[jt2190]

What the author should have made more clear is that we’re starting to see technology that eliminates the “local developer environment” completely, and we’re also starting to see collaborative real-time code editors. Taken together, we can imagine a world where a dev points their browser at codebase hosted somewhere and just starts editing. Each edit is a change event that the system reacts to by running compilers, then unit tests, etc. and provides near real-time feedback that the code works/doesn’t work, right in the editor. In this world the developer does not push their changes, the system does that for them, while they’re working. The CI server disappears from view completely.

[swagonomixxx]

That's an interesting take that I didn't think of. I think the burden on having a cloud-based development environment on ops teams will be non-zero though - some set of individuals (or a dedicated team) will have to maintain these very beefy hosts of your code that run the tests for you.

That said, I'm not against the idea in principle if access to the internet is guaranteed and constant. In some places that I'm in, internet access is shoddy or just too slow for this kind of thing, and my preference there would be to work easily on a local machine without access to the internet.