I keep seeing the same picture in my head: a developer on a couch, iPad in hand, earbuds in, quietly running a software project.
I'm about 70% sure the picture is right. The earbuds are optional. Their real job is putting a microphone closer to your mouth.
Talking beats typing, especially on glass
Typing on an iPad means typing on glass: a full-size keyboard with no keys to feel. Published studies on phones put speech at up to 3x faster than the on-screen keyboard in a lab, and still faster in everyday use.
As far as I can tell, nobody has measured it on tablets, but the logic carries. The place where typing is slowest is the place where talking wins by the most. And holding a tablet while you talk at it feels less ridiculous than addressing a 27-inch monitor.
Output belongs on a screen
Here's where I part ways with the voice-both-ways crowd. I don't want the answer read to me. Diffs, plans, and test output are things you scan, and scanning is a visual job. Speech is for input only, and the transcriber needs to hear you and not the dishwasher.
The rig
A Linux box, tmux, and Claude Code, plus whatever dev tooling you'd need anyway. Turn on Remote Control, scan a QR code, and the iPad is a window into a session that lives on the box. No tunnel, no VPN, no port forwarding. The iPad needs nothing installed beyond the Claude app.
The box does the long-running work, holds the context, and runs the tools. The tablet is just where you talk and where you read.
The catch
The catch is other people. Nobody wants to work in an office full of people talking to their agents, and nobody in a coffee shop wants to hear you develop software any more than they want to hear your phone call. Earbuds can help the transcriber over background noise, but they can't make you less annoying to the people around you. So this won't conquer open-plan offices or coffee shops. Tony Stark doesn't work with Jarvis in an open-plan office. This needs a place free of anyone you'd bother. The future of software development, then, could be one person in a lab or by the pool, muttering at a tablet.
I'm okay with that future.
Todd Espy ยท November 2026