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In my opinion the single most important feature of any development environment is a reliable “reset” button.

The amount of time companies lose to broken development environments is incredible. A developer can easily lose half a day (or more) of productive time.

With cloud environments it’s much easier to offer a “just give me a brand new environment that works” button somewhere. That’s incredibly valuable.

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For sure, but, a VM has that feature too. They have to run some services directly on the laptop to handle the code syncing. So if you accept a certain amount of “need to do some dev machine setup” as a cost, installing Parallels and running a script to download an iso is a pretty small surface area that allows for a full reset.

I don’t doubt that Stripe have a setup that works well for them them but I also bet they could have gone done a different path that also worked well and I suspect that other path (local VMs) is a better fit for most other smaller teams.

To be fair, it seems like the cloud development environment choice was driven by the scale of Stripe's organization.

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