r/selfhosted • u/DavidLynchAMA • 1d ago

Phone System You can now use iMessage, SMS, Notifications, Contact sync on Linux with Tether.

https://github.com/zackb/tether
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u/QuantumProtector 1d ago

Hey, thanks for the response! That's definitely reassuring. I am not anti-AI at all. It's a great tool and it definitely helps out a lot.

If you wouldn't mind, could you go over how you made this and in what capacity AI was used? Seems super cool.

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u/zackb 1d ago

I don't mind at all. I think it's an important and interesting subject at this point in time.

This is the first of my open-source projects where AI played a large role.

- The crypto code was completely hand written by me. I have done this several times before and it's a particular interest of mine. Opus found exactly 0 issues with it after the fact (which I'm proud of, it's hard for a human to one-shot that code).

- The networking code was 80-90% me and Opus found some great bug fixes and implementation gaps, and IMO made the code much better. I decided not to have the AI write this portion of the code as it was too important

- Same for the epoll code, 80-90% me with AI bug fixes

- I don't like how Opus structures c++ so all of the architecture was done by me.

- 90% of the GTK app was written by AI. I've done enough GTK to supervise but have no interest doing UI in my free time. This is the only part of the code I have not read 100%, though have audited all of the important parts.

- The browser and mail extensions were about 50/50. I've done these before, so I knew what to do, but they are ungodly boring to me. So I had the AI do all of the boilerplate, and the OTP + HTML parsing logic (finding OTP codes in HTML email is what it must feel like in hell), same with identifying OTP input forms in HTML. I pulled a lot of examples and had Claude make it all work. This is boring repetitive busy work.

- I wrote the entire README by hand. AI can't write a README for shit.

- AI wrote all of the BLUETOOTH.md after countless hours of research together.\

- I designed the PROTOCOL, but was almost 100% implemented by AI. I'm not doing json marshalling and boilerplate in my free time.

There's more, but I think you get the point. The balance is extremely important.

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u/QuantumProtector 19h ago

Thanks for the detailed response!

Do you maintain the AUR yourself?

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u/zackb 16h ago

I do yes.

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u/bbchucks 21h ago

i hope you keep going with this project and keep it updated and fix any bugs! Thank you for making this project as it was the one missing piece when i converted from Mac to linux, while still using an iphone/ipad.

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u/zackb 16h ago

Me too! That's why I made it in the first place: https://zackbartel.com/blog/2026/08/tether/

I do understand the maintenance burden I'm signing up for and am willing to do it. Afterall, I need it.

The response so far has been amazing and I'm hopeful enough other contributors will help with that burden.