Managed agents are the new Lambda

Managed agents (cloud-hosted agents) are the next big push from the frontier labs. They're genuinely incredible. They're also going to be the AWS Lambda of this cycle - powerful, sticky, and an absolute nightmare to migrate off once you're in deep. What are "managed agents"? While the exact definition is up for debate, in my mind a managed agent is an agent harness (like Claude Code) running in the cloud, not on your local machine. This has a few major advantages. The most obvious one is that you don't need a machine running locally - it can do its work 24/7, in the background. The other that running in the cloud means it can be notified of changes and act on them. Imagine, for example, agents responding to incoming emails or webhooks and doing some activity based on them (this is very possible locally - but easier with the agent running on the server). The other advantage is security - probably the key part of the "managed" agent. Much like PaaS (platform-as-a-service) products like…