The tension between local and cloud agents

Vivek Haldar

May 29, 2026

The tension between local and cloud agents

I’ve grown to strongly prefer agents running locally on my own machine. I was doing so even before the latest crop of features from Anthropic and OpenAI that made it possible to remote-control local agents from their mobile apps — something that has made the case for them even stronger. But if all you were doing was controlling agents working inside their git repos, there would be little difference between cloud and local agents.

Cloud versus local agents is like living out of a new hotel room versus living in your own home: messy, yes, but also comfortable, familiar, and containing everything you’ve used and might need. Your home has a memory of you.

Local agents can:

work across your entire filesystem instead of being scoped to a single git repo. They can look in Downloads, Documents, and Misc folders, and see all your dotfiles.

look beyond the repo they’re primarily working in to other repos you’ve touched, perhaps with changes not yet pushed to remote.

build up an ever-growing, ever-improving set of skills and memories in a designated “agent” folder (I use ~/AGENT for this).

benefit from local state and history. For example, I have skills that compile daily news briefs and are instructed to avoid stories already covered in recent ones; they can do so because every previous brief lives in a designated folder, making it easy to cross-check what’s already run.

do computer-use to operate your browser, where you’re already signed into everything you care about.

ssh into other hosts, because they have your keys.

Doing all this in the cloud would be expensive and a privacy nightmare. It would be tantamount to running your entire workstation in the cloud.

Cloud agents have their own advantages — you don’t have to treat your one precious laptop as an always-on, always-connected server. You start from a clean state. That’s definitely the right environment for enterprise agents. But for personal work, I’ve found local agents much more compelling.