T3 Code Mesh / Less tunnels for t3 connect

[mbeckenbach]

@t3dotgg mentioned in his latest youtube video that the current limit of three hosts on T3 Connect is related to cost, and that Tailscale is the way to reach more machines today. That got me thinking about a "what if" that might reduce the number of hosts T3 Connect has to expose, and open the door to a few new scenarios.

Imagine you have a handful of machines with t3code installed. Today each of them can already be reached from another machine over plain HTTP, Tailscale or SSH. So every machine already holds a list of "machines I know how to reach".

What if machines shared that list with each other?

• Machine A knows how to reach Machine B.
• Machine B knows how to reach Machines C and D.
• B tells A about C and D. Now A can reach C and D through B.

If every machine learns the routes the others know, then a single machine on T3 Connect would be enough to reach all of them. Open the mobile app, connect to A, and see B, C and D as well.

Today

flowchart LR
  Phone[Mobile app] --> Connect[T3 Connect]
  Connect --> A[Host A]
  Connect --> B[Host B]
  Connect --> C[Host C]
  D[Host D] -. not reachable, limit hit .-> Connect

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What if

flowchart LR
  Phone[Mobile app] --> Connect[T3 Connect]
  Connect --> A[Host A]
  A -- Tailscale --> B[Host B]
  A -- HTTP --> C[Host C]
  C -- SSH --> D[Host D]
  D -- host-only network --> VM[VM on D]

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Why I find this interesting

• Fewer T3 Connect hosts needed. One connected machine could act as the door to everything behind it, so the three host limit would matter a lot less.
• Machines that are not reachable at all today without tailscale become reachable. A VM that only has a local network to its host could run t3code too. The host knows how to reach it, so the whole mesh knows how to reach it.
• Home lab and office setups get simpler. One box on Tailscale or T3 Connect, and everything on the LAN behind it shows up on the phone.
• It fits the product story. The Connect onboarding already says "Mesh your devices together". This would make that literally true.

I am intentionally leaving out how this could be built from a technical perspective. Curious what you think.

[markfen88]

I think what we need is Server based connections Rather than having the Key tied to the browser session. That would solve a lot of things... I thought that's how it works initially, so I set up this very awesome environment with my own Cloudflare Zero-Trust setup using MTLS connecting to my one (as i assumed) edge orchestrator where I wanted to connect all my other t3 environments too. And apparently I can't do that, so it's really annoying for me to have the four different devices that I manage connect to eight of my T3 instances. And anytime I have a new client I create a new T3 instance so that way agents are run with separation in mind. I have an OPS T3 environment that sets up all this for me and after it was all deployed I realized the fatal flaw in my plan that I have to manually connect every single device.

We need T3 Connect. As an option for on-Prem or self-host. And that way there will be no limitations.