Set up with your coding agent

Your coding agent can set you up with Phonebox, account included. It reads a short setup guide written for agents, installs the CLI, and gives you a sign-in link. New accounts receive $2 starter credit automatically, with no card required. It then asks what you want to use phones for, and reads the Phonebox agent skill before it drives one. It adds the SDK to your project only when you ask for an integration.

Copy the setup promptCopy Anchor Link

The home page and the sign-up page have this prompt with a Copy button. You don't need an account first:

Read https://phonebox.dev/setup.md and set me up with Phonebox from here: get me signed in and ready, then find out what I want to use phones for and help me with that.

If you are already signed in, the console's Home page has a prompt that skips the sign-up and connects your agent's machine to your account:

Read https://phonebox.dev/setup.md and connect this machine to my existing Phonebox account. Use my available credit without requiring a purchase. Then read https://phonebox.dev/skills/phonebox/SKILL.md, find out what I want to use phones for, and help me with that. Park the phone when done.

Paste either into your coding agent.

What you doCopy Anchor Link

Your agent runs phonebox setup:

1. Sign in. Open the link and sign in with Google, or ask your agent for an email link instead. Check that the page shows the code your agent gave you, and click Connect. A new account gets its first project here. This saves an agent key on the machine your agent runs on. The agent never sees the key, and you never paste one into the chat.
2. Try your first task. A new account has $2 starter credit, enough for about 33 minutes of running time. Setup uses your available credit and only asks for a top-up when it cannot cover a one-minute session. Paid top-ups start at $10.

Your agent may ask you to approve the commands it runs along the way. If you'd rather use the console, Quickstart lists the same steps there.

What the skill teaches your agentCopy Anchor Link

The setup guide covers only the setup. The skill is a single Markdown file on using phones. It covers:

• to find out what you want before it installs or writes anything, and to ask when it can't tell;
• onboarding: checking what already exists, then running phonebox setup for only the missing steps (account, key, credit);
• when Phonebox is the right tool, and when an API or a website is better;
• how to drive a phone with what it has: MCP tools, the CLI or HTTP, and the SDK only for integration code you asked for;
• the loop: create or start a phone, look at the screen, act, look again, and park;
• testing an Android build, when that is what you want: install the APK with phonebox apps "$PHONEBOX_PHONE" install ./app.apk, then look at and walk the screens that changed;
• how to read the text form of the screen, and how to tap by coordinates, ref, text, resource ID or description;
• parking and cost, so that it always parks the phone when it's done;
• rules such as using one agent per phone and never repeating an action whose outcome is unknown;
• what each error code means and what to do next;
• phones for several customers, with metadata and keys limited to certain phones;
• the HTTP request behind every CLI command, for code that calls the API directly.

Claude Code, Codex and CursorCopy Anchor Link

All three work from the terminal, so they use Phonebox the same way: they run phonebox commands, which use the key that setup saved. The prompt above works in each of them.

To make the skill available in every Claude Code session, install it as a personal skill:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/phonebox
curl -fsSL https://phonebox.dev/skills/phonebox/SKILL.md -o ~/.claude/skills/phonebox/SKILL.md

Claude Code can then use it whenever a task calls for an Android phone. Agent skill covers project-level installs and other agents.

If your agent prefers tools to terminal commands, connect it to the MCP server instead. It offers the same phones, limits and billing.

Check the resultCopy Anchor Link

When the setup is done, your agent confirms your project, balance and limits with phonebox account, then helps with what you asked for. Any phone it used should be parked when it finishes: Phones shows each phone's status, sessions and what they cost.