Background coding agent
A coding agent that runs in the cloud on its own, takes an issue or a task and comes back later with a pull request for review.
Unlike a coding agent in your editor, it works while nobody watches, often several in parallel. That moves the safety checks out of the chat: an isolated sandbox, secrets scoped to the task, required CI checks and a human review before merge. Teams that get value from it have fast tests and clear rules in the repository; teams without them get a queue of pull requests nobody trusts.
Related terms
- Coding agent: An agent that reads a repository, edits files, runs commands and tests, and opens pull requests.
- CI/CD: Continuous integration and continuous delivery: every change is built and tested automatically and can be released at any time.
- Agent sandbox: An isolated environment where an AI agent runs code and commands without access to your network, secrets or real files.
- Hooks: Scripts the harness runs automatically at fixed points, such as before a tool call or after an edit.
- Software factory (AI agents): A pipeline where agents write and fix most of the code while people write specs, set guardrails, design the checks and decide what ships.
- Agent control plane: The layer that starts, watches, limits and stops many AI agents at once: queues, permissions, budgets, logs and a view of who is doing what.
