While looking into remote PR housekeeping with Paseo, I asked what would happen to all the tools, MCP connections and authentication already set up on my laptop. Would a remote agent have those, or would I need to prepare another machine? This was a research pass; I haven't provisioned a new worker from it.
Paseo's relay connects a client to a daemon on an existing host. The coding agent still runs on that host. Its SSH transport also expects the remote daemon to be running already; it doesn't install or configure it.1 Paseo launches the installed agent CLI as a subprocess, using that provider's configuration.2
The connection reaches the host where the environment already exists. Choosing another host means checking its checkout, runtimes, tool configuration and authentication separately. Copying an MCP server definition won't install the executable it launches or sign the new host into the service.
I then asked how Pi's durable agents fit. One specific limitation made the boundary clearer: the pi-agents extension documents that its delegated agents use Pi's built-in coding tools and cannot use the parent session's MCP servers or other extensions' tools.3 That is a limitation of this integration, not every application built on Pi Durable.
My earlier durability research focused on what survives a restart. This question adds another check: can the recovered agent actually reach the tools the job requires? A persisted conversation doesn't establish that.
For PR housekeeping, I'd start with a worker that has the repository, its build and test tools, model access and GitHub authentication. The open question is which tasks need my Mac's apps or devices, and which can run with that smaller environment. I haven't tested that split yet.