JetBrains makes money selling to corporate engineering orgs. In that context the incentives towards remote development environments are very strong. You can get a developer immediately productive (again) by restoring a golden image. Instead of paying engineers to optimize the build or write IDE plugins to index manageable subsets of the codebase, you can just throw power at it. Remote dev environments at my company have 96 cores. The monorepo builds in about a tenth of the time. Unfortunately I think it’s inevitable.
The only thing slowing it down was developer rejection of the austerity of vim and emacs. That’s changing now with VSCode’s in-browser and SSH Remote support. That’s the golden path now at my work. Although we still pay for JetBrains licenses, the JetBrains workflow is quietly and unofficially deprecated.
They have to do this to stay relevant. And I’m glad they’re doing it, because I want my JetBrains-level capabilities back. VSCode doesn’t come particularly close.
Especially in corporate context this will be the future for compliance reasons. No more developers who accidentally have code on their machine and lose it. Less access tokens on the client machines etc.
Will be an interesting trend of going back to the mainframe ... and will be interesting to see how that will collide with developers who want to have control and chose their tools and setup.
As another data point, I buy a license to all Jetbrains IDEs as a private individual. The non-remoteness and the fact my license is for a perpetual installed version matters to my livelihood. It's also a known cost where many things get more PAYG
The only thing slowing it down was developer rejection of the austerity of vim and emacs. That’s changing now with VSCode’s in-browser and SSH Remote support. That’s the golden path now at my work. Although we still pay for JetBrains licenses, the JetBrains workflow is quietly and unofficially deprecated.
They have to do this to stay relevant. And I’m glad they’re doing it, because I want my JetBrains-level capabilities back. VSCode doesn’t come particularly close.