The remote development extension is a life saver for me. In my use case is I have a remote headless cluster node with a hardware accelerator. My work laptop is Windows based and the server is Linux based (locate two thousand miles away). The language server needs to be able to resolve symbols in the libraries and the library headers installed on the Linux system. If I just copied the source to my Windows environment, it would fail to provide syntax highlighting and flag too many false errors. I would not be able to run integrated unit tests, etc. Remote development allows me to develop on my laptop as if everything was local without needing to create elaborate build scripts or hacks with minimal latency.

Perhaps you can now use an iPad to do development, if you didn't like the SSH + terminal based editor combo.

Doesn't need to be an iPad, just any dumb desktop-PC without any personalized setup is now good enough. 20 Years ago, Sun coined the concept of a net-pc, basically a dump terminal-like PC, without any relevant local setup. Things like this are pushing things a bit more into that direction.

IIRC another benefit, is also that you can move performance-requirements from the local machine to the remote machine, which can be beneficial depending on your situation. Not every company/freelancer has the money for beefy workstations.

I would like to develop from my phone while I’m watching my kid. Can’t really use a laptop around him yet. Phones are fine though. Would suck inputting but I still want it.

iPads work great, and relatively safe around toddlers armed with liquids

I used to develop remotely in UNIX systems via telnet and X Windows, eventually Windows via Citrix and RDP, nowadays cloud instances.

In the old days, machines were too expensive, everyone shared the UNIX development server.

Later, giving laptops/desktops to all contractors became too much of an hassle with procurement, giving them VMs was much easier for IT to manage.

Nowadays those VMs are Cloud instances.

Here is the use case.

If you have a beefy PC for working at home and a thin and light laptop for working from the office, you can leave your whole dev environment on your PC and then access it on the laptop when you work from the office. You can do this over RDP, but that is heavier and has a lot of lag.

I'd like to use this so I can use my Chromebook to connect to my desktop while away from home to do hobby development. Running VSCode as a Linux app is not an option since the CHrome OS screen reader does not support Linux apps.

There are plenty of workplaces that require a more secure development environment. Centralizing the dev environment without having to go full PC over IP would be a very cost friendly way to manage this.

Depends on your build workloads. We are pushing heavily into remote development. Bursting 2k cores, 10 gbps local network speed to cache has its advantages in the right environment.

I use it to have a high power machine run my everything and use a thin and light laptop to press buttons

Perhaps if the requirements to run locally exceed the resources of a personal device.