For years I wrote about treating a remote machine as my primary development environment - using a VPS for day-to-day dev, wiring up Cloud9 on a Forge server, and later pairing Visual Studio Code with Remote SSH. That approach made sense when local PHP stacks were fiddly and I wanted one consistent environment from any browser or laptop.

In 2026, that picture has flipped. It is now obvious - to me, anyway - that the better default is to develop locally and reserve remote machines for what they are best at: staging, production, and shared infrastructure.

What changed

Two tools in particular made local work feel effortless instead of heroic.

Laravel Herd gives you PHP, Composer, and sensible defaults for Laravel (and much of the surrounding ecosystem) without spending an afternoon on Homebrew paths, Valet quirks, or Docker compose files you will never fully understand. You install it, point it at a project, and you are serving the app. SSL for local hostnames, switching PHP versions, and keeping tools updated are handled in a way that feels closer to “appliance” than “science project.”

Cursor is the editor I reach for now. It is a fork of the VS Code lineage, so muscle memory from the Remote SSH era still applies—but the model is firmly local: your files live on your disk, your terminal is yours, and the tight loop between edit, run tests, and refresh the browser stays fast. The AI features are noise for some people, and I get that; for me they have been overwhelmingly productive. On Cruise Outlook especially, they made it realistic to stand up serious functionality on timelines that used to mean weeks or months of calendar time - not by lowering the bar, but by compressing the distance between an idea and working code.

Why local wins again

• Latency. Every keystroke and file save over SSH is fine until it is not. Local IO and indexing are simply snappier.
• Offline and bad Wi-Fi. Planes, coffee shops, and hotel Wi-Fi still exist. A local stack does not care.
• Parity where it matters. Herd gets you close enough for application work; Docker or a staging server can still mirror production when you need exact parity.
• Cost and simplicity. A $5 VPS is cheap, but so is “no extra moving parts” when you are not juggling SSH configs and remote disk quotas for ordinary feature work.

What I am not saying

Remote development is not wrong. If your team standardizes on cloud workspaces, or your laptop is locked down, or you genuinely need a beefy GPU in another building, SSH and browser IDEs remain valid. I still use remote servers constantly—just not as the place I start every feature.

The through-line from those older posts to today is the same: pick the setup that removes friction for your workflow. Right now, for Laravel and PHP work, that means Herd on the machine in front of me and Cursor in the foreground—local first, remote when it earns its keep.