Bitrise Remote Dev Environments

Agents need somewhere real to run. You can hand an agent a task, but it has to execute somewhere. ❌ On your laptop it fights you for the CPU and the simulator, running multiple in parallel and you won’t be able to do a video call without CPU clipping and fans screaming. ❌ In a throwaway container it has no real device tooling, no warm dependencies and no memory of the last run, so it spends its first tokens rebuilding an environment it’s about to lose again. ✅ Bitrise Remote Dev Environments are that somewhere: Bitrise RDE are on-demand cloud VMs (real macOS on Apple Silicon, or Linux) that an agent drives headless through our open-source MCP server. Start a batch on different branches, → let them work in parallel, → collect the PRs. Or attach VS Code, Cursor or Claude Code over SSH and work in it yourself, like a laptop, but many. The reason it actually works: these are the same machines that run production builds for mobile teams at scale. Same Apple Silicon hardware, same stacks, cloned from the same golden image the CI build fleet uses. 🤷‍♀️ Honestly this came out of a thing that annoys all of us. CI fails on something your laptop never hits: a different Xcode, a stale pod cache, a simulator runtime you don't have locally. You pull the branch, it passes, and your afternoon is gone comparing two machines instead of fixing the bug. Agents made it worse: same problem, none of the judgement. It burns tokens down rabbit holes, sometimes fixes the environment only to hit the same wall next run in a fresh VM, then confidently opens a PR that can’t build – or fixes the wrong thing. So we gave the human and the AI agent the same machine. When the environment you write code in is the one that tests it, a whole category of works-on-my-machine stops existing. Ask me anything about how it works, what it costs, or where it still falls short.

RDE started as an internal tool to solve our own daily headaches at Bitrise. I wrote the first commit in January and designed the core: a template describes the machine, the scripts, and the secrets, and every session is a self-contained snapshot of it. That is the boring foundation behind "pre-configured and ready to go out of the box", and it is why we quickly realized this could work for other teams too. 💜 The decision I am proudest of came in the first month. We put a terminal with Claude Code into every session and shipped an MCP server, so an agent could open, drive, and clean up an RDE without a human in the loop. At the time it looked like a nice extra. It quickly became the main way sessions got opened at Bitrise!

I worked on Bitrise CI before joining the RDE team, and what surprised me most was how much carried over. Running macOS and Linux machines at scale, keeping stacks and images current, making a VM boot fast and come up identical every time. That's years of work we didn't have to redo. RDE started from there instead of from zero. The same holds a level up. Bitrise is a platform, not just CI (Build Cache, Release Management, the integrations underneath all of it) and RDE is one more thing that plugs into it. Our GitHub integration is the example I know best: if your workspace has repos connected to Bitrise, your engineers get git access inside an RDE without anyone pasting a personal token into a VM. A team that's already on CI onboards in minutes. There's still a long list of things the platform already does that we haven't wired up yet, and that list is the fun part. It goes the other way as well: a lot of what we're building for RDE is going to end up back in the rest of the platform.

👨‍🔧 More technical details on Bitrise Remote Dev Environments if you’d like to learn more: Real macOS on M2 Pro / M4 / M4 Pro (M6 and M5 Pro coming soon) + Linux from 2 to 48 vCPU. US and EU regions. $20/month gets you 1,440 minutes per OS. Overage is $0.0288/min on macOS, $0.0044 on Linux, and it stops at a monthly cap – hit the cap and you keep running free for the rest of the month. 14-day trial, no auto-charge. Agents running inside the VM use your own account and API keys. 🔗 Docs: https://docs.bitrise.io/en/bitrise-rde/getting-started/remote-dev-environments-overview ❌ What it isn’t: no Windows. And it’s mobile-first by heritage. If you’re a pure web team you’ll find it works fine, but you’ll notice we built the Apple path first.