Favorite claude skill: /phone-mirror

^ things I could have paid for that wouldn't have worked as well

The Skill itself:

.claude/skills/phone-mirror/SKILL.md:

name: phone-mirror

description: Mirror Jake's Pixel to his Mac via USB for streaming/demos

disable-model-invocation: true

allowed-tools: Bash

***

Mirror Jake's physical Android phone (Google Pixel 9 Pro) to his Mac screen using scrcpy. Assumes the phone is plugged in via USB-C with USB debugging enabled.

## Steps

1. Verify the phone is connected by running:
- Make sure the phone is plugged in via USB-C
- Check for "Allow USB debugging?" prompt on the phone and tap Allow
- Then retry
2. Extract the device serial from the adb devices output (the non-emulator entry).
3. Launch scrcpy targeting the physical device:
4. Confirm to Jake that his phone is mirrored and ready to stream. Remind him he can interact with the phone physically and it'll show on the Mac window.

Quick demo:

Mirroring an android phone to a mac is just the kind of fiddly thing that six months ago could have ruined my day. It should be possible. It might be easy? It's the kind of thing I might successfully do five times and then a sixth time completely forget some crucial step of the process.

Claude skills just ... solve the problem. I only have to remember one thing.

And yes, of course, claude is using a utility that is human-made. Thank you, scrcpy developers! Maybe there can be a micropayments something where when claude skills uses a library I can throw the upstream software some love. But the skill is still a massive upgrade, making things "just work" where in the before-times there's just no way I'm going to remember exactly how to use this (& a million other) cli every time I need it.

I really could be paying (or struggling to cancel payments) for this

https://www.mirroring360.com/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.screenmirrorapp&hl=en

A one-star review for the screenmirror app from 2023:

I wanted to try the app, but it didn't meet my requirements. I thought that paying the initial small subscription was okay, as I could cancel if it was not what I had wanted. (Note that the monthly, recurring paymemts are substantially higher than the initial payment, and this is not clear upfront!) And then, it isn't easy to cancel! You have to email and then wait patiently... I am waiting.

The claude skill...I literally don't even remember making it, that's how easy it was to make. I think I directed claude to mirror my phone, and then I'm finally in the habit of telling claude, when I think of it, to package up what it just did as a skill.

There's a lot to be frightened and uneasy about with LLMs and society. Stuff like this, though, feels like a lot of upside. Feels like more people will be able to make their computers work for them.