Yeah, to be clear for Google work I am talking about the combination of Cloudtop (VM), Cider (IDE), Blaze/Bazel (Builds).

In addition you also need a version control / file sync system.

It's also nice to have some kind of network proxy especially if you are doing web dev. Tools or web services run on the VM and you just access it directly through the proxy on your local browser.

The integration/combination of these is what allows things to work.

For personal code this is Google Cloud Console. You can actually just jump into it . It has a built in VS Code editor.

But at home it would be GCP VM + VS Code + Git.

GCP also has built in proxy. The only problem I have had so far is it doesn't rewrite URL's which can be an issue for web apps. I think it's solveable I just haven't really tried yet.

Theres some other solutions in the other comments as well.

You also should mention the use of CitC. With CitC, I can build/write code from my work machine at the office and then go home and gmosh into a cloudtop that uses the same network mounted filesystem.

I thought network filesystems were a terrible idea until I used citc + piper, really two incredible pieces of engineering infra. So many problems are reduced to just writing files to disk if you have a magically disk that acts like it is infinitely sized and everywhere all at once with low latency and versioned by the second. Whatever promotions they offered those authors and maintainers, and whatever black magic they had to invoke, it really was worth it.

Yep, I sorta glossed over it with file sync. But I guess CitC is more than that. Its more like a workspace sync.

It acts like a view of the monorepo and holds whatever changes you make. Additionally it integrates with your version control and holds its state as well. For example any local commits or branches.

And this can all be accessed from the browser or the CLI on any connected machine.