How we set up our cloud agent environment

Mathew Hogan and Arvind Saripalli treat the development environment as a product whose users are agents. The scale of the shift is the reason:

In December, cloud agents authored roughly one in ten PRs merged to the Cursor monorepo. Today, they write more than half.

Getting a Mac-centric monorepo running on Linux cloud VMs meant a Cursor-defined Dockerfile carrying the key dependencies, along with network egress restrictions, secret scanning and redaction of secrets in tool results.

The other half is making the repo legible. They built anydev, one CLI that consolidates service startup, routes the utility scripts, carries help menus per subcommand, and runs a supervisor that monitors and restarts long-running builds so agents never have to manage processes by hand. Cursor Cloud MCP lets an agent diagnose its own environment health, and an automation called Cloud Doctor periodically hunts for failures, does root cause analysis and opens PRs to fix them. Cloud Doctor also reads agent traces to find misleading skills, avoidable VM problems and inefficient workflows.

The framing is the useful bit: environment friction that a human would silently absorb becomes a measurable defect once agents are the main users. Read with the usual caveat, since this is a coding agent vendor reporting numbers from its own product.