8 ms·

A History of IDEs at Google

473 points by laurentlb 5mo ago

ncruces 5mo ago
The thing I most love about Cider-V is that moving between it and (often remote) VSCode when working outside google3 becomes mostly painless.
compiler-guy 5mo ago
That most engineers use the same IDE at Google allows the company to collect a huge amount of telemetry about what features they are using, how often, and how much. Quite similar to the entire codebase being in a single repo, it allows a certain visibility into what is happening that just isn't possible other places. When Google wanted engineers to use AI features, it turned them on in Cider-V by default. And if you turned them off, later updates would turn them back on. This is very good for your adoption metrics, but might not tell you exactly what you want to know about engineer happiness. Such a dominant IDE also allows management to ignore the long-tail of users who aren't using it.
- hibikir 5mo ago
  Visibility doesn't always get you value though. See the many companies that unify their ticketing to something like Jira, and end up running reports on in. The actual accuracy of the aggregates is rarely great, and instead leads to people doing "jira optimization" to make reports look good. I once worked at a place where VPs were looking at sprint burndown charts, and asked what happened if the line didn't look a lot like the line expected by JIRA. The telemetry is therefore often a curse, as any metric becomes a target. How many companies today have KPIs about having automated code reviews, which are then ignored by the devs, because said reviews are just wrong on almost everything? The learnings of Seeing Like A State don't apply just to governments.
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    You have to be very careful in management to not create perverse incentives. I like to use change control processes as an example. In theory, a super strict change process for every single change is great, because it'll ensure everything gets reviewed thoroughly. In practice, that leads to people flouting the change process as much as they think they can possibly get away with, because it becomes a serious impediment to getting work done. A more moderate change process would have higher compliance, and actually lead to more oversight, than a super strict one.
- krzyk 5mo ago
  > When Google wanted engineers to use AI features, it turned them on in Cider-V by default. And if you turned them off, later updates would turn them back on. How is that good? That would be the first thing that would force me to use IDE that is not controller by 1984 entities.
kylecazar 5mo ago
I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
- joshuamorton 5mo ago
  I do most of my development on a MacBook air and a Chromebook. The ~only thing I do from my local machine is ssh into a beefy workstation and use chrome.
- compiler-guy 5mo ago
  Very little development in Google3 happens locally. You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk, and this is true no matter what OS it runs. (Android and Chromium are different though.) You have access to an extremely powerful remote workstation that from a UI perspective functions almost identically to a local workstation, via Chrome Remote Desktop. Plus, no one builds things locally, even on that machine. There is a huge, absolutely amazing distributed build system that everyone uses for everything. (Again, Android and Chromium are different.) So you don't really need a powerful local machine. I held out for a long time--there were a lot of growing pains in the early days. But eventually it got really, really good.
  - AJRF 5mo ago
    What is Google3?
    - ncruces 5mo ago
      The mono repo that holds most source code (pronounced google-tree?) It's referenced in the OP.
      - StilesCrisis 5mo ago
        I've never heard that pronunciation.
StilesCrisis 5mo ago
"the advantages of having a single, extensible platform become even more obvious" -- imagine the impact that could be unlocked if we got the Android and Chromium workflows into CiderV/Critique! The article is framed around "all Googlers" but there is still a very large contingent of Googlers who cannot use these tools.
- keeda 5mo ago
  I would imagine Android development, with its reliance on simulators for local UI testing, is pretty complicated to shoehorn into a web-based IDE? I think cloud-based IDEs would only really work for anything for which a text or web-based UI suffices. (Which is already quite a lot: that covers code, logs and web pages.) For anything with native UIs, I suppose you could "remote desktop" into an app or a simulator running in the cloud but at that point you might as well run that locally and cut out all the issues introduced by networking.
  - ASinclair 5mo ago
    > For anything with native UIs, I suppose you could "remote desktop" into an app or a simulator running in the cloud This does exist. The network isn't the main problem. The Emulator has to run under nested KVM. That + graphics rendering on the CPU makes it not so responsive. It's useable enough in many cases though.
  - ameliaquining 5mo ago
    "Android" here refers to the Android operating system, which (like Chrome) has its own separate development stack. Most of Google's Android apps are developed using the main google3 stack described in the post, or at least were when I was there.
  - lunarboy 5mo ago
    iOS apps at google are developed via ciderv that had a connection to your local mac, and it's amazing. All code editing is "online" and builds are cached, but simulator runs on your local machine. I'm convinced the apple dev env at google is like 100x better than apple's
taeric 5mo ago
The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative. I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be. But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no?
- compiler-guy 5mo ago
  Google is an ads company with a large amount of infrastructure to back it up. Sure, the money is mostly in ads, but serving searches, AI, youtube, and all the rest at the scale Google does it requires a technical tour-de-force. Does Google do it better than everyone? Absolutely not. But it does it better than many. Certainly it isn't the _only_ way to do it--other companies also manage to do it. But not all that many at the same scale. It's an existence proof that you can.
  - taeric 5mo ago
    Most of what they do really really well, though, is accomplished by massive amounts of spending. That isn't a knock on it. Consider that they spend more on trying to build up and support this central IDE than most companies dream of losing in productivity to not having this.
  - randomCloud 5mo ago
    There are things people do in Borg that when ported to our own public cloud kills entire regions. Sure you get limited choice but things work at global scale without thought
- vineyardmike 5mo ago
  > But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no? They have a ton of other software in 2026. And they have a pretty diverse (and diversifying) income stream today. Like 30-40% from non-ads. Is it worth it? That’s for them to say, but they can ramp up cloud services at scale pretty fast as a core competency.
wood_spirit 5mo ago
The last year I’ve been doing all my dev on a vscode VM thingy my company set up. It’s just been getting better and better. It’s like local dev but, tbh, better. It’s at the point where I don’t even install dev tooling locally any more at all. My computer is just a thin client. The aspect I miss is the distributed compilation hinted at in the article. I remember back at the end of 1990s using distcc and things, but that never seemed to happen in the Java world and the tooling like maven etc is structured to make everything one long dependent chain. Shame.
- barrkel 5mo ago
  You want bazel. Once you've internalized the bazel (blaze) system, you want all builds and tests to work that way.
  - derriz 5mo ago
    How do you internalize it? Our bazel system is full of custom skylark code so understanding the build means effectively reading a bunch of ad-hoc code written with varying degrees of competence and with confusing dependencies. I’m kinda ashamed I don’t have a deep understanding of a tool I use daily - but every time I try reading the documentation I quickly give up.
