Simon Willison’s Weblog

8th June 2022

The End of Localhost. swyx makes the argument for cloud-based development environments, and points out that many large companies—including Google, Facebook, Shopify and GitHub—have made the move already. I was responsible for the team maintaining the local development environment experience at Eventbrite for a while, and my conclusion is that with a large enough engineering team someone will ALWAYS find a new way to break their local environment: the idea of being able to bootstrap a fresh, guaranteed-to-work environment in the cloud at the click of a button could save SO much time and money.