What's your development Workflow? Remoting in to the server to code is getting old

My favorite way is to run git pull on my server, which you can do with a single command on your local machine.

For example, I might start by cloning my project into /var/www/example on the VPS. I configure nginx to serve example.com from that folder. When I’m ready to deploy I run something like:

ssh -t user@example.com 'cd /var/www/example; git pull'

Simple and effective. Add that line as an alias or write it into a release.sh script for easy access.

It will need to get more complex if you have a complicated build process for the project, but I try to avoid that, especially early on.

If you don't require your remote machine to be on AWS, you might have a better experience with another VPS provider. You can get a dedicated, physical server without resource sharing on Hetzner (and others, OVH might also work for you) for as little as ~35 bucks per month.
You could also take a look at JetBrains Fleet. Fleet was developed from the ground up for remote development and is very similar to VSCode from a philosophical standpoint.

I am mostly a WordPress dev, and I use Lando (which is Docker for noobs like me, who don't know anything about Docker) inside WSL2.

It's super easy to set up a local dev environment that matches your staging/production servers.

Then to deploy, for small projects I usually use plain old SFTP (I know... but hey, in the WordPress world SFTP is still a thing! :D ) or if I am lucky and I have a great client, there is some automated way of deploying stuff already set up (Circle CI, GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket pipelines, or something similar).

I am currently working on a personal WordPress-based project. The code is hosted on a self-hosted instance of Gitea, and I am thinking of setting up some kind of automated deploying via Woodpecker CI (also self-hosted) to a VPS, but I am not there yet.

Dont see a reason to develop remotely especially in an EC2 tiny instance.
The flow should be like any startup/company, you develop locally, merge the code changes, when enough changes for a new version then you deploy.

If you really want to keep that remotely dev experience you can use code-server by coder. can be set easily through a docker container.

Also my own product will have exactly that remote dev workspace as-a-service but it will be later in the development, not currently available.

Coding on Github Codespace that has a Github Action that deploys the code to an ECR repository for which my Lambda sits on top of. Anytime a commit gets merged into master branch, the Github Action kicks off. I thought about deploying the code onto an EC2 but Lambdas are a lot cheaper and still effective for my workflow.

Most things I've worked on had a pipeline eg. GitHub/gitlab. Merged code is deployed automatically after passing tests.

I'm either coding on my local machine with VS Code or using Github Codespace. Seamless experience so far.