What are cloud agents?
Corbin Brown
2 min read
Part of the Vibe Coding Fundamentals video series on YouTube.
Until recently, an AI coding agent worked the way a power tool works: only while you hold it. It lived in an editor on your machine, used your files, and stopped when you closed the lid. Cloud agents cut that cord. The agent gets its own computer — a virtual machine in a data center — with a copy of your project on it. You hand it a task from a browser or your phone, go live your life, and come back to finished work waiting for review.
What actually changes
- Delegation replaces supervision. Local agents feel like pair programming; cloud agents feel like assigning a ticket. The skill shifts from steering to writing a task description good enough to succeed without you.
- Parallelism becomes real. Three tasks, three agents, three separate machines, none of them stepping on each other. Each works on its own copy and proposes changes for you to accept or reject.
- Review becomes the job. The work comes back as a proposed change, and your role is deciding whether it ships. The agents got faster; the judgment is still yours.
Where you'll meet them
Every major tool has a version now: Cursor's cloud agents, Claude Code on the web, OpenAI's Codex. The pattern is identical across them — pick a task, agent works on its own machine, result comes back as a reviewable change. The honest caveat: an agent alone in the cloud has nobody looking over its shoulder mid-task, so unclear instructions produce confidently wrong work. The task description carries everything.
FAQ
Cloud agent or local agent — which should I use?
Local for exploratory work where you're deciding as you go; cloud for well-defined tasks you could describe in a ticket. Most builders end up using both, often in the same day.
Is my code safe on someone else's machine?
The major providers run each agent in an isolated environment and publish their security practices — for most projects it's the same trust decision you already made by hosting code on GitHub. If your code genuinely can't leave your machines, cloud agents are off the menu and that's fine.