It’s probably the minority, but I think there are people who it’s helpful for.

For example, I travel with an iPad Pro and a work laptop. If I want to tinker one evening, I can use my iPad instead of bringing a personal laptop. (This also applies to cloud gaming for some people, but I haven’t done that personally).

My partner is also a software engineer and we have a toy server at home with various things running in it (eg game server, home assistant, vpn etc). We have a VSCode instance running so either of us can grab a browser and update the configs, without deal with being in sync. (Imo this is the “most obvious” use case - modifying remote files without worrying about sync).

At work, I also have this setup. (My school had something similar too, just less polished because it was a while ago) The benefits there are big too. Besides everything mentioned before, it also means that there’s basically zero setup time. If you break your laptop, or forget it, or whatever, IT just hands you a temporary chrome book which you log into your work from a browser.

By comparison, my old job pushed a bad MacOS update that bricked my work computer, and they made me remote into a windows VM (AWS workspace) from my personal laptop to do work until a replacement arrived. I lost all my work/files/etc since it bricked unexpectedly, and that job had remote Linux VMs so I had two levels of indirection. Then I had to set everything up again, so I easily lost 3+ weeks of work due to that incident.

This is a very useful feature the moment you have > 1 development machine. Complex build environments, dependencies, personal preferences all syncing seamlessly between all of them is a godsend.

I already do that in pycharm. Everything else needs to be set once. But you’re actually arguing about multi-machines and I’m arguing about “code from anywhere” even on computers that don’t belong to you. That is an overblown feature that I’d never use.

Latency is top priority for me. It shall not be sacrificed for any multi machine inconveniences.

> Latency is top priority for me.

VSCode is super popular and performant. It runs in a browser (electron) natively. Running it in chrome remotely is literally no different if you have a performant network.

I always found VSCode to perform better than IDEA based tools fwiw, especially if you want to keep a laptop on battery. Latency has never been an issue.

What happens when your machine breaks / stops working / gets stolen?

Is your pycharm config and setup backed up properly? Is your pycharm config versioned?

How do you manage credentials / secrets?

How often do you update pycharm? Does this updating require any refactoring?

How do you build (locally? remotely?)

I have a website with a worker process doing RSS parsing that occasionally fails. It would be quite nice to be able to spend 10 minutes fixing trivial bugs from my phone while I'm out and about. Or from my iPad. I'm not doing feature development but this would be nice to have for things that are so easy I could do them now but instead must wait hours or days until I'm back in front of my dev machine.

And actually I have a desktop and a laptop that I do dev work on. More than once I've started a branch on the desktop one night but don't quite get far enough to push it up and the next day I take my laptop to the coffee shop and realize the code is still at home.

I think this is it. As soon as you go from working on one computer to 2 you do have this problem.

I myself work on 2 laptops and a desktop all running different OS.

I mean there are always going to be niche uses for this.

My point is about corporations adopting this sort of a thing because executives got sold on a fancy feature "Accessible from anywhere" but no one really materializes it for 99.99% of the time they are not coding from anywhere but have to suffer latency the entire time.

It sounds so damn good on paper vs. reality.

> executives got sold on a fancy feature "Accessible from anywhere" but no one really materializes it for 99.99% of the time they are not coding from anywhere but have to suffer latency the entire time.

This isn’t the pitch. Not at all. The pitch is “no code (or IP) on local machines that can be stolen” and “no downtime if laptop breaks… IT desk can keep a stack of chrome books ready for backup”. Combined with something like gmail and google docs, the laptop at some employees WFH house contains no business secrets ever.

I’ve never experienced the slightest drag of latency with this approach. If you’re running a compiled language, the compiler is surely the bottleneck. If you’re doing it for work, they’ll probably set it up so it’s always regionalized close to you from a cloud. Maybe fly.io should pitch this.

As a director in a previous job a few years ago I almost introduced apache eclipse orion to our organization strictly to reduce issues with onboarding and junior devs.

I love when senior devs can set up their workspace how they like, but juniors and onboarders often need lots of handholding. Being able to spin up an IDE with exactly what they need with zero effort is incredibly valuable. We lost days and days of productivity because some developers didn't understand how to manage having both a jre and jdk on their machine.