But I don’t really have those concerns—they’re better mitigated. If source control goes down, I have a complete clone on my machine and so do my coworkers (yay git). I have done code reviews by pasting `git am` formatted patches between coworkers during particularly long GitHub outages. CI/CD is more problematic, but I only need those things to integrate work. I can still do work and verify correctness with tests that I can run locally.

None of that is possible in a centrally-managed dev VM setup. When the VMs go down, you send your dev team home until it’s fixed. You’re still paying their salaries while you pay another team to make them productive again.

Depends on the scale you're working with. If your complete code can fit locally, you're working at a different scale. Huge monorepos won't fit on a laptop-sized local disk these days, and a full local dev env would take a half dozen VMs to even replicate half-successfully.

We’re talking generally here about all software development, so of course we can find exceptional cases to refute anything anyone says. Let’s scope the discussion to what is likely a common developer scenario where `git clone` works and it’s possible to run a reasonable facsimile of the application locally (maybe with some simulators for cloud services).

The article we're discussing is from Uber, which has a huge monorepo. It's exactly the use case they designed Devpod for.

> Huge monorepos won't fit on a laptop-sized local disk these days

Reason 743 why monorepos create more problems than they solve

Nothing is stopping developers from running the docker image locally.