    - zhengyi13 5mo ago
      Probably not in the way that you might mean it, but for me (Xoogler, 2010 - 2023) internalizing bazel means: "Hey, where's your tool's code in $MONOREPO?" "<path/to/stuff>" Cool: g4d my-citc-client # moral equivalent to `cd ~/repos/stuff` blaze run path/to/stuff:target ... and you get a running version of whatever $stuff is, immediately built from head, quickly - no matter the set of dependencies, or which language they were built in. I can just try your thing out immediately with a common interface for all the builds, and I don't need to understand the build at all, unless or until I do, and then OK, absolutely every single build is always expressed in exactly the same way, same idioms, same patterns...
VirusNewbie 5mo ago
Cider-V is very nice. It's VSCode so all the extensions just work - Vim mode, themes, etc. It's also nice that it stores all my preferences in the cloud, so switching machines is seamless (helpful when my macbook broke a couple weeks ago and I had to use a loaner chromebook for a day). It's also well integrated with google3 and codesearch, and seamlessly runs tests on remote machines with tmux integration and all. Not all of google tooling is my favorite (like their source control), but the IDE is great.
nostrademons 5mo ago
Was there 2009-2014 and then again 2020-2026. I think there are a lot of aspects of IDE use and culture at Google that this post omits. My recollection from 2009-2011 is that emacs and vim were the dominant editors (just as the TV show Silicon Valley depicted), and there was a decent-sized minority using Eclipse and Intellij, both of which had official support for Google tooling. The command line still largely ruled though, even though the official Google developer workstation was Goobuntu, Google-flavored Ubuntu. This reflected the overall developer population of the time. I think Cider actually was invented a little earlier than the article describes. I have vague memories of some engineers experimenting with web-based IDEs that would integrated directly with Critique (the code-review software) as early as 2013-2014. Its use was not widespread when I left in 2014; there was still the impression that it wasn't powerful enough for daily driving. When I came back in 2020, emacs/vim use was much lower, again probably reflecting differences in the general population of developers. Many more of the developers had been trained in the post-2010 developer ecosystem of VSCode, IntelliJ, etc, and this was reflected in tool usage at Google too. I'd say IntelliJ was the dominant IDE, with Cider a close second and Cider-V just starting to take market share. You still had to pry emacs and vim from a grizzled old veteran's hands. By 2022 I'd transferred to an Android team, and Android Studio with Blaze was the dominant IDE, even as general IntelliJ usage in the company was falling. Cider just didn't have the same Android-specific support. Company-wide Cider-V was growing the fastest, taking market share from both IntelliJ and Cider-V. By 2024 Cider-V was dominant and there started to be a concerted push to standardize on it, particularly since new AI agent tools were coming out and they couldn't be supported on all editors that Googlers wanted to use. As of my departure in 2026, the company-wide push was to standardize on Antigravity [1], which, as I understand it, won a turf war within the developer tools org and got blessed as the "official" Google AI coding agent. This also has the effect of concentrating developer time dogfooding Google's external AI coding offering, which hopefully should improve its quality. There's still significant Cider-V usage, but it's dropping, and execs are pushing Antigravity hard. [1] https://antigravity.google/ https://antigravity.google/
- mghackerlady 5mo ago
  How many new googlers use vim or emacs do you think? I can imagine at least a small amount of new vim people since vim will always be popular, but I would love to know if more than a handful of new googlers a year use emacs
j2kun 5mo ago
I am very opinionated, but I really don't like Cider V. I have been using neovim at Google since 2017 and it's been great.
- semiinfinitely 5mo ago
  same! how do you deal with cloudtop latency though? sometimes my neovim is very slow and laggy because of the remote connection / network file system
  - wmedrano 5mo ago
    I use a workstation specifically to improve latency. Needed to get approval at some point to get a refresh though.
    - semiinfinitely 5mo ago
      like a workstation under your desk? is the latency bad when you remote access it not in the office?
      - wmedrano 5mo ago
        Yeah, under my desk. I rarely remote which is a good excuse for me to disconnect from work anyways.
  - darkvertex 5mo ago
    Ever tried SSH'ing via "Mosh"? https://mosh.org https://mosh.org
  - j2kun 5mo ago
    I have a (Google-issued) desktop in the same city I live in, so the latency is not so bad.
    - j2kun 5mo ago
      I will say that the latency of the filesystem is a different problem. Most of the google filesystem tooling is not built for command line tools that expect to index large subsets of the filesystem at once.
tomaytotomato 5mo ago
Do Java engineer at Google not use IntelliJ?
- Degorath 5mo ago
  Not anymore they don't (usual caveats apply: no longer work there; big company so YMMV). It was an option for a while, but getting it to work with the remote filesystems for the monorepo was a bit annoying (e.g. you'd create a new project in IDEA where you'd have to pick what parts of the monorepo you wanted to have in there, but it all happened up front).
jason1cho 5mo ago
Initially Cider was branded as a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs. Now, ironically with so many extensions and LLM computing, users seem to forget that they chose Cider because of its lightweight.
- genxy 5mo ago
  Everything turns into the thing it was set out to replace.
m3drano 5mo ago
The name Cider is not from Cloud IDE, stems from Critique (the code review), which is addressed via cr/ - Cider is the IDE in Critique: cIDEr.
- laurentlb 5mo ago
  As far as I remember, this "IDE in cr/" explanation was found afterwards.
- pfooti 5mo ago
  I use mondrian/ instead of cr/
lzl1234 5mo ago
How can they post this obviously internal thing from Google? How can they get clearance from security/IP?
- lupire 5mo ago
  OP is an ex-Googler
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Xoogler. We have slack and everything!
- laurentlb 5mo ago
  Although the tool is internal, a lot of information about it is not confidential. As the team had to collaborate with the VSCode team, we got clearance for sharing information about it. The screenshots in the article were posted publicly on GitHub (in vscode issues). You can also find screenshots in https://research.google/blog/smart-paste-for-context-aware-adjustments-to-pasted-code/ https://research.google/blog/smart-paste-for-context-aware-a... More generally, a lot has been communicated on developer infrastructure at Google.
  - agmater 5mo ago
    I'd love for more screenshots should anyone have and can share. I still don't get a great picture of how it's running in the browser and I find UI choices fascinating. But I imagine I'd need an NDA to see the settings/options :')
    - laurentlb 5mo ago
      It's VSCode, so it's 90% similar to https://vscode.dev https://vscode.dev There are internal extensions, but they don't dramatically change the look and feel. I think many VSCode users are not familiar with the Comments UI, but it's used in e.g. the "GitHub Pull Requests" extension. Apart from that, some changes in the list of directories/files (for performance reasons) and a redesigned SCM integration.
w10-1 5mo ago
