Hmm, ok. I'm not sure I follow. I get the part about apply and apply-local needing to be separate. But are you also saying that if I build remotely that can overcome this? I don't think I will build remotely but I'd like to understand what you meant with remote FLake URI.
They say, they treat the local machine as a remote one, and have set up everything to connect from local user to local root via SSH, making it transparent for colmena.
This is a common approach for all of these tools