code-server, instead of VSCode. I can build my own podman image on top of it with whatever dev tools I need for whatever languages I'm working with, and if I have to install something weird or something breaks I can just restart the container. Especially on my work machine that isn't Linux, I have this running in a VM and can just use in my browser and don't have to jump through hoops to get the dev environment I want. On my personal instance I also use it for automating building stuff from source. Before I had this, I just had build tools on pretty much every single machine I was building for and it was a hot mess.

https://github.com/coder/code-server

so... devcontainers but in a different way?

Why not just devcontainers? I know its a PITA to setup on podman.