I had to laugh we he said it took a dozen people a couple years. That's a terribly small investment relative to the leverage over developer productivity, and pales in comparison to what eBay, IBM et al spent in similar large but specialized developer populations for integrated tooling. I'd like to hear the perspective of the developer/user; the IDE provider has some incentive to take credit and imply high utilization reflects success rather than Google policy. I'm interested in how tooling conditions developer expectations more broadly. I'd love to see a comparison of Linux OS development (all local+open+git, open but contributor hierarchy) vs Google (monorepo+required tooling, pre-allocated authority) from someone who's done both.
- DannyBee 5mo ago
  I was responsible for getting the investment and (and pushing on turndowns) in getting Google to one IDE, and also worked at IBM for a few years. I also spent lots of time talking with my counterparts in other places. So I know what others spend and were spendingin similar environments in terms of actual dollars, and where it roughly goes. So let me say - it was not a small investment, in part because the all-in costs of engineers are very different. I'm really unsure why you would think otherwise. Unlike others, Google is also remarkably good at quantifying the actual value something provides in developer productivity/etc. Most engineers handwave this tremendously. Google has an amazing amount of telemetry. So i laugh when you talk about "the leverage over developer productivity" because the vast majority of companies i've worked at or talked with have almost no useful idea about their developer productivity (IE can't even account for the majority of their developers time at work), or how to invest effectively to do something about it. They can often account for <30% of time developers are spending at work, etc. As for perspectives - there is plenty of sentinment and other data. Cider is overall one of the top 5 most loved tools at Google, and had well over 90% developer satisfaction IIRC.
  - rossjudson 5mo ago
    Oh so it's YOUR fault. ;) Don't worry -- I came to love Cider for the simplicity. I tolerate Cider V, but its "anything" nature means it's not good at anything in particular. These days, I mostly use it to peek into what (Antigravity's internal equivalent) does. I was in the Eclipse camp, prior to the IntelliJ reversal. At the time there were at least double the number of active daily users of Eclipse, Google had hired some original Eclipse devs who did an awesome job making Eclipse work at Google scale, and basically I was back to where I had been (in productivity) before joining Google. The decision was made to go with Eclipse. Then it magically went into some sort of internal box/decision process, and came out IntelliJ instead. I've always thought this was because of a sufficiently highly placed Android person with a personal preference, but I could be 100% wrong. This made me sad. I escalated internally, compiled all of the usage numbers, did feature comparisons on what actually worked in each IDE, to no avail. Near the end, Eclipse's C++ support and refactoring actually worked reasonably well on Blobstore, which was NOT a small thing. IMO IntelliJ never worked very well in google3, and certainly didn't have anywhere near the level of fluidity and speed that Eclipse had (all the way back from its VisualAge Smalltalk roots -- something even most users of Eclipse never really understood or got into). That said, Eclipse just had the wrong architecture for a massive monorepo. It could be made to work (and it was), but it was never a good fit...and getting the upstream changes needed was apparently problematic. Plain simple Cider was better (in my mind) than IntelliJ's broken functionality that worked in the outside world, but not in google3 (at least not on the code bases that I worked in). Plain old Cider just kept adding smart features that solved problems and made it nicer. By the time Cider V was coming, it had big shoes to fill.
SimianSci 5mo ago
The biggest question on my mind is how the use of Cider V is being affected by the officially ordained Antigravity. Is the trendline starting to show that its adopting more Antigravity style tooling? or is this causing some sort of rift?
- randomgoogler1 5mo ago
  In my experience, antigravity IDE is much less seemless compared to Cider-V. I completely moved to using web-based antigravity for the agent and using cider-v to make manual changes and viewing code.
- brainwad 5mo ago
  If you are very into agentic coding then in 2026 you're using Antigravity. But if you are less into it Cider-V has a slightly less powerful (e.g. no web browser harness, no multi-agent parallelism) version that is backed by the same implementation. Since both are built on VSCode this is ~ trivial.
- randomCloud 5mo ago
  Antigravity isn’t supported internally so it’s not an issue. There is a similar internal product but the agentic part is shared between that and Cider.
phreeza 5mo ago
The most amazing thing to me about Cider-V was that Cider (without the V) actually went away after a relatively short amount of time, when virtually every other internal service that is officially EOL-ed lives on essentially forever.
- buildbot 5mo ago
  It would be nice if they extended their external services the same behavior…
- DannyBee 5mo ago
  That is because the Cider team did an amazing job of managing it, and spent tons of time going bug report by bug report to find and fix the blockers stopping people from preferring Cider-V over Cider, instead of the typical Google deprecation approach of "monkey knife fight"
  - VirusNewbie 5mo ago
    fucking lol, that is how it usually goes with deprecation.
  - computerdork 5mo ago
    haha, that's a great way to put it! And I get the overall gist of it, but why monkeys? :)
    - aleksiy123 5mo ago
      code monkeys
      - computerdork 5mo ago
        Don’t let them out of their cages, otherwise they’ll stop typing!
    - InfiniteRand 5mo ago
      Because it's international waters
cletus 5mo ago
There's more history than this. Disclaimer: Xoogler (2010-2017). When I first started the environment you used depended entirely on language. In the C++ and Python space, there was the vim and emacs divide. With Java it was more complicated. Some still used vim/emacs but a lot of people used Eclipse. Now Eclipse was a real problem at Google because of the source control system. Java IDEs are primarily built to import binaries, specifically jars. In the outside world, these dependencies are managed via Ant (very early days), Maven/Gradle or the like. At Google there's a mono-repo (Perforce/Piper) and you check out parts of it locally and rely on the rest via a network connection (to SrcFS IIRC, it's been awhile). This was neat because you could edit a file locally and the dependencies would just recompile (via Blaze). So for Eclipse a whole lot of initialization had to be done and the IDE would fall over. A lot. It had a team of ~10 working on it at one point. Then somebody did a 20% project called magicjar. Magicjar took a Perforce client and built all the dependencies as jars that could be imported directly without parsing the entire source tree (which was usually huge). This made it possible, even preferred, to use IntelliJ, which is what I did. Magicjar was great. Other people actually made CLion work reasonably well with C++ too. That was nice. This was a much bigger undertaking with many more corner cases just given how C++ works (ie headers and templates). So checking out a client was relatively heavyweight, even with a minimal local tree. And, if you worked on Google3, you had to do this a lot. You might need to do a config file change. This was the real starting point for Cider because it was way nicer to do config file changes with it. Obviously I don't know where all this went from there. VS Studio as a Cider frontend? Ok, that was news to me. Engineers being unhappy when things change and when the slightest thing works differently is the least surprising thing I've ever heard. Oh it's worth adding that in my time many people didn't use Perforce (P4) directly. They used somebody else's project, which was a Git frontend for it, called Git5. I believe it was already being deprecated while I was still there. But Git5 modelled a P4 change as a branch so you could play around with your Git commits locally and then squash them into a single P4 change. I actually liked this a lot.
- ncruces 5mo ago
