I’ve tried out Claude code a bit but it freaks me out. It runs commands, and installs packages in the background without asking or showing me what it’s done. I’d feel much more comfortable running it in a VM or cloud instance than in my laptop with all my personal data.
That sounds like a configuration issue. You can have it confirm any command. But sure, on a developer machine, Claude Code basically has shell access as the user (which can be as helpful as it is dangerous).
I don't see a benefit at all to push it into the "cloud", on the contrary. Especially since network level analysis for agent tasks is quite sensible and far easier to manage "locally".
Today I would recommend to put infrastructure back on premise for that matter, especially with AI development support, this is increasingly favourable for many companies.
A sandbox for AI development makes sense for that matter. Not cloud, network segmented, middlewares for data access, etc.
A gigachad would have already bought another laptop for Claude code to run free on, given it all the data, and then faced the consequences head on.