Rocky Surf

Rocky Surf is an open-source productivity tool built by John Damask for software engineers who want to run AI coding agents on dedicated cloud VMs rather than their local machines. It installs via npx -y rockysurf, runs as a local Node.js web app and optional MCP server, and connects to your existing cloud accounts on AWS, GCP, Azure, or Hetzner. The project is MIT-licensed and currently at v0.1.4.

What It Is

Rocky Surf sits between your laptop and your cloud provider, giving you a lightweight management layer for spinning up Linux VMs purpose-built for agentic coding. Instead of running Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, or other AI coding agents on your personal machine — competing for CPU, memory, and potentially exposing credentials — Rocky Surf provisions isolated cloud boxes with those agents pre-installed. The tool follows a "Bring Your Own Everything" philosophy: your cloud account, your API keys and agent licenses, your GitHub repos.

How the Surge Pack System Works

The core abstraction for agent installation is the Surge Pack — a software bundle that defines which coding agents and tools get pre-installed on a VM. Rocky Surf ships eleven official packs out of the box:

• Claude Code
• Codex CLI
• Cursor CLI
• Amp
• Grok Build
• DeepSeek Harness
• opencode
• OpenClaw
• OMP
• Pi
• Gas Town

Developers can write their own Surge Packs using agent skills from the Rocky Surf repository, and the Rocky Surf Shop serves as a community registry where custom packs and cloud Providers can be published and installed after script review.

Deployment Model and Architecture

Rocky Surf runs entirely on your local machine — no SaaS, no telemetry, no external service. The web app listens on 127.0.0.1:3000 by default. Cloud credentials are never stored by Rocky Surf; each cloud authenticates through its own standard path (AWS credential chain, az login, gcloud auth, or a Hetzner API token in an environment variable). VM state is tracked in a local SQLite database at ~/.rockysurf.

The optional MCP server surface lets local coding agents manage cloud boxes directly without the GUI. Granular MCP permission scopes (read, stop, start, create, terminate) are configurable, and server-count, create-rate, and monthly spend caps are enforced server-side so they apply equally to the web app, CLI, and MCP.

Security Approach

The homepage describes the primary security benefit as isolation: agents running on their own VMs minimize the blast radius of anything going wrong. Additional controls include:

• No credential storage — keys, passwords, and secrets are never retained by Rocky Surf
• Security groups and firewall rules on AWS, Azure, and GCP that open only TCP port 22 inbound
• Optional CIDR restrictions on which networks can reach SSH on provisioned servers
• MCP scopes that suppress tools entirely when a permission is not granted

Update: v0.1.4

The GitHub repository shows the latest release as v0.1.4, published on September 10, 2026, with the repository created in August 2026. The project is in early active development (39 open issues, TypeScript primary language) and is deliberately scoped: the README notes it does not support devcontainers, per-task sandboxes, Windows, or multi-tenancy. The Rocky Surf name and logo are trademarked separately from the MIT-licensed code.