Persistent Cloud VM vs Local session badge for agent chats

Ideas Feedback
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Describe the request

Persistent “Cloud VM” vs “Local” session badge — not a one-line footnote.

Cloud Agents run on Cursor-hosted VMs and can push branches and open draft PRs on GitHub. Local Agent / IDE chats run on the user’s own machine. Today those two hosts look too similar in the product UI, so it’s easy to assume cloud work was done locally (or the reverse).

Remote-only clues like cursor/… branch names and cursoragent commit authors are after-the-fact. They don’t help while you’re in the chat deciding what the agent is actually doing, or later when you see a PR and try to reconstruct where it came from.

Why it matters

  • Wrong mental model → wrong assumptions about where code was written, committed, and pushed
  • Multi-session / multi-machine users need host identity always visible
  • Cloud vs local changes how you review, merge, and continue work

Proposed UX

  1. Persistent badge on chat/agent session chrome: Cloud VM vs Local (optional: machine / hostname nickname).
  2. Repeat throughout the session: agent panel, composer header, PR creation UI, and commit attribution — not only at session start.
  3. When a Cloud Agent opens a PR, show explicit copy such as: “Branch created on a Cursor cloud VM — not your local machine.”
  4. Local sessions should also say Local, so the contrast is always learned, not only when cloud is active.

Happy to refine copy and placement with the product team.