for the longest time, replicas was marketed as a background coding agent. the idea was that you could delegate tasks, close your laptop, and those tasks would keep running while you did something else.
i've never liked the name. it discounts so much of what a cloud agent can do, while also not really living up to what it promises.
a background agent implies that the work will get done by the time you come back. but that was never something we could guarantee.
agents run into issues that interrupt their turns all the time. they hit usage limits. inference providers go down. transient errors happen. and every time they do, the task stops until you come back and figure out what happened.
so we changed how we talked about replicas. it went from being the background coding agent to the cloud coding agent.
but today we're launching a new way to run tasks in the background, where a turn doesn't have to stop just because an agent does.
if claude hits a usage limit, replicas can automatically fall back to an anthropic api key, microsoft foundry, or aws bedrock and keep going. if you want to switch agents entirely, replicas can fork the same conversation from claude into codex and continue from there.
both can happen automatically, without any friction for the user.
introducing fallbacks + forks.
replicas is the first cloud coding agent that can actually keep your tasks running in the background, even when the agent or inference provider you're using can't.
