The coding agent in the cloud cannot see your disk

My usage page showed a credit I had not earned and had not asked for: a few hundred dollars of cloud-session time, applied automatically, set to expire in five days. I build enterprise software by running a lot of automated coding jobs, so the obvious move wrote itself. Point every one of those jobs at the cloud until the credit runs out. I almost did. Then I stopped to ask a dull question that saved me a week - what is a cloud coding agent, exactly, and is it the same thing as the agent already running on my own machine?

It is not the same thing. Same model, same agent, the same words on the screen. But a coding agent in the cloud is a different machine with a different contract. What it can see, how you start it, and how it hands the work back are all different from the agent running on your disk. And those differences decide which of your jobs it can even do.

I learned this the cheap way, by reading the documentation before I spent the credit instead of after. Here is what a cloud agent actually is, the six-question test I now use to decide what to send it, and the honest result: when I ran that test across my own work, only about one in six jobs passed.