Why would you be using config.assets.prefix in rails?

I'm trying to figure out, whether I should be using config.assets.prefixin my development environment or not.

When I'm using localhost, for development, are there any (dis-)advantages of doing this? When the local server itself isn't caching and is on another domain (production-domain vs localhost), I fail to see the disadvantages? Especially for hard-coding some paths in CSS and Javascript, which will then always return 404's on development..

I've been using config.assets.prefix = "/dev-assets" as pr. reccomendation of another developer, who isn't working with us anymore.

Is this a problem, that anyone else have thought about and taken a standpoint at?