Why cloud VMs let you run 5–10 parallel agents without code collisions

When you work locally, running more than one agent at a time is genuinely painful. You either have to use git worktrees — which are complex — or literally duplicate your codebase into separate directories. Two copies is awkward; five or ten is unworkable. What tools like Devin do is spin up a fresh virtual machine in the cloud for each task. Each VM is its own isolated development environment. You click a button, a new server appears in your browser, and it has no knowledge of — and no overlap with — any other session running simultaneously. There's zero risk of code collisions, zero mental overhead spent wondering whether you've pulled the latest changes or whether two agents are stomping on the same files. The result is that running five or ten parallel agents becomes completely routine. Working locally instead of this is, as the expert puts it, holding yourself back — you're shipping 10x less than you could be.