Zephyr Archaeotech Emporium, a fictional company, is exploring ways to accelerate its development process using Pulumi, specifically for locally testing application code of their online store. In a conversation between Alice, a developer, and Bob from the platform engineering team, they discuss the challenges of the current code testing approach, which involves deploying an entire environment on AWS, thereby consuming significant time. Alice suggests using Pulumi's Docker provider to automate local testing, allowing her to quickly deploy the online store application to a local Docker daemon using TypeScript. This method enhances the inner development loop by enabling rapid iteration on code changes. Although Docker Compose is a viable tool, Alice prefers Pulumi for its ability to incorporate logic into her program, such as specifying whether to build a container or use an existing version, thus allowing selective testing of specific services. This approach not only speeds up development but also maintains consistency across environments since Pulumi is already used for deploying to Kubernetes in other stages. Alice demonstrates the efficiency of this process by making code changes and observing results quickly, emphasizing that while it doesn't replace the need for per-developer stacks, it provides quick feedback on code modifications before deploying to more extensive test environments.