It baffles me when engineers are using VMs and clusters provisioned on cloud providers for tasks where their powerhouse laptops (mostly the latest Apple Silicon ones with 64G+ memory) would be just as fine, but faster, and much cheaper. Instead of this they are using their laptops as thin clients to ssh into much less reliable/performant machines.
Local machines, but only because of years of muscle memory. Not because dev environments are worse or anything.<p>I have used github.dev before, and they seemed decent.<p>(Tip if you didn't know, pressing '.' when in any github repository will spin up an in-browser VSCode editor for the repo)
The latency annoys me. The editor zed.dev might make this better (fast editor can connect to cloud ssh). Pick a backend in your region and it might be OK.<p>Depends on other things. Using Windows for example might make cloud more attractive as most dev work is done on linux. WSL is a bit sucky to use. And uses a lot of disk space and you need a decent amount of RAM for two operating systems.<p>On a fast mac you might prefer local unless the dependencies dont support M chips.<p>But the main pitfall will be latency and maybe cost and possibly not being able to work without internet.
I don't know if I would do it for web dev, but it's great for ML stuff to work on a massive machine.<p>Pitfalls maybe are leaving the VM on racking up $, I just made a crontab to shut it down at midnight. Some storage options are way more expensive for 100gb of storage (the extreme ssds) that aren't worth it. And I think the other is basic linux admin. Also making sure it's firewalled properly
I think it depend on the fruit. I mean a cloud has an advantage if the dev env were too complicated to use on each locals. On a local machine has enough spec to dev present. I had some 'pitfalles' on a clound, then I prefer a local than it.