Since we started checking the assistant’s work, we’ve focused on three smaller pieces that matter once a PC lives in the cloud: noticing when nobody is using it, getting files in and out, and keeping your own edits when you hand a task back.
Noticing when you’ve stepped away
A cloud PC is easy to forget, and one left on by accident shouldn’t keep running for hours. So we’re teaching the PC to notice when nobody is using it. It looks at more than one thing: whether anyone has touched the keyboard or mouse, whether the PC is still busy in the background, whether the assistant is in the middle of a task, and whether you’ve asked it to stay on.
When everything has been quiet for a while, the plan is to warn you first and stop the PC a few minutes later if nothing changes. Your saved files stay on the PC’s disk. Anything you haven’t saved doesn’t survive a stop, which is why the warning comes first.
The harder question is what to do when the PC can’t tell. If a reading is missing or doesn’t add up, or the PC has just restarted, we don’t count that as quiet time; the count starts over. Stopping a PC someone is using is a worse mistake than leaving an idle one on a little longer.
So far, the PC collects these signals and a separate rule decides whether to keep running, warn or stop, in local testing. Connecting that decision to actually stopping a PC is the next step.
Getting files in and out
In local development, you can now send a file from your browser into a folder on your PC, and send a file from that folder back to download. Each transfer is checked when it arrives before it’s marked done. If a transfer is interrupted, it waits to be checked instead of quietly starting over. Each person has their own storage allowance, and you can see how much of it your files use.
Your edit becomes the starting point
When you take over from the assistant and fix an image yourself, saving it now makes your version the new starting point. Input pauses for the moment it takes to save, so nothing slips in halfway. The assistant doesn’t pick up again until you tell it to, and when it does, it works from your saved version. The original and the assistant’s earlier result are kept alongside it.
We’ve tested this locally with one image editor and one round of edits. Several rounds in a row, Korean text input and choosing between versions are still ahead.
What this is, and what it isn’t
All of this runs in local development on our own machine. None of it has run on a real Linux Cloud PC yet, and early access is still closed.
How long should “quiet for a while” be before a PC stops? If you’ve ever come back to a computer you forgot to turn off, or lost work to one that turned itself off, tell us in #feedback on our Discord. It helps us pick the default.
Where we are: idle detection, file transfers and saving your own edits work in local development. Stopping an idle PC automatically is next. No real Cloud PC has been validated yet, and early access is closed.