Gartner's recent inclusion of cloud development environments (CDEs) in their Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies is a watershed moment, validating the disruptive potential of this rapidly evolving technology. The term has evolved from browser-based development environments to encompass pre-configured, cloud-based development environments accessible through the browser. These environments encapsulate the full development environment, including operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, dependencies, and tools needed to code, test, and run an application. CDEs offer several key benefits driving adoption, such as consistent and portable environments, streamlined onboarding, isolation and security, collaboration, flexibility, scalability, business continuity, and unified workflow. Gartner's classification of CDEs as an emerging technology poised for major near-term growth is driven by accelerating cloud adoption, increasing stack complexity, the shift to distributed teams, demand for portability, need for enhanced security, repository-centric workflows, standardization, and innovation. The future of CDEs will likely involve integrated standardized development environments (SDEs) that encapsulate end-to-end application lifecycles, providing guardrails and golden paths to accelerate development while allowing customization and freedom.