In recent days, the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter have visited the offices of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor, in San Francisco. Onsite, they talked with software folks working on the model side to learn more about how their way of building software is changing. This article is based on observations from those visits.

Last week, Andrej Karpathy employed the phrase “new paradigm” to describe using Claude Tag – a way to mention Claude in Slack and have it kick off tasks .

There was plenty of pushback against this claim on social media ; after all, it’s just a Slack integration with Claude, right ? The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter also thought this until they asked David Hershey at Anthropic’s Applied AI unit about it while visiting the company’s offices. He explained in detail what makes this particular Slack integration different from using something like Claude Code :

1) No additional setup.

 For Claude Code to work well, it should be connected to internal MCP servers, with the right skills on your local machine. Of course, at larger companies this setup is at least partially automated, but devs often need to do tweaking.

2) No “tool context-switching.” Just mention it in Slack ! Of course, opening Claude Code is not a big effort, but it’s still more work than just typing it out in Slack, and kicking off work.

3) Routine work made easier. David has “Claude playing Pokémon” as his side project. Every time a new model comes out, he kicks off a run of his script on it. Previously, this took a few minutes to set up every time, and then it ran on his machine for hours. With this new Slack integration, it’s just one command.

My sense is that the excitement here is less about the Slack integration itself, and more to do with the fact that it’s easy to kick off one or more Ais that no longer run on a local machine. You can skip the setup entirely.

‘Claude Managed Agents’ is a big focus at Anthropic. While there, I met Katelyn Lesse, head of engineering for Claude Platform, who explained that Claude Managed Agents is a large, complex project which her team built over a six-month period. It’s a hosted service to execute long-running agents on various cloud providers.

Also according to the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, Cloud agents are the “big deal”, not the Slack integration

Also last week, they had the opportunity to attend a private AI builders event, where Peter Steinberger discussed his workflow.

He talked about how he has gotten really tired of having several OpenClaw agents running on his local machine, which heat up the CPU and slow down his whole system. So, he built Crabbox as a way to run OpenClaw agents in the cloud :

Suddenly, the same solution of cloud agents has emerged in separate places – at Anthropic and with Peter’s OpenClaw – in response to issues caused by locally-running agents. They also learned that cloud agents are becoming a big deal at OpenAI and Cursor, too.

OpenAI bets big on Cloud Agents

OpenAI acquired Ona, (formerly Gitpod), the leader in cloud development environments (CDEs). Back in 2021, CDEs were built for developers to develop software faster, and they also happen to be the perfect primitive for agents to run in a sandboxed cloud environment. From the acquisition announcement by OpenAI (emphasis mine) :

“As Codex becomes more capable, its most valuable work is unfolding over hours or days, rather than minutes. We believe people should be able to delegate more ambitious work without remaining tied to the machine where it began. The work should continue beyond the initial session, with Codex making it possible to stay connected and check progress, provide direction, make decisions, and review results from anywhere.

Ona will help us do that. Its technology provides secure, persistent environments where agents can access the tools, systems, and context they need to make progress over time.

By bringing Ona to OpenAI, we will expand Codex beyond work tied to a single device or active session and help more organizations deploy agents securely in production.“

At OpenAI’s offices, the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter asked engineers there if their focus is shifting to cloud-based agents. Their answer : it very much is. This is a fairly recent development and they’re hiring engineers for the Cloud Agents team. Here’s one job ad that’s currently live :

“We are looking for an experienced software engineer to help build and scale our cloud agent platform. You will design and operate systems for orchestrating agents at scale. You will work closely with product engineers on ChatGPT, API, and Codex to define the right abstractions and enable them to ship products quickly. Strong backend or infrastructure experience is important ; experience with Python, Rust, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or product platforms is especially helpful.”