We transitioned one of our repos to devcontainers and that did lock us into VSC (though in theory I think pycharm supports now, it does not successfully build from the same file). Based on how that went, we will not be transitioning our other projects.

It’s been… ok. Devcontianers are a great idea, but the implementation is rough around the edges at times. There is a complex story around making sure your dependencies are appropriately synced. If you want any test reliability, you need to rebuild the container in CI/CD before running tests, which isn’t impossibly complex but isn’t out of the box and can require additional work and really thinking through things at times. While the deduplicated dockerfile multi-stage flow of dev -> test -> prod images works, I’ve found it to take a nontrivial amount of work and background to get this up and running.

There also is the git integration, which is functional but flaky. First, you have to use VSC’s terminal rather than your console. Which I have found is not an issue for junior devs that just do what they’re told, but the crusty seniors who are used to it not mattering which terminal you use seem to find a lot of headache here.

It will occasionally randomly not find the ssh keys git needs and fail to authenticate, and the only fix I’ve found is to open a new terminal outside of VSC and git push (or any other remote authenticated operation), which somehow reenables VSC’s SSH compatibility. Which of course may also fail if you have pre-commits in place that rely on the dev container env having pre-commit installed.

There is also a bit of complexity around bind mounts in general, I can’t recall specifics but we have had some compatibility issues related to this that are difficult lot debug, as there is some magic that VSC seems to do behind the scenes that you can’t replicate outside of VSC. We also had some issues multi-architecture targeting that was made more complex by this setup.

Overall, devcontianers are fine and they will work in most cases, but they are not panacea. They basically take all of the distributed frustration of each user’s individual setup and consolidate that frustration and headache onto your tech/devops lead etc. This is, of course, by design. Solve it once, for everyone. But you don’t magically have less edge cases. And of course the dev and CI/CD setup becomes entirely magic to anyone not involved in configuring it in detail. So when issues pop up, I’ve found devs to be less able to unblock themselves without getting the lead involved.