Claude Code on your laptop is great for hands-on coding. Ellipsis runs agents in the cloud on a schedule, on a pull request, or from a Slack or Linear mention, with the team-wide visibility and central governance a local setup cannot provide.
| Runs without you at the terminal | Agents run in the cloud, day or night | Only while your terminal is open |
| Triggers | Pull requests, pushes, cron, and @ellipsis in Slack and Linear | You start every session by hand |
| Scheduled agents | Native cron schedules | Your laptop would have to stay on and awake |
| Team-wide visibility | Every session, cost, and diff in one shared dashboard | Local to one developer |
| Governance | Scoped GitHub tokens, repo scoping, and spend caps | Each developer configures their own |
| Cost tracking | Spend by agent, repo, and day across the team | Each developer has a separate bill |
| Audit trail | Every action and every config version recorded | No shared record of what ran |
| Shared configuration | One versioned YAML per agent, in your repo | Local settings, not centrally governed |
| Hands-on, interactive coding | Built for automated and triggered work, not live pairing | Excellent for pairing at your desk |
The two work well together. Keep Claude Code at your desk for live coding, and let Ellipsis run the automated, scheduled, and team-wide work in the cloud.
On a laptop, a session lives and dies in one developer's terminal. Ellipsis records every session in one shared dashboard: how it was triggered, what it changed, what it cost, and the full step-by-step trace, across every repo and every agent.
Local sessions are governed by whoever is at the keyboard. With Ellipsis every agent's GitHub token is narrowed to the permissions and repos its YAML grants, and spend is capped per session, per day, and per month across the whole team.
See the reasoning behind every change, not just the change. Each session records the agent's thinking, the tools it called, the tests it ran, and the diff it shipped, available to anyone on the team and not just the person who launched it.
Move the scheduled, event-driven, and team-wide work off your laptop and into the cloud, with the governance and visibility a local setup cannot give you.