Your first hour on a cloud dev machine: what to open first

You clicked the link from your order and landed on a dashboard. That is the whole machine, seen from the top. Before you install anything, it helps to know what is already there and what happens when you close the tab.

The dashboard is the map

Every tile on the dashboard opens a tool that is already running on the machine: VS Code at /code/, a terminal, a persistent workspace, a file manager at /files/, and the agent CLIs. Nothing on that page is a thing you have to set up first. It is a menu of what shipped with the box.

Open a terminal, then a workspace

The fastest way to feel at home is to open the terminal and treat it like any Linux shell, because it is one. A good first ten minutes:

• Run whoami and pwd — you are root, in a real home directory.
• Clone a repository you actually work on and open it in the editor.
• Start the workspace tile; it runs Zellij, which survives a dropped connection.

It keeps running without you

This is the part that changes how you use it. The machine is a VM that is always on, not a session that lives in your browser. Start a long build, close the laptop, open the tab again from your phone on the train — the build is where you left it.

Nothing you do in the browser can end the machine. Closing the tab is just closing a window onto something that keeps running.