What we’ve learned building cloud agents

This post details the evolution of Cursor's cloud agents, highlighting key lessons learned in building a robust and reliable system. It emphasizes the critical role of the development environment as a product component, requiring infrastructure for setup, hibernation, and checkpointing. The migration to Temporal for durable execution is presented as a major reliability improvement, moving from one '9' to over two '9's of reliability and handling millions of actions daily. The decoupling of agent, machine, and conversation state is explained as enabling more flexible execution and client updates. The shift in the harness from deterministic logic to agent-controlled tools is discussed, along with the development of specialized subagents for tasks like computer use. The concept of self-healing agent environments through 'autoinstall' is introduced as a future direction.