  There are mercurial and jujutsu frontends now.
- wmedrano 5mo ago
mcoliver 5mo ago
Meanwhile Google acquired windsurf, released antigravity, and recently handicapped it for Google business workspace users by removing the AI Ultra plan for workspace. So the only real way to use antigravity is either being a Google employee or using a personal account and AI Ultra. https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra-access https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- barbolo 5mo ago
  It was a sad surprise last week when we tried to upgrade the workspace AI plan for some of our team members to Ultra and it was gone. We're moving to Claude/Codex.
  - nimchimpsky 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - mcoliver 5mo ago
    Yeah I've considered that as well. Was loving having everything in the same ecosystem and have been pleased with the Gemini 3.1 models. I still think this is a blip and Google will come around. It doesn't make any sense.
    - aix1 5mo ago
      You're not missing much -- Claude is a better model for coding. That's what basically everyone at Google DeepMind uses and what I expect most other Googlers would choose to use IF they had access: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-ai-tool-divide-internal-tensions-2026-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-ai-tool-divi...
      - knightabu 5mo ago
        I am Not a googler, just a very good google user but hope those Googlers using them third party service providers' (other than Google) LLMs read this (manually critically thinking, not skimming via a LLM layer, losing structural human nuance) : https://www.oreilly.com/radar/dont-automate-your-moat-matching-ai-autonomy-to-risk-and-competitive-stakes/ https://www.oreilly.com/radar/dont-automate-your-moat-matchi...
skybrian 5mo ago
> a team dedicated to the IntelliJ integration was formed around 2015 I don't know which team that was, but to add to that, official support for IntelliJ at Google started quite a bit earlier. I was the second person to join a team writing IntelliJ plugins. We wrote a Blaze plugin not too long after Blaze launched, as it was becoming more popular. Google tells me that Blaze launched in 2006, so I think it must have been 2007 or 2008.
- laurentlb 5mo ago
  I'm not sure about the dates. At some point (2014?), the use of IntelliJ was discouraged in favor of Eclipse. One year later or so, the decision was reversed and the effort focused on IntelliJ (and Eclipse were considered deprecated).
  - jeffbee 5mo ago
    Was there never a detour via Eclipse Theia? I thought it might have had some traction internally, since Cloud Shell is based on it.
    - DannyBee 5mo ago
      Not on the developer side. The cloud side, yes, a bit.
      - rcleveng 5mo ago
        still on the cloud side, cloud workstations and also the cloud shell gui mode are all theia. I never understood theia TBH
  - jvolkman 5mo ago
    IntelliJ was unsupported ("community supported") when I joined in the summer of 2015. I built a new protobuf editor plugin during that period as a side project, mostly for myself, which suddenly became used by thousands of Googlers when IntelliJ became the supported IDE again in ~2016? I eventually handed it over to JetBrains and I think it ships by default with IntelliJ now.
wmedrano 5mo ago
Luckily, they still support the text editor + CLI tools workflow so I can still use Emacs effectively.
alwinaugustin 5mo ago
Real IDEs are built by Jetbrains.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
piker 5mo ago
Man in building Tritium[1] I have always used the analogy that developers would never program in a web-based IDE. Thus, lawyers would never live in a web-based legal IDE either. In exchange for that we’ve paid the onboarding price of trying to get desktop software installed to even run a demo. This is super timely to push us back towards a reality that web may be viable. [1] https://tritium.legal https://tritium.legal
- codethief 5mo ago
  Hi Drew, I remember your "Show HN" from a while back and have been secretly rooting for you ever since! (I'm not a lawyer but for some reason I have many friends that are, and now I happen to do work for a firm in the legal publishing sector, so I often hear about how terrible "word processing" can be and think there've got to be better tools!) May I ask, how are things going? Also, will your IDE always be focusing on transactional law or have you considered expanding to other legal areas and/or markets?
  - piker 5mo ago
    Hi! It's a super interesting time to be in legal tech. Thank you for asking. When this project got started, "VS code for transactional lawyers" was the target. We pretty well have that on offer at this point, but it sits in a weird spot making it harder to sell than it would be in, say, 2024. Right now, "AI forward" lawyers are spinning out of law firms in droves to start "AI native" firms backed for example by YC. They're so comfortable with Claude that they for the large part bypass a need for Tritium (or at least they think they do ;). OTOH, large law firms are inundated with legal tech products right now and have a hard time even understanding how an IDE benefits their lawyers. We're also trying to stay away from VC funding (other than from a certain awesome one ;), so we're missing a key signal for enterprise buyers. As I mentioned above, it's super hard to even set up a hands on demo because we have to get the desktop app installed on their infrastructure. But I'm shocked to learn that Googlers are happy to work in a browser, and distributing Tritium via browser is trivial, so we're going to 180 on that right here and now. That all said, we eliminated the "free tier" as advised back in the Show HN thread, and we've managed to find a very small market in individual users. We're also finding some opportunities with the AI natives using an "unreal engine for legal tech" model that makes Tritium source available and handles the boring editor-related parts of their innovation. I should probably do a post on this, but there's actually a topic we're working on that perhaps the HN audience will find even more interesting... coming soon! [edit: I realized that I haven't responded to your question re: other markets, but accidentally did with the hint. We have some ideas.]
hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
I can't imagine people enjoying web based IDEs. I used to work for a company that has everything made internally, including IDE -- they used the same method OP described -- using VSCode on web. The experience is horrible. I guess maybe it was fancy back in mid 2010s, but my experience was a couple of years ago.
- FrojoS 5mo ago
  From the article: “ Cider was a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs. All the magic happened on a backend that indexes the entire codebase, so that all the data was ready whenever someone opened the webpage. ” Sounds like all other editors were slow compared to Cider.
  - hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
    OK, this was probable me telling other people I have never worked in a large repo without telling other people that...
    - randomCloud 5mo ago
      Pretty much. Also it’s not that slow and you can’t just checkout all of g3
    - flakiness 5mo ago
      It is basically VS Code Web. Try https://vscode.dev/ https://vscode.dev/ to see how you feel. If you don't like it you won't like cider.
      - hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
        I have used something like that (mentioned in my original reply ^). It was even worse -- there were about 3-4 plugins available. Basically that company (a well known social media company, not FB) tried to implement everything on their own. Infra is their own (kinda makes sense because it is so huge), IDE is their own, communication is their own (which has an interesting feature that if someone screen shares an internal doc, other people can click a link to access that doc, too, very useful). I was very jealous about their tooling team (that's what I call real programming), but nevermind I quit after a few months due to some unrelated reason.
dobx2010 5mo ago
