When local development is still valid — and when to push work to the cloud fast

There is one legitimate exception to the 'always work in the cloud' rule: heavy front-end UI work. If you're shipping a brand new feature with a lot of new UI, you'll probably spin up a local agent and do some light front-end work, maybe wireframing. But the goal is to move that work into the cloud as quickly as possible and let a cloud agent take over from there. Outside of that specific case, working locally is no longer defensible. The expert is direct: 'local maxis' who look down on cloud VM users as amateur aren't doing real work. Once a product hits product-market fit and you're shipping real fixes for real customers, the output requirement scales dramatically — and local development simply can't keep up.