Coder
Ranked 2 of 3 cloud dev environments by recommenders
Recommended for running development containers and coding agent workspaces, and as a simpler alternative to self-hosting dev environments. The main caveat is that it can overwrite changes in its config section.
Recommended for running development containers and coding agent workspaces, and as a simpler alternative to self-hosting dev environments. The main caveat is that it can overwrite changes in its config section.
20 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 8
- approval share
- 60%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Development containers and agent workspaces
“If you are running these agents outside of something like Coder or Codespaces I think you are doing it wrong.”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Grok uploaded my user directory to xAI's servers” “I'm using https://coder.com for all my development containers.”
Comment from 4 Jun 2026 in “Self-hosted dev sandboxes with preview URLs (Docker, Go, no K8s)” Praised as the perfect dev stack
“It's the perfect development stack.”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?” “coder is great! We love it.”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility”
Other cloud dev environments people recommend
The two most recommended other cloud dev environments, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Codespaces | 13 | 8 | 62% | 10 | — | — |
| CoderThis page | 12 | 8 | 60% | 7 | — | — |
| Boxes.dev | 9 | 5 | 64% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
20 of the 21 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“It's the perfect development stack.”
“really dislike having to do my work in a web browser”
“what about coder (and coder workspaces)?”
“why does anything have to go through their infra?”
“If you are running these agents outside of something like Coder or Codespaces I think you are doing it wrong.”
“it’s pretty good but less ML/AI integrated”
“I'm using https://coder.com for all my development containers.”
“But honestly it’s a lot more effort that just using Coder”
“none of them are really simple like Compose”
“Clearly the model is still very capable”
“neglected to update their front page readme with this information, continuing to mislead people”
“the result is still good after fixing the cheating problem”
“it's not even close to sonnet 4.5, let alone opus.”
“sadly it looks like the agent cheated during the eval”
“it does however say something about the researchers when they didn't look at a single output where they would have immediately caught this”
“model just reward hacked its way to look up future commits with fixes”
“its comparing a model that is optimised for pass@2 and self improving its output”
“I self-hosted DevPods and Coder, but it is quite tedious to do so”
“unfortunately 'hogs' the config (it threatens to trash any changes to the coder section)”
“coder is great! We love it.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.