Definitely not for a web dev.

1. iPad doesn't have a serious IDE. And syncing your workspace with a local computer is not trivial.

2. Safari for iPad doesn't have a dev mode.

3. However, if you only use terminal and vi, iPad has a great terminal app: Blink. Honestly Blink is better than most of desktop terminal in the market. https://blink.sh/

I use an iPad Air for light webdev work. Built my personal website with it, using a few handy apps.

Working Copy is an excellent Git client and pretty good text editor, Shellfish is great for FTP/SFTP.

Other good editors include Buffer and Textastic. Terminus is a great terminal client (though the pro edition is pricey).

Pythonista is a surprisingly powerful Python environment – with a bit of work I got Django working on it. Codea is the same for Lua. DraftCode is good for PHP, though more limited. Can run Wordpress and other PHP CMSs. There's other apps for JS/Node.

Inspect gives on-device browser developer tools. Not the best but still useful.

Plus, there's iSH, a Testflight-only app that provides a mostly complete Alpine Linux environment. Managed to get Git/Ruby/Jekyll running on it to develop a site locally, though it was slow.

You can't install your own software on ios without jailbreak (which is not available since iphone 5 or so)

At a stretch you can, although probably not as a primary/sole machine for web development. I bought an iPad Pro about a year ago with the intention of doing just that (and using it for other stuff).

Essentially you need to be able to work from a remote server to do anything that could be considered serious web development.

So prepare to spin yourself up an EC2 instance or a Digital Ocean droplet that you will be working from.

There are some good tools available now -

Working Copy (https://workingcopyapp.com/) is a very good Git client

Blink(https://blink.sh/) is the terminal app you'd need

And I've used a mixture of

Kodex(https://kodex.app/), Textastic(https://www.textasticapp.com/) and GoCoEdit(https://gocoedit.app/)

for my editor. None of these are as good as something like SublimeText or a proper IDE but they are good, basic text editors with FTP/SFTP/etc. integration, code highlighting/folding/auto indentation etc. GoCoEdit I found to be probably the better of those three but they all offer something the others don't.

There's a SQL Client you can use (if you're not that comfortable on the CLI with your chosen SQL server) called SQLPro which I believe is available for MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL Server or you can get one that covers all but it's not especially cheap - £55 a year or £150 one time payment.

I've downloaded and used Dash, which is a documentation app that gives you offline access to API documentation for all your favourite languages and tools.

So there are plenty of tools available - some of them integrate with each other more tightly but I've found you're still really limited in how much development you can do. There's nothing like Docker or Vagrant available, you couldn't run your favourite language locally in a terminal although I recall seeing a PHP parser and a Javascript environemtn available for iOS that gives you some ability to code locally. Nothing you could use for any serious work.

Until Apple gives us the ability to get to the guts of iOS and install our own tools, realistically you're always going to be limited to working off a remote server for any serious work. I think the tools that are currently available are great but are limited. You may find a workflow that gets around the limitations and if you do, please share!

I use sidecar when I'm on the go with my iPad.

I can’t imagine anyone wanting to use this for development. But then again, I don’t see how people develop without at least one, preferably two external monitors.

The new MacBook Air for $999 would be a lot more appropriate.