DigitalOcean shipped Cuttlefish on November 5 — a native iPhone app that lets you supervise AI agents running on its Managed Agents platform from anywhere. Not just watch them: approve or deny individual tool calls with the full command or diff in front of you, redirect a mid-session run, or stop it before it does something irreversible. The problem it solves is familiar — you kick off a long agent session, walk away from your laptop, and the agent either stalls waiting for you or plows ahead without you. Cuttlefish is the third option.
Approve or Deny Tool Calls With the Full Context
When an agent hits a tool call, Cuttlefish shows you the complete command, file path, or diff — before anything executes. This is not a notification that something happened. It is an intervention point before it happens. You approve or deny from your phone. If you deny, you can attach a reason, which stays recorded with the decision.
Calls that look risky get flagged automatically: recursive deletes, force-pushes, sudo commands, scripts piped from the internet into a shell. Approving a flagged call requires Face ID or your device passcode. That design puts a physical layer on top of the software gate — a person must be biometrically present to authorize the most dangerous agent actions.
Works With Whatever Framework You Already Run
Cuttlefish works with Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, OpenHands, Hermes, LangGraph, and CrewAI. The supervision layer sits above the harness, not inside any specific one. That design choice matters: most agent tooling locks you into a single framework. A mobile supervision interface that works across all of them is worth more than one tied to a single runner.
Sessions Run Without Your Phone
Agents, sandboxes, and tool calls all run on DigitalOcean’s Firecracker microVMs, not on your device. Sessions keep going when your phone is locked, offline, or the app is closed. Harness Runtime resumes from a paused state in 305 milliseconds. Billing follows active CPU consumption — charges drop to zero when the agent is idle, and fall completely to zero when a session is fully paused. The app is a window into a session that exists independently of it.
Box Integration and Availability
Box Mount (currently in private preview) syncs a Box folder into every Managed Agents session. The agent works on plain files; edits sync to Box under its existing permissions, version history, and audit trail. This targets teams that already manage business content in Box and want agents operating on their actual documents.
Cuttlefish is in public preview on the App Store. It requires iOS 26.5 or later and a DigitalOcean account with Managed Agents access. No Android version has been announced yet.
The Supervision Question Worth Asking
Mobile agent supervision is a new category — before Cuttlefish, your realistic options were trust the agent completely or stay at your desk. What matters now is not just having an approval mechanism, but using it correctly. Research on human-in-the-loop agent design is clear: requiring approval for every action rebuilds manual work with extra steps. The right model is letting agents read, search, and analyze freely while requiring a checkpoint on write-category actions that carry consequence — deletions, commits, deployments, payments. Cuttlefish’s high-risk flagging is a reasonable first pass at that split. Whether teams configure it well is a separate question, and one worth getting right before you hand the agent a production credential.
