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Ask HN: Do you use a cloud dev environment?

8 points by jzelinskie ↗ HN
In the 2010s, I knew lots of start-ups that tried to create web IDEs and never got traction because developers are fanatics about their tools, but more recent efforts have been done by large companies (GitHub, Google, etc...).

- Do you think success in the space is due to the ubiquity of Monaco (Visual Studio Code)? - Do you think these environments are best kept for fly-by contributions (e.g. loading up GitHub Codespaces on a repo and firing off a PR to a project you'll never contribute to again)? - Do your projects have these environments to encourage first-time contributors? - Do you personally use these environments for long term development?

This post is coming off sounding market researchy, but I promise you that I have no association with any of these products/projects. I've used a terminal-based editor (vim/neovim/helix) my entire career, so I feel detached from what others think about these technologies.

7 comments

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Daeraxa
As somebody involved with the team developing a GUI desktop editor... no not really. Outside of the very, very occasional use of the VSCode integrated into GitHub (like you mention - even then most of the time I just use the standard GH editor). I just don't really have a need for it.

Saying that I do quite like the Phoenix project (https://phcode.dev/) and I know some people like using GitPod but personally I don't really "get it" over just having everything local where I can use any tool I want that I have at my disposal on my system.

hello_computer
There are all kinds of operational constraints out there. Many corporate/government environments lock-down the computers and prohibit unauthorized installations. Cloud IDE has a nice ring to it when the only other option is Notepad.
jstx1
Yes, developing on a VM with VSCode's remote extensions is pretty similar to using VSCode locally.
swah
I personally don't use them more due to latency ie servers are never in Brazil.
mrobins
Our team switched about a year ago to huge benefit. We’re using VSCode locally to connect and edit repos hosted remotely. VSCode’s remote extensions are really good and from a code editing perspective the difference is almost imperceptible.

One of the drivers for us is we use remote dev databases and services so overall latency is dramatically reduced. It also allows us to much more easily deploy dev environments that are almost identical to production.

The downside is folks can no longer use their favorite editor but for now everyone’s happy with VSCode.

baremetal
I do everything on my own boxes running Linux. For the last 20 years.
sneed_chucker
At work we use VSCode to develop on remote servers. It's a good setup, pretty much identical in terms of DevX to working locally.