Lucas Meijer Open-Sources holmes, a Cloud Agent Coding Tool

On October 9, developer Lucas Meijer open-sourced and released for free holmes, a cloud agent coding tool he had been using for months. The tool aims to address three pain points in his AI-assisted programming: not being locked into any single AI lab, cloud agents running in isolated environments unable to touch his local laptop, and staying on top of codebase state without hand-writing code.

Confirmed

• holmes runs cloud agents on the user's own hardware, assigning each task an isolated remote development environment with its own browser, terminal, and VS Code instance.
• The tool takes an "any agent, any model, any subscription" approach — for example, running the original Claude Code with the user's existing Claude subscription.
• The project is free and open source, and the mobile experience is highlighted by the author as a key feature.
• holmes is specifically designed for evaluating agents' work.

Why it matters

• It offers a free, open-source option for a cloud-agent workflow that isn't locked to a single lab and uses your own subscriptions — appealing to developers who want to keep existing subscriptions (like a Claude subscription) while running agents in isolated environments; the per-task isolated environments also reduce the risk of agent mistakes affecting the local machine.

2026-10-09 ~ 2026-10-09 · 5 related posts

• [source] Dev ships free open-source cloud coding agent tool with no single-lab lock-in — lucasmeijer · 2026-10-09
• [source] Lucas Meijer open-sources cloud agent coding tool with per-task remote dev environments — lucasmeijer · 2026-10-09
• [source] Open-source holmes: per-task cloud agent workspaces with browser, terminals, VS Code — lucasmeijer · 2026-10-09
• Remote dev setup: each workspace gets its own agent, browser, and terminals — lucasmeijer · 2026-10-09
• Dev shows remote workspaces running any agent on any model, incl. vanilla Claude Code — lucasmeijer · 2026-10-09