The first cloud agent felt less like pair programming and more like hiring an engineer

I thought a cloud coding agent was still pair programming: the same local conversation, just running somewhere else.

The first thing that surprised me was not the code. It was how little the run needed me.

My evidence is a first Cursor Cloud Agent run against a real monorepo. What initially looked like a Cursor feature turned out to be a different execution model. The run started over in a fresh environment, did the onboarding work, and left proof. Useful. Autonomous. And missing almost everything I already knew in the local session.

The wrong picture

In local Cursor I already had a planning thread: investigation, tradeoffs, and tools I had already authenticated in that session (including Notion MCP). When I pointed a Cloud Agent at Codenames AI, an npm-workspaces monorepo with an Express API, a Vite frontend, Playwright E2E, and CI, I expected continuity. Same decisions. Same auth. Same half-finished reasoning, just remote.