We built cloud development environments back in the Codeanywhere days. Developers didn't want it. Turns out we built it for a customer that didn't exist yet.
The pitch was never that your laptop is fragile. It's that the better computer is somewhere else.
Remotely you have more powerful machines than whatever is under your desk. You can run multiple environments at the same time, not one bloated setup fighting Chrome for RAM. You can share those environments. You can connect from a laptop, a phone, someone else's machine. The work is not tied to the rectangle in front of you.
A computer sitting in front of you is the least optimal place to put your work.
Slowly, the work started leaving. Not all at once.
Developers started doing remote SSH, a VM in the cloud.
We got Copilot.
We got coding agents.
It happened.
Autonomous Coding Agents
Look at Cognition. Devin's brain always lives in Cognition's cloud. That is not a metaphor, that is their architecture. The intelligence is not on your laptop. The runtime is a VM. They spent years on hypervisor work so every session gets its own kernel, then scaled it so they could run thousands of those VMs at once. One person, many environments, none of them on the machine in their backpack.
Cursor did the same thing and just said it out loud. Cloud agents run in isolated VMs in the cloud, with a full dev environment, instead of on your local machine. You can run as many as you want in parallel. They do not need your laptop. You kick one off from the desktop, from the phone, from Slack, from GitHub. A teammate can open the same run. You are not sharing a laptop. You are sharing a computer that actually belongs to the work.
OpenAI Codex. Replit Agent. Factory. Same pattern. The model is in the cloud. The computer the model uses is in the cloud. You are a window.
This was never just about code.
If you have not been living under a rock, try Grok Bot. It works ridiculously well, and the reason is not a prompt trick. There is a cloud computer under the hood. A real one. Browser, filesystem, terminal, logins. You chat from your laptop, you pick it up on your phone, someone else on the team can be in the same work. It signs in with its own credentials, or with yours, and it does not mess up your computer because it is not on your computer. That is the whole thesis.
The runtime and the intelligence both left the building.
And the average person still thinks AI will run locally. On the edge. On a NPU. On a Mac Studio. Or whatever.
I understand the fantasy. Privacy. Latency. No bill. A model that lives in your house and never calls home. Fine for autocomplete. Fine for a toy. It is not where the intelligence in the economy is going, and it is not where the work is going.
Because the work is not a chatbot in a terminal window. The work is an agent that needs a computer. A more powerful computer than you will buy for a desk. Many of them at once. Shared. Reachable from any device. A computer that can log into Slack and GitHub and the admin panel without installing anything on the machine you actually use. A computer you can give to a teammate.
You cannot do that on a laptop. You never could. It took developers fifteen years and a lot of stubbornness to learn that with code. Agents compressed the lesson into about eighteen months.
The cope now is "hybrid." Local for the easy stuff, cloud for the hard stuff, a router in the middle. Watch the router. It routes up. The definition of easy keeps shrinking because the cloud model got better and cheaper, and the local model is still the one you can fit in VRAM. Hybrid is not an architecture. It is the migration with extra steps.
Same story as the VM on the laptop. You told yourself you left localhost. You had not.
Even the companies that will run the agent on your infra still keep the brain in their cloud. Cognition is explicit about it. Cursor is explicit about it. The intelligence does not move. You are arguing about where the hands sit. The head already left.
So no, local AI is not going to "coexist." It is going to zero as a share of useful intelligence, as a share of tokens that do real work, as a share of where agents actually live. What remains is a checkbox. Air-gapped. Regulated. Real money, sure. Also not where the future gets decided. A procurement line. A subreddit posting tok/s screenshots.
The agents voted. Devin, Cursor, Codex, Grok Bot. Not one of them shipped running on a laptop. More power. Many environments. Shared. Any device.
Obviously I sell cloud computers for agents. That is exactly how I know what runs on them.
If you still think the future is an LLM on the edge, you are not early. You are standing at a funeral insisting the body is fine.