Cognition added terminal control for Devin Cloud, letting developers start, monitor, and resume the coding agent’s remote sessions without leaving the command line. The company announced the update on its blog Monday, alongside a limited window of free SWE-2 sessions running through October 8.
The core addition is a handoff command. A developer working locally with Devin CLI can type /handoff to push a task to a dedicated cloud virtual machine, where Devin keeps working even after the laptop closes. The terminal stays connected as a control surface: the developer can watch progress, steer the agent, or step away entirely.
That reverses the usual tradeoff between local speed and cloud persistence. Local agent sessions die when the terminal closes; cloud sessions have historically required a separate web interface to check on. Cognition’s update tries to close that gap by letting one command line handle both modes, then hand the finished work back with a second /handoff that pulls the pull request branch into a local Git checkout.
Cognition also shipped full SSH access to the cloud VMs. Developers can run devin ssh to connect directly to the machine running their session, launch dev servers, forward ports for interactive testing, or copy files with scp. Previously, inspecting a cloud session in that kind of depth meant using Devin Desktop or the web app; SSH access turns the VM into an ordinary remote development box a developer already knows how to use.
A resume command, devin --cloud --resume, reopens any cloud session in the terminal using its session URL, and /open web or /open desktop routes the same session to a browser tab or the desktop app when a visual view is more useful than a terminal one. Cognition frames the three surfaces (terminal, web, desktop) as interchangeable views onto the same underlying session rather than separate products.
The free SWE-2 promotion is the company’s own offer, not an independent benchmark result, and Cognition has not disclosed usage caps or eligibility rules beyond the October 8 cutoff. Coding-agent vendors have leaned on free trial windows before to drive adoption ahead of a pricing change; whether this one precedes a price adjustment or simply seeds terminal usage is not something the announcement addresses.
The terminal-first framing puts Devin in more direct competition with tools like OpenAI’s Codex CLI and Anthropic’s Claude Code, both of which already run agent sessions from the command line but without a persistent cloud VM a developer can SSH into mid-task. Cognition’s bet is that developers will tolerate switching between local and cloud execution only if the switch costs nothing, no new interface, no lost context, no separate login.
Teams already running Devin CLI in their workflow should test the SSH access against their existing CI and secrets-handling policies before the October 8 window closes, since a remote VM with full shell access changes the security surface of a coding agent in ways a purely local session did not.
Cognition detailed the update in a company blog post published September 21, 2026.
