Is everyone ready to code online now?

There are a lot of advantages to a ‘thin client’ developer experience where your code is edited and run on a VM somewhere in the cloud. You can scale the memory of your machine up as needed, far beyond what is feasible to pack into a MacBook Pro. Your remote file system can be made available to other developer tools to enable a myriad of convenient integrations. You can do away with the awkward local branch vs. remote branch semantics of git and simplify your version control (having no need for or concept of a ‘local’ copy).

For the past decade, whenever I’ve seen these ideas brought up, the reply from devs has been the same: ‘what about when I want to code on a plane/car trip/vacation where I have no internet connection?’ The idea of a connection-required development workflow was a total non-starter.

But now it is 2025 and we have all these wonderful LLM-based tools that everyone is using. For the most part, these models don’t run locally but are accessed through a service provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.). No getting your agentic AI without an internet connection!

I wonder whether the ‘must work offline’ refrain will slowly die away as these tools become embedded in our collective processes. Might this finally bring thin development clients into vogue?