Java backend development got pushed to Cider-V from IntelliJ to a degree because the company stopped supporting IntelliJ internal plugins, so not all developers organically moved to Cider-V (and some still use Android Studio to do the non-Android Java development). The forced move got a lot of resistance because of lack of power refactoring features among others in Cider-V.
aboodman 5mo ago
I was there 2004-2014 and never used an IDE the entire time. From my perspective the most popular editors were emacs and vim. Life was probably different in the Android and Java areas, but there was also a massive chunk (50%+?) of people writing C++ and Python, and I think IDE-less is/was the standard for those folks.
tantalor 5mo ago
Going from Cider to Cider-V was a huge loss for user experience. I just can't get used to the VSCode UI. The in-house stuff was much better.
bhickey 5mo ago
Before cider there was Brightly. My recollection was that it was developed by a team in Atlanta and got cancelled before it reached general availability. People were pissed at the time (ex. "cancelling brightly considered harmful"). That died down when Cider delivered on what Brightly had promised. The days of using Eclipse were particularly bleak. These days I use Antigravity for the overwhelming majority of my work.
- spwa4 5mo ago
  There was also the code search, uh, I forgot the name "quick change", I believe? Very handy for seeing a problem, quickly solving it (sending out a CL) marking it autosubmit and just moving on.
  - randomCloud 5mo ago
    I assume quick change became critique?
    - hcnews 5mo ago
      There was a code reviewer starting with M before Critique iirc (Mondrian I wanna say?). The M code reviewer was completely written in Python iirc.
      - spwa4 5mo ago
        No I mean that in code search you could click "edit" and just change something, which would then post a CL immediately, which you could set to auto-approve, for quick changes. I believe it was part of cider (the first non-vscode version)
        bruckie 5mo ago
        The first version was part of Code Search proper, and wasn't super useful for much more than just typo fixes, since it was essentially just a textarea edit box. That was eventually deprecated and replaced with a button that did the same thing, but opened in Cider instead.
s-xyz 5mo ago
I wonder if the IDE will eventually die, and be replaced by something fundamentally different, like Claude Code Desktop, Codex Desktop, Lanes.sh, or Factory.
malkia 5mo ago
Xoogler here (2014-2017). My team (part of Ads) used primarily Java, and we used the Eclipse, then we started switching the IntelliJ. Cider was used also a lot, but I've heard even back then some folks were free to use whatever they like - vi, emacs, you name it.
- achille 5mo ago
  Yep, I made my own! (Xoogler 2017-2023) this is my noogler IDE story, one of my favorite, proudest hacks! I developed a fork of the IntelliJ IDE on my second week at google out of raw frustration over latency. At the time I was commuting 2-3hrs/day SF<>MTV on the gBus. Connectivity on the bus wasn't optimal, and there was high latency. Cider didn't have deep integration, and wasn't able to let me explore and understand the internal APIs effectively. I found it easier to enter a debug session within Intellij then 'vibe' and explore the internal apis via superComplicatedObject.ini<tab>. Faced with an alien architecture + ADHD-unfriendly flow-crushing remote desktop latency -- and the lack of discoverability, I started hacking at it and without any knowledge of the system and architecture. Just tracing Intellij execution, subprocesses and network calls. I was able to hack together a prototype in a few days that allowed me to run IntelliJ on my Mac, while the heavy bits ran on my corp desktop. The system would mount the remote filesystem over sshfs, would monitor and patch network connections and setup transparent shim binaries. Half of Intellij was running on the Mac (the front end) and the other half ran on Linux. Intellij didn't "know" that that it was running on a mac. This was initially implemented in a ~250 line shell script that patched everything. It was called MDProxy[1] and ended getting adopted and supported during COVID as more development went remote. This became a source of many peer bonuses and spot bonuses. circa 2017* remote coding options at the time: typing | code latency | integration -------------------------- cider low | meh mdproxy low | great ssh+vi med | meh rdp+iJ crushing | great [1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/intellij/blob/6b8f03c21172033abb2ca37d6310416070419475/base/src/com/google/idea/blaze/base/command/buildresult/BuildEventProtocolUtils.java#L42 https://github.com/bazelbuild/intellij/blob/6b8f03c21172033a...
  - dotwaffle 5mo ago
    > flow-crushing remote desktop latency Yeah, I was working out of the Sydney office. Almost everything was incredibly slow due to that latency, not just chromoting but also just accessing most sites through beyondcorp.
fleaflicker 5mo ago
Another real killer feature of web-based IDEs is zero setup for new engineers. You won’t have to spend a day fiddling with your local env. Everything just works immediately. There are commercial alternatives like GH codespaces but not as good as Cider-V.
- rcleveng 5mo ago
  I'd rather have a remote hosted devcontainer and a local IDE. No fiddling, settings pushed on the container (same with plugins to use etc). The keybindings with the web ide's always are a drag to me, actually the lack of good keybindings.
squirrellous 5mo ago
Something that amazed me around the time Cider V was first introduced is that some folks have been at Google for so long, they have never used VSCode, and didn’t recognize the UI at all.
- rossjudson 5mo ago
  100% up-to-date VSCode is still pretty trashy, IMO. It's a mixed bag of plugins without cohesion, no awareness of code other than what that mixed bag attempts to provide (poorly). It is and always has been little more than a progressively more complicated mobius loop of autocompletion-oriented UI experimentation. Ah, I feel so much better now. ;) VSCode never made it past the first 10% of what Eclipse did (does). VSCode did succeed at being something for everybody, available everywhere.
  - saltmate 5mo ago
    Do you have an example of what eclipse can do that VScode can't?
dogscatstrees 5mo ago
I think it's also worth mentioning Piper, Critique, and the infamous monorepo. [1] Piper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system) [2] Crituque: https://books.google.com/books?id=V3TTDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA399#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=V3TTDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA399#v=on... [3] Monorepo: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2854146 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2854146
exclipy 5mo ago
I jumped from Google to Facebook on 2019 and while I had thought Google had best in industry developer tooling, Facebook had it better. Google’s dinky browser based Cider was cute but Facebook in its transition from Atom to VS Code was far ahead. Google might have invented asynchronous web based code review with Mondrian and Critique, but Facebook’s Diff was better with its stacked diff support. Google’s Buganizer was outdated and clunky compared to Facebook’s Tasks. I left Facebook the year after but I do wonder where Meta’s tooling is up to nowadays. Is it still a glimpse of the future?
- exclipy 5mo ago
  Oh yeah, not to mention the drag and drop GUI mercurial client in the IDE. I still haven’t seen anything as good on the outside. Regular engineers could use stacked diffs proficiently and regularly, without it being seen as a super advanced 10x engineer power user thing.
- exclipy 5mo ago
  And the instant start cloud dev servers complete with shareable full stack preview links! Chefs kiss
- cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
