DigitalOcean introduced Cuttlefish on 5 November 2026, an iPhone application through which teams can follow cloud-based AI agents, send corrections and approve operations requiring human intervention. The application is in public preview and connects to Harness Runtime within the Managed Agents platform. Execution remains on DigitalOcean infrastructure, including when the phone is locked, offline or has the application closed.
The launch adds a mobile interface for controlling work sessions, showing messages and tool calls. Users can inspect the documents and applications an agent produces, suspend work or continue a session. The documented access requirements are an iPhone running iOS 26.5 or later and a DigitalOcean account belonging to a team with access to Managed Agents.
Tool calls are approved according to the environment's policy
Approval requests appear when the environment's permission policy is configured to ask for consent for the relevant action. The agent waits for a decision, and Cuttlefish displays the full command, file path or differences between versions. The request can be allowed or denied. A reason can be added when denying it and is retained with the decision in the operation's history.
The application highlights requests classified as risky and explains the classification. Documented examples include recursive deletion, overwriting history through a force-push and running commands with administrative privileges. Approving such a request uses Face ID or the device passcode. If neither method is configured on the phone, the application requests explicit confirmation. The control is associated with the proposed action and the environment's settings.
During execution, a user can send a corrective message, while messages submitted as the agent works are queued. Dictation is also available, with speech recognition performed on the device; according to DigitalOcean, dictation audio is not sent to the company. Message text and submitted files do, however, enter processing by DigitalOcean and the model provider configured for the relevant environment.
From cloud execution to a human decision
- Cloud agentThe session runs in a DigitalOcean sandbox.
- Access policyConfigured actions request approval.
- Decision on iPhoneThe command can be allowed or denied.
- Output inspectionFiles and artifacts can be viewed.
The cloud session continues independently of the phone
Harness Runtime executes agents in hardware-isolated Linux microVMs. An environment defines the reusable configuration: resources, the agent adapter, tools, credentials and permissions. A session starts from that environment and receives its own sandbox. This model separates the team's configuration from an individual execution and supports retaining conversation and working state for compatible operations.
Pausing suspends compute resources and retains the session's state for resumption. Stopping the current run is a different operation: it ends the agent turn in progress and leaves the session ready for the next message. DigitalOcean specifies that cancelling a run does not automatically undo changes already made. Returning to an earlier point uses checkpoint and rollback mechanisms in sessions that support them.
The platform provides adapters for several agents and frameworks, and the Cuttlefish announcement names Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, OpenHands, Hermes, LangGraph and CrewAI. Capabilities depend on the adapter. The documentation explicitly distinguishes codex-agentapi, for which DigitalOcean's event stream, approvals, checkpoints, forking and rollback are unavailable. The list of agents supported by the infrastructure does not mean identical controls for every configuration.
Files and generated applications can be inspected through the mobile interface
Cuttlefish supports browsing files in the session workspace, uploading files and photographs, and sharing generated outputs. The artifacts section includes documents, spreadsheets and pages. The application also identifies ports hosting web servers inside the sandbox so that their content can be displayed. This access supports checking a work in progress without automatically turning it into a website published for customers.
The Box Mount integration announced alongside the application is at a distinct stage: private preview. It synchronises a Box folder with the Managed Agents environment, using each person's own Box account. Agent changes are uploaded to Box, while changes made in Box reach the workspace. Permissions, version history and the audit trail remain associated with the files in the Box service.
Synchronisation works in both directions and includes deletions. The agent can edit or delete files in the synchronised folder, and deletions propagate to Box. This property specifies the effect that integration access has on the team's documents. Box Mount has its own private-preview access, separate from the Cuttlefish application's public-preview availability; these are different conditions for using the two products.
Notifications and available features have defined behaviours
The application can report approval requests, completion and failure of a run. Notifications arrive promptly while Cuttlefish is open. In the background, iOS determines when checks occur, so notifications can be delayed by several minutes. After the application is force-quit, they no longer arrive. The session currently being viewed on screen does not generate separate notifications, and voluntarily stopping a run is not treated as failure.
The mobile interface does not include editing code or conducting an in-depth code review, changing an existing environment's tools or managing Toolbelts collections. Questions asked by the agent, as distinct from approval requests, are answered through the doctl command-line interface. For application development and integration, the update concerns execution coordination and access to outputs, while advanced configuration remains in the platform's tools.
DigitalOcean specifies that authentication tokens are stored in Keychain on the iPhone only and revoked at sign-out. Locally cached conversations and session lists are excluded from device backups and deleted when the user signs out. According to its technical description, the application contains no analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDKs, while data submitted for work follows the environment's configured model provider.
