Yep, I've been using a local vm-centric agent setup for about 3 months, and it works great. I think there is also value in the fact that with a local VM, you can have the same public IP address, so you're not relying on an EC2 EIP that may be blacklisted somewhere.

Yes, running locally certainly helps if you want your sandboxed AI to be able to use the internet without getting blackholed by Cloudflare