I’ve had corporate laptops get BSOD’d because a sysadmin pushed a bad GPO rule that worked fine on 99% of their clients but butchered the developer laptops.

Another fun one was when an org was rolling out CarbonBlack on all endpoints and decided to block all Java. Because apparently Java in the web browser is a security threat. They blocked 30 devs Java runtimes as a result. So there was an entire afternoon wasted for those guys.

To a corporation the risks of GitHub being down might be ok. Plus this will drastically increase on boarding devs to an existing project.

If you've never had these issues, this product is probably not for you.

The question is, how much time do you spend on dev environment issues per year?

When I was at one of the FAANGs, our dev enviroment took about 1hr to install, and you had to redo it everytime you switched platform / version (about every week).

We spent ~50 hours per year managing our local dev enviroment. probably more in reality.

> The question is, how much time do you spend on dev environment issues per year?

Definitely not little. But at the same time, I usually learn a lot about how stuff works during that. Which I like to think makes me better at helping other people debug weird shit.

I would frame it as, your current dev env is your specific laptop, and codespaces requires any laptop.

It's certainly reasonable to think that a SaaS can approach availability time of a single piece of hardware.

Furthermore, it appears that engineering github/github to work in codespaces helped their local provisioning as well.

> My current environment is my laptop, which I would also need to access codespaces.

> So by extension, codespaces is more risky than my current environment.

That only looks at the hardware. There are many more pieces to the puzzle.