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Comment by allset_ | Hacker News Reader

> Why?

Three reasons from my perspective:

1) There's no setup steps. You just open your editor of choice and everything is set up for you. All the build tools, linters, specific versions of software $XYZ, etc.

2) Large VM (16 core, 96GB of RAM in my case) speeds builds and tests up dramatically.

3) Zero productivity lost if your laptop breaks. Just grab a new one from IT and you're up and running exactly where you left off with zero effort.

> Not being able to run the project natively

What do you mean by this? It's just running on a remote server rather than your laptop.

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I don't see #1 happening. There is no way anyone has my personally customized development setup in some VM ready to use. More likely it is going to be one common setup that they want everyone to use.

It's not for you, it's for every new hire. You can always build on top of the base image, but it sets a nice lower bound and gets people started fast.

Problem is with people who put together these sorts of systems tend to think theirs is best and everyone should use it. For example I once interviewed at a place where every developer got an identical Mac with the dev environment already setup and you couldn't use something else as they thought it better if everyone had the same setup to enable easier pairing. I could really see something similar happening with these systems.. seems like the kind of setup that would have appealed to that company I interviewed at.

Setting up a working dev environment can take days to a week+ in my experience. On boarding can take a while, so getting a VM image or whatever that works out of the box that you can build on is a really good thing.

It's great too because if your own environment breaks, you can compare to a working one to fix it.

Just because a company might abuse it doesn't mean we should avoid it.

I have no problem with the idea of having a pre-existing image to kick off your dev setup. Just more that, human nature being what it is, it is unlikely to stop there. It will vary from company to company of course and I think my current company would adopt it in a good way but I also can think of one or two previous employers who would politicize and abuse the idea.

IE. it's no slam dunk. Like any other tool of this sort is will be used for good and ill.

> my personally customized development setup

Why would your personally customized development setup even need to be on the remote host? You pop up your IDE, connect to the remote host via SSH and you are set.

Also most “personally customized “ environments can be copied around with 1 config file or a few dot files at this point

My IDE is designed to run on the remote system and be accessed via SSH and so it needs it's configs synced over or packaged up in some way. It is a bit more work to setup, but pays dividends in many ways.

Why are you speaking as if this is some weird future state that doesn't exist and has lots of unknown downsides? This is the current state in some companies. I work in this flow daily and really appreciate the value it delivers.

I haven't experienced it yet, only read about it in various places. So it only exists as a future possibility for me at this point and as speculation about how the various places I've worked or know well for other reasons would use it.

Ever seen Google Cloud Shell? Setup your own local install of software and configuration, it persists on disk.

For things like github codespaces, you can bring your own dotfiles to company codespaces. https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/customizing-your-codes...

Yeah as ops gets more complex i don't want to tell developers they need to install xyz with a hundred specific versions. Just grab the latest app image

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