  I left Google end of 2022, but we already had the mentioned new version of Cider based on VS Code for a few years before that. It's possible FB did it first, but I don't think Google was far behind at all. I'm fairly certain there was the new VSCode based Cider by early 2020. Certainly was by end of 2020 and entirely common by the time I left. (I didn't get to use it much because I worked on embedded stuff that was on the Chromium stack and in git, not in Google3) Buganizer (v1 and v2) was delightfully primitive and simple. That was the point. PMs couldn't play games with it.
- surajrmal 5mo ago
  There is enough flow of engineers between the two companies that many of the things Facebook has done better have been copied by Google. I think in many ways it goes both ways.
- 5mo ago
kjgkjhfkjf 5mo ago
When I left Google in the mid 2010s, there were a couple unusual constraints: 1. They had the majority of their code in a vast++ monorepo. 2. There was a policy that forbade having code from this monorepo on your laptop. Most companies and projects have orders of magnitude less code, and don't restrict where that code can be stored. It's interesting to learn about Cider and the other things Google built to address their unusual situation, but it's worth keeping in mind that their approach probably isn't ideal in ~most modern dev scenarios.
- throwaway2037 5mo ago
  > There was a policy that forbade having code from this monorepo on your laptop. Was this due to security and/or technical reasons?
  - brainwad 4mo ago
    It was a security policy. It used to be common to have local checkouts on workstations, but now everything is in the cloud.
- eddd-ddde 5mo ago
  I actually think these constraints _help_ the average project as well. By enforcing remote builds and execution you completely remove the need for something like docker. You also get cloud backups for your code automatically.
9front 5mo ago
Is the V in Cider-V the Roman numeral 5 or V like in Visual?
- kps 5mo ago
  V as in VSCode.
  - cobalt 5mo ago
    so, visual :P
istillwritecode 5mo ago
xoogler from 2005 to 2018. People in developer tools always wanted a mandate to use their tools when their tools didn't gain enough users.
LAC-Tech 5mo ago
This idea of forcing every programmer to use the same IDE is incredibly depressing. I only associate that with really low tier outfits here in NZ, to think that leading companies want to do this too is disheartening (because of course everyone and their dog will copy it). Fight for your autonomy as a dev, because they will always want to take it away.
- rossjudson 5mo ago
  It's not about forcing everyone to use the same IDE. It's about making sure that there's at least one IDE that everyone can use. Over time, engineers realize that Code Search is more important than their IDE. Some of the most productive engineers I know at Google are proud (and adaptable) VIM users, always have been, and nobody is going to tell them they should use anything else. They're also just fine with AI tooling, and fit it right into their VIM workflows.
  - jim33442 4mo ago
    Yeah I just use vim and jetski CLI, way faster than dealing with any of these IDEs
  - aiuto 4mo ago
    > Over time, engineers realize that Code Search is more important than their IDE. You nailed it. One particularly hard problem Google faced w.r.t. IDE integration was the intersection of thousands of RPCs defined by protobuf declarations => generated protobuf code in 10 different languages being dong transparently by blaze + not checking in generated code => where does the IDE based indexing find the generated source files, and then tie that back to the original .proto file declaring the RPC declaration. Blaze had the information available through a query, but needed ways for the user (the IDE) to optimize the query plan so that it could deliver just the proto related dependencies with sub-second response time to keep the human users happy. Once you found the .proto file that defined your data they could leverage the the monorepo and search over it. Let's say I am a Java programmer working on a server endpoint and want to change the format of some data I am stuffing into a protobuf. I could find the original declaration, and then find all the instances of objective-C code that our iOS apps were using to consume it. Trivially easy with the combination of global code search and a global dependency graph. Caveat: Code search and a monorepo let you do some amazing things. But there is a LOT of cost which Googler's tend to nostalgically gloss over. piper, citc, kyte, critique, and depserver* represent (wet finger in the wind guess) probably $100M of development effort. Context: Googler from 2007-2025, worked on API serving infrastructue, desktop apps (yes, we checked out source code to windows laptops), blaze/bazel, and a few others. I've seen all the developer tooling problems. *depserver is a essentially a service that holds the entire blaze dependency graph every file up to every buildable object across the code space. That drives the automatic testing infrastructure.
hona_mind 5mo ago
[dead]
insumanth 5mo ago
I still have high hopes that antigravity can work if they have good agentic harness to support with seamless integrations to gemini and 3rd party models. Current Issues * It is still buggy. They are fixing it fast, but not as seamless as VS Code. Extensions support is not good. * Harness while it is good, is not on par with others. Harness makes all the difference * Gap between Gemini models and others. Hopefully they catch up soon (IO-2026?)| If you use Antigravity, what needs improvement to become mainstream?
ryukoposting 5mo ago
One less-discussed side effect of google's idiosyncratic project structure & tools is that their open source projects can be a goddamn nightmare to work with. Want to make a CI/CD pipeline for your ChromiumOS builds? Have fun trying to make a container that precisely mimicks a Gentoo chroot that changes every 2 weeks.
rudraneel93 5mo ago
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rudraneel93 5mo ago
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LadislavSopko 5mo ago
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anymouse123456 5mo ago
Was at the big G many years ago. It was long series of incredible and impressive feats of truly singular engineering talent continuously wasted solving problems of our own making that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
setheron 5mo ago
I'm at Meta now but I was at Google as well. I really enjoy contrasting the two toolchains and where they rise and fall short of each other. I must say the debugging experience at Meta has been spectacular. I liked the way CitC exposed Snapshots and easy to make projects. (+ A bunch of other dozen opinions) I was also at Amazon circa 2011 and it's funny to think about the experience back then. I remember i toiled to get Eclipse CDT to work whereas everyone else worked without any language intellisense. The work paid off though and I was able to drop P95 of the real time service I was on by 50% with the aided code intelligence + hooking it into callgrind.
xenodium 5mo ago
While most IDEs converged to a unified web solution, pockets of devoted users continued to volunteer improvements/integrations for their preferred editors. During my time there, a relatively small, but fairly active Emacs group, would often share tips, tricks, and elisp integrating the latest internal tools.
Akuehne 5mo ago
As a noogler, I feel like I missed all the cool toys. And now I'm stuck with whatever they've acquired.
plexescor 5mo ago
[flagged]
mattlondon 5mo ago
From what I've heard rumor-wise, everyone has abandoned the web UI editors and are now using (or being told very loudly by management to use) Antigravity exclusively for everything.
lacymorrow 5mo ago
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ianhxu 5mo ago
Been using Cider for two years now. Early on I struggled, trying to use IntelliJ, and even tried the thin client version — but both are basically in maintenance mode. Cider is the de facto standard. It really is the best IDE in terms of integration with internal tools, but it also inherits Google internal tooling’s general disregard for UX quality and aesthetics.
- rockemsockem 5mo ago
  The aesthetics are literally vs code though .....
aiuto 4mo ago
> There's more history than this LOL. Understatement of the year, Laurent. :-)
aiverdict 4mo ago
[flagged]

