---
title: "How we set up our cloud agent environment"
description: "Setting up a cloud-agent environment for the Cursor monorepo required treating development infrastructure as a product for agent users. The team aligned cloud VMs with local development by adapting utilities and setup scripts for Ubuntu, adding dependencies to a Cursor-defined Dockerfile, and introducing security controls for secrets and network access. To make the repository easier to operate, it built anydev to start services, route utility scripts, explain subcommands, and supervise long-running builds. Cursor Cloud MCP and Cloud Doctor then inspect environments, distinguish transient from salient failures, perform root-cause analysis, open high-confidence fixes, and improve workflows using traces. The resulting end-to-end testing and recorded demos helped cloud agents grow from about one in ten merged PRs in December to more than half, with the post identifying tool parity, documented skills, and core-workflow verification as readiness checks."
---

# How we set up our cloud agent environment

[Cursor](https://yomu.fyi/company/cursor) · Mathew Hogan & Arvind Saripalli · Jul 30, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Setting up a cloud-agent environment for the Cursor monorepo required treating development infrastructure as a product for agent users. The team aligned cloud VMs with local development by adapting utilities and setup scripts for Ubuntu, adding dependencies to a Cursor-defined Dockerfile, and introducing security controls for secrets and network access. To make the repository easier to operate, it built anydev to start services, route utility scripts, explain subcommands, and supervise long-running builds. Cursor Cloud MCP and Cloud Doctor then inspect environments, distinguish transient from salient failures, perform root-cause analysis, open high-confidence fixes, and improve workflows using traces. The resulting end-to-end testing and recorded demos helped cloud agents grow from about one in ten merged PRs in December to more than half, with the post identifying tool parity, documented skills, and core-workflow verification as readiness checks.

## Context

The team wanted cloud agents to have computers for testing changes, but found that agents struggled with the monorepo's messy development experience. The environment also changes continually, requiring ongoing diagnosis, recovery, and improvement.

## Approach / What changed

The team adapted the development setup for Ubuntu cloud VMs, added dependencies to a Cursor-defined Dockerfile, introduced controls for network egress and secrets, and built anydev to simplify service startup and supervise builds. Cursor Cloud MCP and Cloud Doctor inspect failures and traces, support recovery, and can improve skills, workflows, and the environment through high-confidence fixes.

## Takeaways

- Cloud VMs run on Linux while most Cursor developers use Mac machines, so development utilities and setup scripts had to work on Ubuntu.
- anydev includes a supervisor that monitors and restarts long-running build commands, removing that responsibility from the model.
- Cloud Doctor periodically checks environment failures, distinguishes potentially transient errors from salient ones, performs root-cause analysis, and can open high-confidence PRs.

**Tags:** [AI Agents](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-agents), [Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/topic/developer-experience), [MCP](https://yomu.fyi/topic/mcp)

- Source: [Cursor](https://cursor.com/blog/cloud-agent-environment)
- Source URL: https://cursor.com/blog/cloud-agent-environment
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-02T11:41:53.601Z

[Read original post](https://cursor.com/blog/cloud-agent-environment)