I actually use it quite a lot for personal projects, at least those that I intend on deploying to a server. It's nice to work in the exact environment the application will end up in, not to mention that certain tools only exist/work properly in a particular environment. To me, it only enhances the development process.
You need to provision one or more dev environments (for me two. On my Linux desktop and on my MacBook Air). The ansible configs are also used to provision production servers. If you end up with a failed hard drive it can save a lot of time rebuilding
