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.
Where to go from here?
- Pull a codebase on your local machine
- Open in Cursor
- Implement a feature you never had time for
- Ship it
- Repeat