The big issue with this is though that GPUs are not available. I believe many people have local workstation boxes where they do dev on and need proper sandboxes and stuff like firecracker is also not super useful as afaik GPU passthrough is not ideal/working. Or any kinds of larger HW requirements.

A workaround might be to copy a directory out with something like Syncthing so you can test locally. But then the coding agent can't help you. So yeah, I can see setting up a box for that. I'm doing web development so it's not an issue for me.