[core-questions]

> I think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use.

It's absolutely a finished product, GitPod is the commercially available (and white-label-able) version, people are productively using this today, including using VSCode addons and writing their own.

> "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode"

Imagine preparing a Docker image of everything reasonably needed in your dev environment, and then giving your developers one click access to be totally set up with company-standard configuration. The IDE goes from wild-west everyone working their own way, to something that can be supported, where new devs can be brought up to speed in days instead of weeks, something with real consistency.

[rubyn00bie]

You ever see one VIM or Emacs user try to use someone else’s setup? I’d be shocked if there were any productivity gains... this seems like something that managers want to say but is disconnected from reality.

[core-questions]

I actually have - because I've built an environment for a bunch of Emacs / Lisp developers, that uses a container + Emacs + VNC, so that they literally connect up to identical, pre-configured sessions - like the spiritual predecessor of the cloud IDE.

What this replaced was madness. We could never train anyone up before. We couldn't sit with each other and debug stuff. Agreeing on how things will work is key on a team that expects to do things like pairs programming, even if it means everyone sacrifices a bit of muscle memory.

[willberman]

I made the mistake of recommending standardization of development tooling at one point. Not one of my finer moments.

[ckolkey]

At one point in my vimrc I decided that P and p needed to be swapped...

[battery_cowboy]

You can do that already in vscode easily with the container remote add-on.