Yes, it feels very similar to Devcontainers.

But having tried Devcontainers a lot, it feels like its probably a complex specification since outside of VSCode every implementation has issues.

The CLI on Mac has weird user permission issues. Cursor's implementation is very flaky. Zed doesn't implement it yet.

So maybe there's space for more solutions in the same space but Devcontainers are very feature rich. And not to mention they have a huge user base via VSCode.

The killer combo for us is remote+devcontainers. We use this for GPU access, so you can run a project on one or more GPUs that are on a remote server. You can spin up LLM stuff from a mac air and get the best of both worlds.

This has been my experience. I don't use VSCode and every time I've attempted to play with devcontainers I've just given up and gone back to a docker compose file. I love that they tried to extract the feature out into a stand alone thing, but the juice doesn't seem to be worth the squeeze yet.