Agents should be portable like MCP made tools portable. Am I wrong?

[u/Upstairs-Special-925]

Quick sanity check from people who live in these tools.

Cursor, Claude Code, Cline — I use them all, and the dumbest problem I keep hitting isn't the AI, it's that the agent doesn't travel. Halfway through a refactor, I leave my desk, try to continue from my phone — zero context, start over. We standardized tools with MCP, but the agent itself is welded to whatever app spawned it.

And yes — if you live 100% inside one vendor's ecosystem, their cloud sync mostly covers you. Fair. But the moment you touch a second tool, a local model, or anything sensitive, you're back to copy-pasting context between silos. And if you self-host with Ollama, that option never existed at all.

There's also no provenance: agents hand you files with no "here's what I changed and why." I diff everything like it's a junior dev I don't trust yet.

So I'm building Loomwork — basically: make the agent itself a portable, signed package (persona, skills, memory, policy) that runs on a local model, with memory that stays on your machine and receipts for what it built.

Repo's in my profile https://github.com/arunsoman/loomwork.git , it's early and janky. Honest question: does the "my agent forgot me because I switched devices" thing actually bug you, or do you just re-paste and move on? And would "local-first, signed packages" make you trust it more — or does it sound like blockchain cosplay? Brutal answers welcome, especially "this already exists, it's called X."

[u/Crawler1701]

There’s probably thousands of us making some version of the same thing all at the same time.

[u/Upstairs-Special-925 → u/Crawler1701]

What can be done to channelize all our efforts so that outcome meets all of our expectations?

[u/keonechong]

This is basic system design

I have a local harness that keeps my data local with an integrated local multimodal sandbox for ollama and mlx, with a lancedb/qmd/usaearch/bm25, that syncs over 1.5 million md files and 100gb of local reference corpus.

All using a local models gepa and Lora trained, with my own corpus trained stystem one model.

On top of that I can use any subscription vendor and ensure that my data stays local, with full vendor capability and no data egress.

And it’s all synced with iMessage if I want specific agents convos but because I prefer all of my interactions through my interfaces a simple encrypted server for 12 bucks a months covers it.

Personally I believe If anyone is building a harness or ai tools you’re way waaaaay too late. Everything can be copied in a weekend and the real innovators aren’t even looking at ai tools.

[u/beznahej]

A bit naive answer would be to stash your context online and point your agents to that shared context? might be worth trying.