For about two years, "AI coding agent" meant something that ran next to your editor: a Copilot completion, a Cursor chat panel, a Claude Code session in your terminal. The work used your CPU, held your attention, and stopped when you closed the laptop. That assumption is breaking. A separate class of tools runs the agent on remote infrastructure instead — you describe a task, close the tab, and come back to a pull request. Conductor is the newest name moving in this direction, and it lands in a category that already includes background agents from Cursor, GitHub, OpenAI, and Google.
The agent leaves your laptop
A cloud coding agent executes on a vendor's servers rather than your machine. You hand it a task — fix a failing test, migrate a module, draft an endpoint — through a web UI, a chat message, or a linked issue. It spins up an isolated sandbox, clones your repository, works through the task, and pushes a branch or opens a PR. You don't watch the edits land in your editor; you review the output.
That sounds like a small plumbing change, but it shifts what you can reasonably ask for. An IDE assistant is interactive: fast, visible, and dependent on you staying in the loop. A remote agent is asynchronous: slower to finish any single task, but it doesn't need your attention while it runs and doesn't compete with your machine for memory or battery.
