This seems to have the potential for quite some impact on the future of coding, doesn’t it? What do you think? https://github.com/features/codespaces

Frankly, it’s seeming more and more by the day that local development environments are living on borrowed time.

I wonder how much of a dependency on GitHub this new feature introduces. Can you still work 100% outside of GitHub on your projects? After all, GitHub could close down in a a few years, like others did in the past.

While I agree 100% that that’s something worth worrying about, it also seems to me that the market in general has decided that they don’t care about that kind of risk.

The market is made of people. All of us get a vote! And we get to change it as much as we want. So it's certainly worth discussing scenarios, so that we can influence and be influenced by each other's adoption.

Apparently it's not just github but a microsoft product : https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/fr/services/visual-studio-codespaces/?rr=https%3A%2F%2Fonline.visualstudio.com%2Flogin

instead of local/remote we could push for a standard for "roaming" environments of which this is one instance and then local and remote are basically the same

I really like the framing of the goal as "roaming"/isolated development environments. Regarding Codespaces does anyone know if you can ssh into your Codespace? And tangentially, does this model allow using any text editor (or any other program) besides Visual Studio Code? E.g., can you edit an image in Photoshop in the Codespace for example? I'm sure not today, but ever? Does the model allow for that?

VS Code has a "remote" protocol builtin, it uses that to connect to a container as far as I understand, if the protocol was a standard others could implement it (since VS Code is open source it shouldn't be hard to reuse it), and since the env is an environment it should be possible to ssh to it, don't know if this service allows it

I like the "roam" label as well. Local vs. cloud is not really the important point. What matters to me is being in control. If next week I need to work offline, I want to be able to do that. If my cloud IDE provides goes bankrupt, I want to be able to move to a different one without loss or major effort.

I'd add to control also being able to use any apps with your source code. I love the idea of being able to spin up a development environment from anywhere, but I don't want to be forced to use VSCode to do so. (I use and love VSCode, but I still don't want to be forced to use it.)

I use github, but I am wary of being tightly coupled to it. My project doesn't have a wiki, it has a 'docs' directory. It also has an 'issues' directory, although casual users are free to create github issues. For many years, I have done 'development from anywhere' by either bringing along a laptop with a dev environment, or by ssh-ing into my main dev machine from anywhere. If github were to instantly vanish with no warning, I would be fine, and that's due to the distributed nature of git, and the fact that my dev environment contains a local copy of all my code. Github would surely benefit by turning into a walled garden with so much crucial functionality that only exists in their servers, not on your local machine, that you are locked in and cannot escape. The more it looks like Github is heading in this direction, the more that some people in the dev community will resist, create alternatives, and migrate elsewhere. My personal future of coding is decentralized. Git is an amazing decentralized tool, but more can be done.

The best tool for a local-first approach is probably Fossil, which keeps issues in the repository itself, and therefore in every local copy. But being non-git, it will probably remain a niche tool.