alt Hacker NewsSeems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine.
I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...
Replies
I started building something for the dioxus team to have access to mac/linux persistent and ephemeral dev envs with vnc and beefy cpu/mem.
Nobody offered multiplatform and we really needed it!
> I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...
A lot of companies have been wanting to move in this direction. Instead of maintaining a fleet of machines, you just get a bunch of thin clients and pay Microsoft of whoever to host the actual workloads. They already do this 'kiosk' style stuff for a lot of front-line staff.
Honestly, not having my own local hardware for development sounds like a living hell, but seems like the way we are going.
Claude Code for the web is kind of a persistent virtual dev environment already.
You can start a session there and chat with it to get a bunch of work done, then come back to that session a day later and the virtual filesystem is in the same state as when you left it.
I haven't figured out if this has a time limit on it - it's possible they're doing something clever with object storage such that the cost of persisting those environments is really low, see also Fly's Sprites.dev: https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/