> 24/7 running coding agents are pretty clearly the direction the industry is going now.

This assertion needs some support for those of us that don't have a macro insight into the industry. Are you seeing this from within FAANG shops? As a solo developer? What? Honest question.

I'm speaking from my daily experience. Sometimes i don't want to close my laptop before going to bed because there are still 1-2 tasks ongoing in my AI kanban board, so I just leave my laptop open (lock but not suspend it) so that the agents keep working for a while. I don't even have things all that automated.

I anticipate that once I have some more complex agentic scaffolds set up to do things like automatically explore promising directions for the project, then leaving the AI system on overnight becomes a necessity.

100% this.

I also have Claude Cowork automations running constantly. As-is, I can't shut down my laptop, and it gets frustrating when my laptop is in my backpack all day because of commutes or travel.

Yes or when you get good feedback/idea talking to someone, being able to spawn tasks from your phone makes everything much faster

For a solo dev running one task at a time, a beefy desktop overnight is totally viable. We see a lot of this with the Mac Mini hype

Cloud starts to matter when you want to (a) run a swarm of agents on multiple independent tasks in parallel, (b) share agents across a team, or (c) not worry about keeping a machine online

I would point out that a beefy desktop is probably faster at compiling code than a typical cloud instance simply due to more CPU performance. So maybe up to 10-ish concurrent agents it's faster to use a local desktop than a cloud instance, and then you start to get into the territory where multiple agents are compiling code at the same time, and the cloud setup starts to win. (That's assuming the codebase takes a while to compile and pegs your CPU at 100% while doing so. If the codebase is faster to compile or uses fewer threads, then the breakeven agent count is even higher.)

Other than that, I agree with what you said. I don't know what the tradeoffs for local on-premises and cloud agents are in terms of other areas like convenience, but I do think that scalability in the cloud is a big advantage.

Totally right on the compile time. CIs have the same bottleneck, and the ecosystem is working on fixing this (faster cpus, better caching) in both coding agents and CI to improve overall velocity

And (d) not worry about toddler agents wrecking your single point of failure beefy desktop

I've just set up an old MacBook with tmux and ssh/mosh, you can run as many parallel Claudes in the 'cloud' as you want

The core issue for me is, I don't want to trust someone else with my code, or run my stuff on their computers. I don't see serious enterprise organizations offloading something as critical to security outside their own network perimeter.

Optimising to keep the coding going 24/7 feels like a local optimisation trap. The amount of code that can be written by coding agents in normal working hours dwarfs what humans can productively describe and assess.

My efforts will be in improving agentic requirements gathering and assessment.

To do what exactly? If the work requires 24/7 then fair enough.