Your agent finished the app. The link still points at your laptop.

This week the coding session learned how to outlive the desk. The page you meant to send someone is still a different problem.

Two products shipped the same idea

On 6 October, Cursor’s iPhone app started showing agents that are running on your own computer. If an agent stops to ask a question while you are away, you can answer from the phone. The laptop still has to be awake. The work is local. You are just no longer tied to the chair.

Around the same time, Claude’s newer Projects in the Code section of claude.ai moved the working machine into the cloud. Each project gets its own virtual machine. Threads share that project’s memory. Closing the laptop no longer ends the session, which was the complaint about the older Cowork setup, where the model ran in the cloud and the tools ran in a virtual machine on the computer in front of you.

Read together, the week is easy to summarize. The agent loop is becoming a background job. You can check it from a phone, or leave it running on someone else’s computer, and come back to a result.

The app is not the agent

None of that puts the thing you built in front of another person. A friend, a client, or a coworker still needs an address that opens in their browser. An agent transcript is not that address. Neither is localhost:3000.

Look at a project the morning after a long session and you can usually sort the leftovers into three piles.

• The dev server. It runs only while a terminal on your machine is running. Sleep the laptop and the tour is over.
• The hardcoded local address. The page fetches http://localhost, or links to a file path, so it works for you and for nobody else.
• The data that never left the disk. The waitlist is a JSON file, a row in a local database, or a console.log. Refresh on someone else’s phone and the list is empty.

Those three piles are the actual product. The agent can keep typing after you stand up. The piles stay on the machine until you give them a home that does not depend on that machine.

What “done” can mean tonight

For a landing page, a demo, or a tool a few people will open, done is smaller than a production platform. It looks like this:

1. The files the browser needs are static. There is an index.html, often inside dist/ or build/.
2. Those files are available at an HTTPS address you can paste into a message.
3. Anything the page must remember, such as an email address, is stored somewhere that survives a refresh and does not require your laptop to be open.

A custom domain, a private network, and a second environment can wait. They matter when strangers depend on the app every day. They are expensive distractions when the goal is to show the work this week.

Why this week’s news still matters

Background agents are useful. They remove the requirement that you watch every command. They do not remove the requirement that the result be reachable. When you review what an overnight session produced, review the address first. A clever page that only you can open is a draft. A plain page at a public HTTPS link is something you can send.