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What is pier

pier gives every coding-agent session its own VM on your own AWS or GCP account. One command launches the instance and drops you into tmux inside it, with your repo on a fresh branch, your agents installed and authenticated, your MCP servers configured, and your dev environment built by the repo’s own setup script.

Detach and forget it. An in-VM supervisor parks the VM once the agent goes quiet. The instance stops, the disk persists. Attach again and it resumes in about 20 seconds on AWS and about a minute on GCP, with files, branches, and credentials exactly as you left them.

pier setup # once: a short wizard sets up the account groundwork
cd ~/code/myapp
pier fix-login # new session: your branch, your secrets, your dev env
pier proxy # sessions as hostnames: the dev server at fix-login.pier:3000
pier # the TUI: list, attach, create, resize, destroy
Session stateCosts
running~$0.04/h
parked~$3-4/mo (disk only)

There is no control plane. No server, no database, no daemon on your laptop. Session state lives in instance tags. Every byte between you and the VM is plain ssh. On AWS it dials the instance directly with port 22 open to your IP only, falling back to an SSM tunnel on networks that block it. On GCP it rides Google’s IAP tunnel and the instance accepts nothing else from the internet. The VM never holds cloud credentials.