When we decided to give cloud agents computers so they could test their changes, the first step was to make sure they were good at testing them in our own codebase.
Getting our monorepo working for cloud agents taught us that the development environment is a product in its own right, only one whose users are agents. You have to make cloud match local development, make the repo legible enough that agents can run and test code without tribal knowledge, and keep that environment healthy as the codebase changes.
Building that environment has changed the way we work. In December, cloud agents authored roughly one in ten PRs merged to the Cursor monorepo. Today, they write more than half.
Matching cloud to local development
The first step to making cloud agents work well in our repo was making our repo work well in a cloud VM. This stage is familiar to any engineer who has set up a remote development environment for the first time.
