remotifyd

Remotify is software purpose-built for AI agents to operate all kinds of remote devices. remotifyd is the small native daemon that runs on each device and connects it to Remotify.

Why not SSH, Tailscale, or a traditional remote-control agent?

Those tools solve human remote access or network connectivity. AI agents need a different interface.

1. Agents need editing primitives, not just a shell. Agents frequently apply patches and need dedicated tools for safely editing files. A typical AI-agent integration over SSH gives the agent a remote shell, but no agent-native patch or edit primitive. That pushes the agent toward commands such as sed for source edits; those text substitutions are brittle and often produce incorrect changes. Remotify provides patch and file operations as explicit tools.
2. Many remote-control products have left older Windows machines behind. Their current clients cannot run on systems such as Windows XP or Windows 7, even though those machines still operate real equipment and software.
3. General-purpose remote access can be much heavier than the job requires. Clients can grow to hundreds of megabytes, request broad privileges, and modify network interfaces to create an overlay network. That is unnecessary when an agent only needs a narrow, auditable way to run commands and change files on an authorized device.
4. Direct SSH has no team control plane. When several people or agents need to manage many machines, direct SSH connections bypass a central place to attribute access, retain an operation trail, or revoke a member before the next operation reaches a device. Remotify puts a team-aware management layer in the path: every operation is tied to an authenticated user and Agent session, device access is checked centrally, and administrators can revoke that access without rotating credentials across every machine.

Remotify is designed for AI agents from the protocol up. It includes dedicated patch and file-transfer operations, and a release build of remotifyd is about 3 MB. The daemon is written entirely in C so the same small codebase can run on old and modern machines: Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10/11, Linux, and macOS.

Long-term vision

Remotify is working toward support for embedded and IoT targets such as ESP32 and STM32. These chips are part of the roadmap, not supported release targets today.

Our larger goal is to connect everything: workstations, legacy PCs, servers, industrial equipment, and embedded devices, all through one interface designed for AI agents.

How it fits together

AI agent
   |
   | Remotify CLI
   v
Remotify service
   |
   | authenticated outbound WebSocket
   v
remotifyd on the remote device
   |
   +-- run a command and report its output
   +-- apply a patch
   +-- upload or download a file

remotifyd does not contain an AI agent and does not open an inbound remote shell. It keeps an authenticated outbound connection to Remotify and executes only the operations delivered for its enrolled device. Commands, patches, and file writes are never automatically replayed after an uncertain transport failure.

Internally, a long-running parent owns the network connection and a separate Executor process owns command execution. They communicate through fixed binary IPC frames. See docs/INTERNALS.md for the detailed runtime, ownership, WebSocket, IPC, and process-lifecycle design.

Build targets

The release matrix currently includes:

• Windows XP, x86
• Windows 7, x86-64
• Windows 10/11, x86-64
• Linux, x86-64 and ARM64
• macOS, Intel and Apple silicon

Build

The project requires CMake and a C toolchain. Pinned native dependencies are downloaded and built by CMake.

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --parallel

For the same named release artifacts used by Remotify, use the Makefile. For example, on an x86-64 Linux host or toolchain:

make build-release TARGET=linux TARGET_NAME=remotifyd-linux-amd64

TARGET is one of darwin, linux, windowsxp, windows7, or windows10. The output architecture comes from the active compiler and toolchain, not from TARGET_NAME. Windows targets require the corresponding Windows cross-toolchain.

Tests

The C test suite covers the patch engine, including its stress and fault-stress paths.

cmake -S . -B build-tests -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBUILD_TESTING=ON
cmake --build build-tests --target remotifyd_patch_tests --parallel
ctest --test-dir build-tests --output-on-failure

Protocol sources

Generated device-protocol sources live in src/device_protocol_gen.* and are checked in so this repository builds independently. Their schema source lives in the parent Remotify repository. From a recursive Remotify checkout, regenerate both the Go and C implementations with:

make -C protocol generate

Commit the regenerated C sources here before updating Remotify's submodule pointer.

License

remotifyd is licensed under GPL-3.0-only. Third-party dependency licenses and source attributions are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.