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vs cloud coding services

Covers Devin, Cursor Background Agents, and Codex Cloud — the family of services that run autonomous coding agents on remote infrastructure.

What they are

  • Devin (Cognition). Autonomous engineer that plans, executes, debugs, and deploys. As of early 2026, plans start at $20/mo (Core) with metered "Agent Compute Units"; Team is $500/mo for 250 ACUs.
  • Cursor Background Agents. Asynchronous agents that run in isolated Ubuntu VMs in the cloud, clone the repo, work on a branch, and push back. Tightly integrated with the Cursor IDE.
  • Codex Cloud (OpenAI). Cloud-isolated containers running the Codex agent with Skills, Automations, and multi-agent parallel execution. Internet access disabled during task execution; the agent only sees the cloned repo and a setup script.

Workflow boundary

These services own a remote machine and the agent that runs on it. You hand off a task; the service produces a PR or a result. The agent runs where the service operates it, not on your laptop.

Repowire owns the routing between agents on your machines. Agents run wherever you started them (your laptop, a remote dev box, a tmux session you control), and the daemon connects them.

Architecture difference

  • Cloud services. Cloud-managed compute, cloud-managed agent runtime, repo cloned per task, ephemeral environment, vendor controls the trust boundary.
  • Repowire. Local-first daemon, agents are CLI processes you started, no remote compute by default. The hosted relay is optional and only tunnels traffic — it does not run the agent.

The big difference is where the agent process lives. Cloud services run it; repowire routes between processes you run.

When to use repowire instead

  • You want to keep agent state, codebases, and credentials on your own machines.
  • You're paying by API tokens and don't want a per-task or per-ACU cloud premium on top.
  • You need multi-agent coordination with full context retained between turns. Cloud services typically reset per task; repowire sessions persist as long as the agent processes do.
  • You want to mix runtimes (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode) freely.

When to use a cloud coding service instead

  • You want a remote agent to finish a well-scoped task and push a PR while you do something else, without you keeping a session warm.
  • You don't want to manage agent processes, tmux sessions, or hooks on your own machine.
  • Compliance or hardware constraints prevent you from running agents locally at the scale you need.
  • The task is one-shot enough that the cloud service's "task in, PR out" shape fits.

Can you use both?

Yes. Run Devin or Cursor BG for fire-and-forget tickets, and use repowire on your local machine for the work you're actively driving. A repowire orchestrator can even dispatch tickets to a cloud service through the same mesh primitives — notify_peer an infra-style peer that pokes the cloud service's API, then surfaces the result back.

The line is who runs the agent. Cloud services run it for you. Repowire connects agents you run.