473 points by laurentlb 5mo ago

The thing I most love about Cider-V is that moving between it and (often remote) VSCode when working outside google3 becomes mostly painless.

compiler-guy 5mo ago

That most engineers use the same IDE at Google allows the company to collect a huge amount of telemetry about what features they are using, how often, and how much. Quite similar to the entire codebase being in a single repo, it allows a certain visibility into what is happening that just isn't possible other places. When Google wanted engineers to use AI features, it turned them on in Cider-V by default. And if you turned them off, later updates would turn them back on. This is very good for your adoption metrics, but might not tell you exactly what you want to know about engineer happiness. Such a dominant IDE also allows management to ignore the long-tail of users who aren't using it.

hibikir 5mo ago
Visibility doesn't always get you value though. See the many companies that unify their ticketing to something like Jira, and end up running reports on in. The actual accuracy of the aggregates is rarely great, and instead leads to people doing "jira optimization" to make reports look good. I once worked at a place where VPs were looking at sprint burndown charts, and asked what happened if the line didn't look a lot like the line expected by JIRA. The telemetry is therefore often a curse, as any metric becomes a target. How many companies today have KPIs about having automated code reviews, which are then ignored by the devs, because said reviews are just wrong on almost everything? The learnings of Seeing Like A State don't apply just to governments.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  You have to be very careful in management to not create perverse incentives. I like to use change control processes as an example. In theory, a super strict change process for every single change is great, because it'll ensure everything gets reviewed thoroughly. In practice, that leads to people flouting the change process as much as they think they can possibly get away with, because it becomes a serious impediment to getting work done. A more moderate change process would have higher compliance, and actually lead to more oversight, than a super strict one.
krzyk 5mo ago
> When Google wanted engineers to use AI features, it turned them on in Cider-V by default. And if you turned them off, later updates would turn them back on. How is that good? That would be the first thing that would force me to use IDE that is not controller by 1984 entities.

