This is an old note from around summer 2025, written up as a post. These days I mostly let AI do the coding, so I care a lot less about my local dev environment than I did back then. So read this less as a verdict and more as a “I tried it once and here’s how I judged it” record.

What I was going for

If I’m going to develop against containers anyway, why not go all the way and lock the whole dev environment inside a container with a devcontainer? That was the starting thought.

The mental image was something like:

• Attach to the container from Neovim and develop inside it
• Maybe semi-automatically generate the Dockerfile from shell history

Honestly, I just wanted the VS Code devcontainer experience but in nvim.

What I found out by trying it

In practice it didn’t click the way I expected.

• Slow startup. You wait on the order of minutes. When you just want to poke at something, that’s a high barrier.
• Wasted storage. You end up installing the whole dev toolchain plus the editor and its plugins inside the container. And this piles up per project.
• If you can set up your own environment, you don’t need it. Something like uv already gives you per-language environment isolation.

“Keeps your environment clean” is the selling point of devcontainers, but if that’s the goal, there are other ways to get there — that was my takeaway after actually using it.

Conclusion: for solo dev, the priority is this

For a solo developer who has the skills to build environments, I think the rational order is:

nix > per-language package manager > devcontainer

• nix is the cleanest. You can pin the environment declaratively, with no container overhead.
• Per-language package managers (uv, etc.) are lightweight and cover most use cases.
• devcontainer, on top of those, has a weak case for being the deliberate choice.

That doesn’t mean devcontainers are bad — they’re strong as a lowest-common-denominator solution for a team with a skill gap. “Press this button in the README and everyone gets the same environment” pays off precisely when not everyone can assemble an environment themselves. Solo dev just doesn’t match that premise.

Looking back now

As I said up top, I now let AI write code more often, and the situations where I fuss over my local dev environment have shrunk. Even so, taking the “lock the dev environment inside a container” approach for a proper spin and concluding it doesn’t fit how I work wasn’t wasted effort. You only learn whether you need a tool by trying it.