I still have an Acer C720, which cost $250 back in 2013. It's a lovely piece of equipment, once you remove ChromeOS. I've taken it apart more times than I can recall, lots of empty space inside. The only downside is 2GB of RAM, 4GB would have been better, otherwise it's a perfect device even today (for development and browsing the web).

I always meant to buy a couple more RAM chips and solder them down to the motherboard (there's a couple of unpopulated pads), but never got round to it.

Sadly the wifi chip is soldered down, that's one of my only grips (RAM I get, but typically wifi would be an m.2 slot unless you're really cheap).

So I imagine you could get a lot done with this, even with the terrible performance. If you're just programming and using a browser you really don't need much oomph.