[_54qb]

While impressive technology, I still get that eerie feeling of my computer's ownership being slowly taken away from me. The problem is not Github codespaces offering us an alternative to traditional dev environments, the problem may be 10 years from now, when someone says: "All the coding is done on the web nowadays, why should we allow users to install compilers and dev tools on their machine? They may use those for hacking and compromising the security of our systems. They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us! Better not take risks". I'm afraid to go into a future where this is normal...

[nyanpasu64]

> All the coding is done on the web nowadays, why should we allow users to install compilers and dev tools on their machine?

Currently, web-based development is unsuitable for video streaming or native GUIs which operate on local filesystem files. I don't think video streaming over networks is easy. If development shifts such that people stop wanting local filesystems and native GUIs, I'll be sad...

[rplnt]

10? I'm fairly certain some companies were asking for these features precisely for this reason. To have better control.

[easton]

It’s the same rationale as having Citrix for developers in big banks, so they don’t have anything on their local machine. And this way you don’t have to keep a big machine with a bunch of GPUs around.

[Aperocky]

That sounds like 'The future will be no code development, will all the developers lose their job?'. I can see it happening in some business centric shops (outsourcing?), but going to happen at widespread scale at all.

[bryanrasmussen]

>They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us!

has a hacker ever hurt themselves by hacking and sued the company whose computer they were using?

Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.

[_54qb]

Fair enough. But that was not my rationale, it was just a made-up corporate rationale that is not too far from what I can observe in reality. Take, for example, lobbyists in right-to-repair hearings. They use arguments like this: "If we let users repair their smartphones, they might hurt themselves, so it must not be allowed and instead always performed by a skilled technician". The implication always being, that if users hurt themselves, they will sue.

> Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.

My point was, precisely, that we might get to some point where this is no longer possible. Imagine they stopped selling what we today call "PC", and instead everything is closer to smartphones or tablets. There would be no way to setup a development environment on the machine. There's no sudo access, no compiler toolchain...

[vladvasiliu]

A hacker? Probably not. A random Joe who copy/pasted some random things found on some sketchy website? I wouldn't be surprised.

Also, what matters isn't whether someone actually sued as much as if some executive somewhere thinks that someone might.