Cloud Agents

A paradigm from Cursor's essay "The Third Era of AI Software Development" (2026): coding agents run on remote virtual machines rather than locally in the IDE. They work autonomously for hours, iterating and testing without ongoing supervision; the developer receives artifacts — logs, session recordings, and previews — instead of diffs, and can run multiple agents in parallel. Cursor states that 35% of its internal PRs are created by agents in cloud VMs.