Your AI Coding Agent Isn’t One Thing: Four Ways It Actually Runs
When people talk about “their AI coding agent,” they usually picture a single product doing a single job. A helpful assistant living in the editor, suggesting code, running tasks. One thing, in one place. That picture is often wrong, and the gap between the picture and the truth matters more than many developers realise.
The same tool, in a different mode, can behave like a fundamentally different machine. Not a little different. Different in where computation happens, whose infrastructure it runs on, and what it can touch on your system. GitHub Copilot autocomplete and a Copilot cloud agent may share a product name, but they occupy very different positions in the execution stack. GitHub itself draws the line: its documentation distinguishes the autonomous cloud agent, which works in a GitHub Actions-powered environment, from agent mode in the IDE, which makes edits directly in your local development environment.
The mode...
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