First Look: Hands-On with Claude Code’s New Telegram and Discord Integrations

Late yesterday, Anthropic announced messaging support for Claude Code, allowing users to connect to a Claude Code session running on a Mac from a mobile device using Telegram and Discord bots. I spent a few hours playing with it last night, and despite being released as a research preview, the messaging integration is already very capable, but a little fiddly to set up.

For Club MacStories members in today’s issue of MacStories Weekly, Federico explains how he has already used this new feature to reimplement OpenClaw using just Claude.

Let’s take a look at what it can do.

Here’s what a Telegram session looks like on the Mac end of the conversation.

I set up Claude Code with Telegram instead of Discord, so I’ll focus on that, but in either case be sure to carefully follow Anthropic’s instructions on GitHub. The sequencing of the steps is important.

If you’ve ever set up a Telegram bot, the first steps of the process will be familiar:

visit the @BotFather account

use the /newbot command

provide a username that ends in “bot” and a display name

copy the key that is generated

Then in Claude Code on your Mac, you need to install the Telegram plugin, reload your plugins, and provide the key from Telegram. Finally, you’ll be prompted to DM your bot for a code that will pair the two sides of the communication channel you’ve created. The commands for each of these steps are on the GitHub project page, so I won’t repeat them here.

Despite taking my own advice to carefully follow Anthropic’s instructions, I did run into one hiccup in the setup process: I didn’t have Bun (an open-source project that Anthropic bought last year) installed. Once I went back and installed Bun, though, I was off and running.

Transcribing podcast audio and retrieving saved articles from Readwise via Telegram.

To start a Claude Code session that you can access from Telegram you must first launch a Claude Code session on your Mac using the channels flag:

claude --channels plugin:telegram@claude-plugins-official

One limitation you’ll probably hit right away is that if Claude Code needs your permission for something, there’s no way to grant it in Telegram. You’ll need to access the Terminal session on your Mac and give it the necessary permission before carrying on with your Telegram chat. The solution, of course, is to run Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions enabled. That poses a certain level of risk, but if you’re someone who already uses that flag with Claude Code on your Mac and are comfortable with it, using the flag via Telegram is no different. To enable the flag just tack it onto the end of the command when you start Claude Code:

claude --channels plugin:telegram@claude-plugins-official --dangerously-skip-permissions

You can still get stuck if Claude Code needs your input in the Terminal, but with permission skipping enabled, you can do far more than would otherwise be possible.

With that permission skipping enabled, I set out to see what I could do from Telegram, and was impressed with the results:

I built and ran an iOS project and deployed it wirelessly to the iPhone I was using to chat with Claude Code, using xcodebuild.

I had Claude Code compile a list of 83 articles tagged “NPC” that I’d saved to Readwise Reader using its CLI tool.

I kicked off a skill in Claude Code that transcribes podcast audio and cleans up the resulting text, after which I had the TXT, SRT, and a Markdown report of the results delivered to my iPhone.

These are all tasks I do on my Mac, but being able to do them anywhere from an iPhone felt like a superpower because you’re able to access tools that are simply not available on iOS. It’s worth noting, too, that you can send images to Claude Code using Telegram, which is great for debugging an iPhone app you’re testing, but there is no support for voice messaging.

The results of Claude Code’s work on your Mac can be sent to you in Telegram.

Now, you might be wondering why not use a terminal emulator or the Remote Control feature in the Claude iOS app instead. Those are good options, too, and in some cases preferable since features like Remote Control give you better visibility into what’s happening in your Terminal window and the ability to respond to permission prompts. However, if there’s one takeaway from the OpenClaw phenomenon, I think it’s clear that many people prefer a familiar chat interface when directing an agent. So, it’s good to see Telegram and Discord chats added to Claude Code as optional chat interfaces.

Big picture, I think we’re at the leading edge of something that should concern Apple. Developing for Apple platforms from the Terminal’s command line isn’t new. However, the ability to do so from mobile devices has been made much easier thanks to agents that can interact with a Terminal session via chatbots and messaging platforms. Apple doesn’t have a mobile version of Xcode but should, and if it doesn’t develop one soon, Claude, Codex, and other coding agents are poised to fill the gap with remote connections back to the Mac.