Your coding agent, in a WhatsApp chat

Scan a QR code once and the gateway joins your WhatsApp as a linked device, the same mechanism WhatsApp Web uses. There is no bot account and no Business API: you open “Message yourself”, type a task, and the agent on your own machine answers in that chat. Approvals are typed: the agent asks a numbered question and you reply 1, 2 or 3. There are no tappable buttons on this channel, and we say so up front.

What each harness has been run with is on the verification log; a cell without a dated row there is unverified.

Read this before you link a number

This channel speaks the unofficial WhatsApp Web protocol. Automating a personal account is against WhatsApp’s terms, and WhatsApp does ban numbers for abusive automation. Personal-scale use has a long community track record, but the risk is not zero: do not link a number you cannot afford to lose. The channel ships no bulk-send features and rate-limits what it sends.

What works from WhatsApp today

• Your self-chat is the command line. The agent answers there with your session’s context. Its own replies are tracked by ID, so they are never mistaken for your commands.
• Typed approvals. A tool that needs your say-so arrives as a numbered question. Reply 1 to approve, 2 to deny, or 3 to trust the rest of the session. No reply within five minutes is a deny. Only the linked account can answer; nobody else in a chat can approve anything.
• Replies stream by editing the message in place, and long answers split at paragraph and code boundaries.
• Photos, voice notes and documents work in both directions. A voice note is transcribed.
• Scheduled results can land here. Cron jobs can deliver to a WhatsApp chat, from your own number.
• Commands: /new, /compact, /status, /stop and /help.

Set it up

1. Install the WhatsApp extra into the gateway’s environment. From a source checkout:

   .venv/bin/pip install -e '.[whatsapp]'

2. Enable the channel. This reports whether the extra is installed and turns whatsapp.enabled on; there is no token to collect:

   warding setup --whatsapp

3. Restart the gateway. With the channel enabled and no session on disk, it starts pairing and holds a rotating code.
4. Pair. In the dashboard, open Settings → Channels → WhatsApp and click Show pairing code. On your phone: WhatsApp, Settings, Linked devices, Link a device. The code rotates about every 20 seconds and the panel follows it.
5. Check the badge. It reads Connected once the scan lands. The pairing is kept in the data home, so you scan once, not on every restart.

To stop, Unlink this device in the same panel revokes it; your phone’s Linked devices list is the revoke that always works.

Who can reach it

whatsapp.dm_policy defaults to self: only the linked account, which is you, can command the agent. You can allow-list other numbers, but they never get approval or session-steering controls, and their turns run without your memory, lessons or history in the prompt. Groups are ignored unless you list them, and a listed group starts in mention-only mode. Unknown policy values deny everyone. Denials are written to the audit log.

Why not an official plugin?

Anthropic’s Channels plugin for Claude Code covers Telegram, Discord and iMessage; WhatsApp is not on its list. Community bridges exist, and we have not reviewed them, so we compare nothing here. What this page can state is what this channel does: the agent is the one you docked, running on your machine as a service; approvals are typed and only you can answer them; and a command on the built-in deny list, or a read of a keystone path such as ~/.ssh, is refused before any question reaches your phone. The security page names each mechanism.

Limits, stated plainly

• Typed, not tapped. Approvals are numbered replies on this channel by design, because whether a button sent from a personal linked device renders is not something we can promise.
• Owner-only. One person runs this gateway. There is no shared or team mode.
• One harness for chat, chosen in one setting; a spawned subagent can be routed to another installed harness (registered, not verified).
• Terms of service. See the warning above. We would rather you read it twice than lose a number.

Approvals: typed reply · All ten channels · Full reference publication pending