At a high level, coding agents have a basic architecture: an LLM calls tools in a loop, while carrying forward the required context. Since that’s easiest to implement locally, many coding agents started out as terminal tools and then desktop apps (Claude Code famously began as a CLI tool). But as the open laptop meme illustrates, modern agent harnesses have frustrating limitations if they’re not able to be managed in the cloud. Since 2025, both OpenAI and Anthropic have been trying to shift their harnesses more into the cloud — but with varying levels of success. The challenges include keeping