The Laptop Limit

zach-lloyd's observation: "the way that we are working now at Warp, I assume this is true for a bunch of you, is like increasingly running multiple agents at once and starting to run into the limits of like what our laptops can do."

Concrete symptom: 4–5 concurrent Rust rebuilds on a million-line codebase saturates local CPU/RAM. The productivity gain from more parallel agents is bottlenecked by local hardware long before it's bottlenecked by model capability.

Why this matters

Lloyd's argument for cloud agents is not primarily a convenience argument — it's a Amdahl's-law argument: if the agent's wall-clock is dominated by compile/test/setup, adding agents to a fixed local box shifts thrash onto the engineer's dev loop. cloud-agent-primitives are the migration path.