With that being said, the base-model Macbook 
    Air is absolutely designed to leave you unsatisfied. 
    256gb of storage is a decade-running joke

I spent a couple of years doing Rails and Python work on a 2018 MBP (local dev) with 256GB. It's doable, barely, if you are willing to leave a low-profile thumbdrive permanently inserted. Or if you are willing to velcro an external SSD to your laptop lid =)

8GB+256GB is fine for a lot of use cases though. If you have a remote development setup, or if you are just kind of using your laptop as kind of a glorified $1099 chromebook.