It's not about lack of money. I prefer developing everything locally because it feels snappier to me, even with a good internet connection, or even a local server. It might not make a difference to you but that's what I prefer.
I think my view stems from the days of having to re-install my windows workstation every 6-12 months in order to regain decent performance, so moving as much as I can to be on a 'different host' (usually a local linux server) to minimise the pain of backups/restores when rebuilding the workstation.
Cheers!
Of course, you can just use a text editor instead of an IDE, but once you get used to being able to jump to definitions, get method signature autocompletion, refactoring, syntax checks etc, it's kind of hard to go back to just a text editor.
oarsinsync’s IDE is sending each keystroke from his local computer to a cloud machine, where the source code lives. That source code compiles, executes, is tested in the cloud. Is this the setup you’re comparing with?
The theory behind this is sound: “When the size of the program is smaller than the data, move the program to the data.” In this particular instance, the code edit keystrokes are smaller than the total amount of source code. If the complete source code, packaged or compiled program has to be moved to the cloud anyway, it saves a lot of data transfer to just move the edits.
This assumes you’re running your application in the cloud, and the trade-off is that you need a reliable network connection, otherwise you might find yourself unable to edit when the network is down.
My particular workflow involves running my IDE locally, and having files hosted remotely. My IDE is plenty snappy, running my code is plenty snappy, but I'm slowed down by a need to commit + push changes to a repository.
I have it on my stack to do something like syncthing to keep a local + remote cache without needing to explicitly go through version control, but I suspect that'll just shift the latency out of my workflow, and trip me up in different ways.