To straight up answer your question: Yes, I have friends who really like the iPad so much and wants to do development on it. Will it practically work? I really don't know. Until I see Xcode and/or Docker on iOS/iPadOS I am not very hopeful.

Yes - I do it regularly. Blink SSH to get to my workstation at home + tmux + [console editor of choice]. Works great when I'm somewhere I don't want to carry my laptop to, have a cellular connection, and find a few minutes where I feel like doing some work. For context, this is day-job work in high performance computing. The only awkward part is when I'm editing papers, although I've been happy with working copy (for git) + local tex editor/compilers on the iPad. Not ideal for producing final copy, but good for editing and drafting.

I’ve been developing full-time on an iPad for the past two years. I got the idea from a series of blog posts that were written in 2011, so it’s not a new idea. If you search Twitter for #codespaces you’ll see after Microsoft announced Github Codespaces (a web-based IDE based on VSCode), much of the attention was on how this will further enable development on an iPad. Personally I used AWS Cloud9 which does the same as Codespaces.

The iPad is a computer with a keyboard and mouse and a full-featured web browser. There are also language-specific native IDEs like Pythonista and Play.js. There are Git clients available natively as well. Pretty much the only thing you can’t do is make iPad apps on the iPad, which is a pretty small subset of programmers. Pythonista costs $10 and has nearly 1k reviews, so someone must be using it.

So why do people constantly ask “does anyone really want to develop on a computer that offers many development options?” The answer is yes, of course people seriously want to develop on an iPad.

I am currently on a long path towards a central machine that I can remotely access from an iPad (and a laptop). In addition to connecting via ssh or screen sharing, I'd love to be able to clone git repositories on the iPad and edit locally.

If I could Handoff something like a shallow clone of a git repo and its working index between iPad and mac, I'd be in love.

I could see myself doing light drafts or a few Leetcode problems, or toying with an api on it. Nothing heavy.

Not all the time every day, but Panic’s Coda on an iPad saved my bacon once when I was on vacation.