This was a long time ago, but I had a similar experience with Blackbaud (A Salesforce competitor). The suite of APIs required was only installed on a server so

This was a long time ago, but I had a similar experience with Blackbaud (A Salesforce competitor). The suite of APIs required was only installed on a server so you could not run the code locally. You could either perform code edits locally and copy the files before building, or simply do all development while remoted into the dev server.