Hi Product Hunt community,
I’m Ives from CodeSandbox.
Today, we’re announcing CodeSandbox CDE, an instant cloud development environment that automatically provisions a VM for every branch, accessible with a URL.
We built this product to solve some of the main issues with coding today: time spent maintaining local setups, slow compilation times, time wasted during context switching, broken collaboration, etc.
CodeSandbox CDE brings a new approach, where your code is run on fast VMs instead of your laptop, and these cloud environments are instantly available and shareable with your entire team.
This opens the door to some powerful flows. For example, here’s how you would review a PR in CodeSandbox:
1. Open the PR in GitHub as usual.
2. Check out the automatic comment from the CodeSandbox bot, which leads to a cloud environment with the PR running.
3. Click that link to open the PR in CodeSandbox - the dev server will start in under 2 seconds, with everything pre-configured.
4. Check out the running preview if needed to understand the context of the changes.
5. Leave comments and a review message right from CodeSandbox.
What’s more, you can do this entire flow without having to stash the changes of your current work or switch context. Because everything is running in a VM, you can have as many branches/PRs open simultaneously as you want and switch between them instantly.
We are curious to hear your feedback about this and about cloud development in general. Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Happy coding,
Ives
CodeSandbox.io
Used to be great, but unfortunately has been totally unstable seemingly since devbox was launched. I've been using CSB in my workflow for several years, but after many months of game breaking bugs every single time I launch this product, it's unfortunately time to look for alternatives. 😔 Hope the team can turn things around and stabilize the product, because it had an amazing niche when it was a smaller, more stable product. The ambition to move into a more fully featured cloud dev platform seems to have come at too high a cost.
@jorgenb Hey! I'm sorry to hear that you've had that experience. I do admit that we've had stability issues with running Firecracker, especially at the start given we run our own scheduler. But as we've been running the infrastructure for longer now we've had time to fix a lot of these issues and everything is more stable than before.
If you still see issues, it would be incredibly helpful if you could DM me on Twitter or send a message to ives@codesandbox.io, I'll make sure to look at it then ASAP.
I've been coding for years now and I think the seamless integration with GitHub and instant VM provisioning for each branch is a game-changer for development workflows!
I think it'd be really cool incorporating real-time collaboration features which could further streamline the review and coding process, making teamwork even more efficient.
@aayush_kniru Thanks for sharing your experience! This has also been a game-changer for us in our development flows because we've been dogfooding CodeSandbox since day one.
We currently have live collaboration built in, but I'm curious to learn more about which specific collaboration features you'd like to see.
CodeSandbox for iOS