With AI dependence, unless you are a holdout, offline development isn't really a thing anymore. Perhaps to do some code reviews, but actually producing new code?

That is sad.

Somewhat, it's a tradeoff we are making willingly

I haven't made that tradeoff. I still code myself without agents from time to time.

Nothing changed. You can still code the old way. All those 100x productivity gains are probably closer to 10% productivity gains after you account for all the added debugging and steering.

I am retired, and don't need to - I have a couple of beelink's (just need my home wireless running) and a couple of VPS if I really want to do things away from home, which I don't

I cannot remember the last time I wanted internet access but could not find it. Cell coverage is pretty good and reliable these days.

also - I do not like developing on my personal machine. I got into this habit a long time ago - I would always use a remote Linux box, and now with LLM's I ride them bareback (or maybe they ride me). If I trash a machine (which has not happened yet), I just rebuild it or find another box.

You totally can, I got Linux+VSCode+Docker running on my new Chromebook in less than 15 minutes, without doing any funny stuff.

But for optimal DX it can still be preferable to VSCode tunnel into your big powerful dev box that has everything configured just right.

No reason that you can't. ChromeOS has supported Linux containers for over a decade.