[aidos]

For sure, but, a VM has that feature too. They have to run some services directly on the laptop to handle the code syncing. So if you accept a certain amount of “need to do some dev machine setup” as a cost, installing Parallels and running a script to download an iso is a pretty small surface area that allows for a full reset.

I don’t doubt that Stripe have a setup that works well for them them but I also bet they could have gone done a different path that also worked well and I suspect that other path (local VMs) is a better fit for most other smaller teams.

[sam_perez]

To be fair, it seems like the cloud development environment choice was driven by the scale of Stripe's organization.