We’ve been having great luck using cloud agents but one point of friction is dev environment setup time. Most of the time we want the environment to spin up, but sometimes we don’t and it is painful to sit there burning compute for a query we know doesn’t need a desktop environment running.
For instance, having the embeddings for the platform available is great when a user wants to make a simple query against an mcp that is configured for the team in cloud agents. But the team environment setup can take minutes and we don’t use the services at any point in the chat.
tl;dr “Ask mode” in cloud agents doesn’t need service startup but you have to sit through it regardless
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some additional context based on an offline conversation about this:
We have a team snapshot. the daemons in it are fine, but node process start anew (with a warmed dependency cache from the snapshot). sometimes it takes more than 2 minutes to start up, and when that happens it seems like the agent automatically takes a new snapshot, which can make things difficult to reason about.
Same problem here.
Without the preconfigured environment/VM we need several minutes to install dependencies, but with it we have ~30s extra boot time for every session start.
@still-weighting is right that ASK mode doesn’t require dependencies, and also some MCP actions or other AGENT mode tasks won’t. Ideally I would want a button to decide myself with a team preset setting for default ON/OFF.
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