Spin up a scratch editor in ten seconds

You have an idea at 11pm. A small Python script. Nothing serious. You don't want to mess up your laptop's pyenv. You don't want to think about a virtualenv. You don't want to write a Dockerfile.

You hit a URL. ?folder=/scratch&id=99. VS Code opens in your browser, on a fresh container, in ten seconds. You write the script. You run it from the integrated terminal. It works.

You close the tab. The container goes idle. Tomorrow you might come back to it, or not: either way it costs nothing to leave it sitting there.

Most code starts out as scratch code. Most scratch code dies in a folder called ~/tmp/ on someone's old laptop. This way it dies in an idle container that costs zero.

It's the cheapest possible way to start typing.