Two years ago, every developer ran code on their laptop. One year ago, the best developers started using AI coding agents on their laptop. Today, the smartest teams are moving those agents to the cloud.
This isn't a prediction. It's already happening.
The case against local agents
Local coding agents have three problems that get worse as your team grows:
1. They're invisible. When an engineer runs Cursor or Claude Code locally, nobody else sees what the agent is doing. The agent writes code, the engineer opens a PR, and the team reviews it without any context about the agent's reasoning, the alternatives it considered, or the trade-offs it made.
2. They're insecure. A local agent has access to everything on the developer's machine. Environment variables, SSH keys, other repos, personal files. The blast radius of a misbehaving agent on a laptop is the entire machine.
3. They don't scale. You can run 1-2 agents on a laptop. Maybe 3 if you have a beefy machine. But the real productivity gains come from running 5, 10, or 20 agents in parallel on different tasks. That requires cloud compute, not local hardware.
The case for cloud agents
Cloud agent execution solves all three problems:
Visibility. When agents run in the cloud, the entire team can see what's happening. Agent work shows up on a shared board. PRs come with context about the plan, the decisions made, and the trade-offs considered. Code review becomes informed review, not blind review.
Security. Cloud sandboxes have explicit boundaries. The agent can access the repo it's working on and nothing else. No ambient desktop access, no credential leakage, no blast radius beyond the sandbox.
Scale. Cloud compute is elastic. Run 20 agents in parallel, each in their own isolated environment, each working on a different task. Your laptop stays cool while your backlog shrinks.
Preview environments change everything
The other half of this shift is preview environments. Every change an agent makes can be deployed to its own live URL before it touches production. Click through the change like a real user. Compare multiple agent outputs side by side. Ship the one that's right.
Preview environments used to be expensive and slow to set up. Now they're trending toward instant and free. When every PR gets its own live URL, the entire review process changes. You're not reviewing code diffs. You're reviewing a working application.
What this means for your team
If you're still running coding agents locally, you're leaving value on the table:
- Your team can't see what the agents are doing
- Your agents are limited by your laptop's compute
- Your code review is missing the context that matters most
Local development isn't dying. But local agent execution is.