that it can read by absolute path.

clipbeam closes that gap and gives the remote agent two capabilities it otherwise can't have:

• Eyes. Beam a screenshot, an image, or any file from your laptop into the box you're already SSH'd into. clipbeam lands it on the box's disk and prints the absolute path, so your agent just reads it:

  # on the box, in your agent:
  claude "what's in $(clipbeam last)"

• An inbox. A private agent-to-agent channel — an in-memory FIFO inbox that never touches the human's clipboard or notifications. One agent beams a message or a file to it; the other drains it one item at a time (see Built for agents).

No cloud, no account, no open ports: clipbeam rides the SSH connection you already have. It speaks the macOS ClipBeam.app's (source private) frozen Envelope v1 wire protocol byte-for-byte, so the ClipBeam.app and the clipbeam CLI interoperate over Tailscale.

Demo

A tour of the agent-first surface (rendered from docs/demo.tape with vhs). The full story — drag an image on the laptop → clipbeam send → the box's agent reads clipbeam last — is a ~30-second flow once you've clipbeam setup'd a box.

Install

# macOS / Linux — Homebrew
brew install vybzai/tap/clipbeam

# any Unix — one-line installer (OS/arch detect, checksum-verified)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vybzai/clipbeam-cli/main/install.sh | sh

# Go toolchain
go install github.com/vybzai/clipbeam-cli/cmd/clipbeam@latest

The binary is a single static executable — no runtime, no dependencies. On Linux it is a fully static ELF; on macOS it is self-contained and links only the always-present system dylibs (libSystem, libresolv) — there is no such thing as a 100%-static Mach-O, and clipbeam pulls in no third-party or cgo libraries.

Quickstart

# 1. On the laptop, once per box — clipbeam bootstraps the remote binary over
#    your existing SSH (detects arch, streams the matching build, pairs):
clipbeam setup root@my-box

# 2. Forever after, from the laptop:
clipbeam send screenshot.png my-box     # → prints the REMOTE absolute path
clipbeam shot my-box                     # screenshot → box, prints the path

# 3. On the box, your agent just reads the path:
claude "describe the image at $(clipbeam last)"

No Tailscale required, no open ports, no config-file editing. clipbeam rides the SSH connection you already have. If you do run Tailscale, point it at a 100.x peer instead — same wire, always-on.

Built for agents

Every command emits a stable, versioned JSON object with --json (or set CLIPBEAM_JSON=1), uses a documented deterministic exit-code table, and is self-describing via clipbeam schema — so an AI agent can drive it with no human and no guessing.

# agent A on the laptop → agent B on the box, on a private channel that never
# touches the human's clipboard or notifications:
clipbeam msg "build is green — log attached next"   # text → B's agent inbox
clipbeam send build.log my-box --agent              # file → B's agent inbox

# agent B drains its inbox (long-poll; one item per call, FIFO):
clipbeam recv --json
# {"schema":"clipbeam.v1","ok":true,"type":"file","sender":"…","path":"/…/build.log","text":null}

# or stream every incoming item as NDJSON for an event loop:
clipbeam watch --json

Verb	What it does
send <file> [target] [--agent]	beam a file; prints the remote path
shot [target] [--agent] [full|window|region]	screenshot → beam the PNG
msg <text…>	text message → the peer's agent inbox
push	beam the current local clipboard
last / wait	print the last received path / block for the next one
recv [--timeout N]	dequeue one agent-inbox item (FIFO long-poll)
watch [--channel …]	stream received items as NDJSON
setup <user@host>	bootstrap + pair a remote box over SSH
serve	run the receiver daemon (unix-socket / tcp / tailscale)
health / version / schema	liveness / version / full self-description
install-skill	drop a maintained agent skill into ~/.claude, ~/.codex, …
doctor / service	diagnostics / optional service unit (off by default)

The send verbs (send / shot / msg / push) also accept --transport auto|ssh|tailscale. The default is address-driven (a tailnet name/IP routes over Tailscale, user@host over SSH). --transport auto prefers Tailscale when the peer is on the tailnet, a shared token exists, and its /health answers — otherwise it falls back to daemonless SSH. ssh / tailscale force a tier. (auto only upgrades a box running --serve tailscale, which binds a tailnet-reachable listener; the default --serve exec runs no listener and --serve tcp binds loopback-only, so auto always uses SSH for those.)

Run clipbeam schema for the complete machine-readable surface (every command, flag, JSON shape, and exit code), or clipbeam install-skill to teach the agents on a box how to use it.

Security model

clipbeam is push-only — nothing leaves a machine unless you act. Transport is tiered (full detail in SECURITY.md):

• SSH (default). You are already SSH'd in; clipbeam rides that tunnel — encryption, authentication, and NAT traversal for free, with no new account. Host keys are verified against known_hosts (strict; InsecureIgnoreHostKey is banned and there is no --insecure flag); first-contact TOFU happens only under clipbeam setup, never silently under a data command.
• Tailscale (preferred for always-on). Plain HTTP inside the WireGuard tunnel, gated by exact-peer-IP and a constant-time 120-bit token.
• Public + TLS is designed but deferred — a bare public port is a footgun.

Secrets live in the macOS Keychain or a 0600 token file on Linux; logs redact all X-ClipBeam-* headers and the token; saved filenames are sanitized and traversal-proof.

How it compares

	image into a remote TUI?	encrypted	zero extra account	agent-native (--json, inbox)	wire-compatible w/ ClipBeam.app
clipbeam	✅ disk + path	✅ SSH / WireGuard	✅ rides your SSH	✅	✅
scp / rsync	⚠️ manual path juggling	✅	✅	❌	❌
Tailscale-only raw HTTP	⚠️ no path/inbox ergonomics	✅	❌ needs Tailscale	❌	partial
pastebins / gists	❌ (and leaks to a third party)	⚠️ in transit only	❌ account	❌	❌

Interop

clipbeam is a from-scratch Go re-implementation of the frozen Envelope v1 protocol shipped by the macOS ClipBeam.app (source private). The wire is validated by golden fixtures captured from the real Swift app (testdata/interop/) and asserted in CI in both directions — so a Mac and a Linux box interoperate over Tailscale out of the box. The protocol is described in PROTOCOL.md (the Swift source + fixtures are authoritative).

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/vybzai/clipbeam-cli
cd clipbeam-cli
CGO_ENABLED=0 go build ./cmd/clipbeam
go test -race ./...

Requires Go 1.26+. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT © Sani / VYBZ.