[crabbone]

Working in a configuration where your development environment isn't on your computer is always a huge downgrade. Work with VM? -- sooner or later you'll have problems with forwarding your keyboard input to the VM. Work with containers? -- no good way to save state, no good way to guarantee all containers are in sync etc. God forbid any sort of Web browser-based solution. The number of times I accidentally closed the tab or did something else unintentionally because of key mapping that's impossible to modify...

However, in some situations you must endure the pain of doing this. For example, regulatory reasons. Some organizations will not allow you to access their data anywhere but on some cloud VM they give you very botched and very limited control over. While, technically, these are usually easy to side-step, you are legally required to not move the data outside of the boundaries defined for you by the IT. And so you are stuck in this miserable situation, trying to engineer some semblance of a decent utility set in a hostile environment.

Another example is when the infrastructure of your project is too vast to be meaningfully reduced to your laptop, and a lot of your work is exploratory in nature. I.e. instead of typical write-compile-upload-test you are mostly modifying stuff on the system you are working on to see how it responds. This is kind of how my day-to-day goes: someone reported they fail to install or use one of the utilities we provide in a particular AWS region with some specific network settings etc. They'd give me a tunnel to the affected cluster, and I'd have some hours to spend there investigating the problem and looking for possible immediate and long-term solutions. So, you are essentially working in a tech-support role, but you also have to write code, debug it, sometimes compile it etc.

[aidos]

Sounds like you’re talking about something else (more like the Citrix / virtual desktop type model - I don’t know the name).

The idea here is that you use a VM (cloud or local) to run your compute. Most people can run it in the background without explicitly connecting to it.

[crabbone]

What you describe isn't a development process in a remote environment. You are testing on some remote compute resource. Testing is a non-essential part of development, so, in a sense it "doesn't count" that you test somewhere else -- you cannot call it "developing in a remote environment".

Otherwise, you could say that, for example, reading documentation on a Web page you are doing "development in a remote environment" because, well... most likely that Web page isn't hosted on your laptop.

The essential and mandatory part of development is that a program is written. If you write the program on your laptop, you aren't doing "remote development", no matter where other tools you use for development are running.