He might be asking why your laptop does not have a full dev environment.

Space? Performance? Builds typically perform best directly adjacent to storage, and if you're working with a large project syncing that back and forth may be slow.

Ah fair enough.

As someone who’s been fairly mobile/nomadic most of my career, I have always enjoyed the thin client approach.

I can get many more years of service from my client hardware when offloading the bulk of compute, storage, and stable bandwidth needs to beefy servers.

I’ve found that it’s just generally more economical and efficient this way.

Plus, the few times I’ve had laptops die, get stolen, damaged etc to have a much lower impact when they don’t have anything all that important on them.