Well you see if they acknowledged nix then they wouldn't be able to claim to be the first.

Haha, spicy. We definitely don't want to overlook nix. It's a great tool. We do mean something different with "developer environment" in that context of this quoted sentence. I'm not sure if nix will help you much if you want to connect your VS Code to a remote VM or container to work inside of that environment. We'll work on rewording this though to make things clearer :)

I'm sure you can find a narrow enough definition; I believe in you.

"Containerised" would be less ambiguous, I think.

Oh yeah, that would make it clearer! Thanks

I also don't see how this is different from devcontainers, which are like codespaces, but without it being hosted on a server.

That's exactly the difference. You don't need to pay for codespaces and are locked into 1 cloud provider. You can use whatever cloud you want with DevPod

That sounds the same as dev containers, so it can't be the difference.