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Devcontainers are amazing for getting a consistent environment set up on multiple computers on multiple operating systems. I was in this situation recently with a new colleague who was using a very locked-down Windows computer, and it was really convenient for the "you must install" list to be Docker and VSCode only. It's definitely not ideal - it adds overhead on Windows and Mac, there's occasional networking issues, and I don't have all the creature comforts of my usual shell - but it's very convenient for what it is.

Similarly, editing code in-place over SSH rather than rsyncing back and forwards is very useful for certain types of embedded development. I worked for a while on sensor systems where a lot of the logic was handled by a Python webserver that couldn't really run without access to the sensor data it was using. Developing entirely locally was therefore difficult, but developing on the machine was also painful because it didn't have the right tools. So we'd work locally, and then copy the Python files over every so often and restart the server. At the time, I don't think VSCode's remote stuff was working as well, but I believe now it's a lot better and could have handled that situation well - edit everything in-place, run it immediately, but still have the power of you local development machine available to you.




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