Daytona is an automated development environment platform that allows users to spin up preconfigured development environments for any project automatically, integrating with source control to clone repos and builds ready-to-code dev environments complete with dependencies, tools, and configurations. The platform can be used locally or in the cloud, offering benefits such as no time wasted setting up new projects, standardized and reproducible environments, built-in collaboration features, and quickly onboarding new developers. To get started, users need to install the Daytona CLI, create a development environment using the CLI, open it in VS Code, run the site preview, share and collaborate, and finally destroy the ephemeral environment when complete.