kylecazar 5mo ago

I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.

joshuamorton 5mo ago
I do most of my development on a MacBook air and a Chromebook. The ~only thing I do from my local machine is ssh into a beefy workstation and use chrome.
compiler-guy 5mo ago
Very little development in Google3 happens locally. You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk, and this is true no matter what OS it runs. (Android and Chromium are different though.) You have access to an extremely powerful remote workstation that from a UI perspective functions almost identically to a local workstation, via Chrome Remote Desktop. Plus, no one builds things locally, even on that machine. There is a huge, absolutely amazing distributed build system that everyone uses for everything. (Again, Android and Chromium are different.) So you don't really need a powerful local machine. I held out for a long time--there were a lot of growing pains in the early days. But eventually it got really, really good.
- AJRF 5mo ago
  What is Google3?
  - ncruces 5mo ago
    The mono repo that holds most source code (pronounced google-tree?) It's referenced in the OP.
    - StilesCrisis 5mo ago
      I've never heard that pronunciation.

StilesCrisis 5mo ago

"the advantages of having a single, extensible platform become even more obvious" -- imagine the impact that could be unlocked if we got the Android and Chromium workflows into CiderV/Critique! The article is framed around "all Googlers" but there is still a very large contingent of Googlers who cannot use these tools.

keeda 5mo ago
I would imagine Android development, with its reliance on simulators for local UI testing, is pretty complicated to shoehorn into a web-based IDE? I think cloud-based IDEs would only really work for anything for which a text or web-based UI suffices. (Which is already quite a lot: that covers code, logs and web pages.) For anything with native UIs, I suppose you could "remote desktop" into an app or a simulator running in the cloud but at that point you might as well run that locally and cut out all the issues introduced by networking.
- ASinclair 5mo ago
  > For anything with native UIs, I suppose you could "remote desktop" into an app or a simulator running in the cloud This does exist. The network isn't the main problem. The Emulator has to run under nested KVM. That + graphics rendering on the CPU makes it not so responsive. It's useable enough in many cases though.
- ameliaquining 5mo ago
  "Android" here refers to the Android operating system, which (like Chrome) has its own separate development stack. Most of Google's Android apps are developed using the main google3 stack described in the post, or at least were when I was there.
- lunarboy 5mo ago
  iOS apps at google are developed via ciderv that had a connection to your local mac, and it's amazing. All code editing is "online" and builds are cached, but simulator runs on your local machine. I'm convinced the apple dev env at google is like 100x better than apple's

taeric 5mo ago

The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative. I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be. But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no?

compiler-guy 5mo ago
Google is an ads company with a large amount of infrastructure to back it up. Sure, the money is mostly in ads, but serving searches, AI, youtube, and all the rest at the scale Google does it requires a technical tour-de-force. Does Google do it better than everyone? Absolutely not. But it does it better than many. Certainly it isn't the _only_ way to do it--other companies also manage to do it. But not all that many at the same scale. It's an existence proof that you can.
- taeric 5mo ago
  Most of what they do really really well, though, is accomplished by massive amounts of spending. That isn't a knock on it. Consider that they spend more on trying to build up and support this central IDE than most companies dream of losing in productivity to not having this.
- randomCloud 5mo ago
  There are things people do in Borg that when ported to our own public cloud kills entire regions. Sure you get limited choice but things work at global scale without thought
vineyardmike 5mo ago
> But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no? They have a ton of other software in 2026. And they have a pretty diverse (and diversifying) income stream today. Like 30-40% from non-ads. Is it worth it? That’s for them to say, but they can ramp up cloud services at scale pretty fast as a core competency.

wood_spirit 5mo ago

The last year I’ve been doing all my dev on a vscode VM thingy my company set up. It’s just been getting better and better. It’s like local dev but, tbh, better. It’s at the point where I don’t even install dev tooling locally any more at all. My computer is just a thin client. The aspect I miss is the distributed compilation hinted at in the article. I remember back at the end of 1990s using distcc and things, but that never seemed to happen in the Java world and the tooling like maven etc is structured to make everything one long dependent chain. Shame.

barrkel 5mo ago
You want bazel. Once you've internalized the bazel (blaze) system, you want all builds and tests to work that way.
- derriz 5mo ago
  How do you internalize it? Our bazel system is full of custom skylark code so understanding the build means effectively reading a bunch of ad-hoc code written with varying degrees of competence and with confusing dependencies. I’m kinda ashamed I don’t have a deep understanding of a tool I use daily - but every time I try reading the documentation I quickly give up.
  - zhengyi13 5mo ago
    Probably not in the way that you might mean it, but for me (Xoogler, 2010 - 2023) internalizing bazel means: "Hey, where's your tool's code in $MONOREPO?" "<path/to/stuff>" Cool: g4d my-citc-client # moral equivalent to `cd ~/repos/stuff` blaze run path/to/stuff:target ... and you get a running version of whatever $stuff is, immediately built from head, quickly - no matter the set of dependencies, or which language they were built in. I can just try your thing out immediately with a common interface for all the builds, and I don't need to understand the build at all, unless or until I do, and then OK, absolutely every single build is always expressed in exactly the same way, same idioms, same patterns...

VirusNewbie 5mo ago

Cider-V is very nice. It's VSCode so all the extensions just work - Vim mode, themes, etc. It's also nice that it stores all my preferences in the cloud, so switching machines is seamless (helpful when my macbook broke a couple weeks ago and I had to use a loaner chromebook for a day). It's also well integrated with google3 and codesearch, and seamlessly runs tests on remote machines with tmux integration and all. Not all of google tooling is my favorite (like their source control), but the IDE is great.

nostrademons 5mo ago

Was there 2009-2014 and then again 2020-2026. I think there are a lot of aspects of IDE use and culture at Google that this post omits. My recollection from 2009-2011 is that emacs and vim were the dominant editors (just as the TV show Silicon Valley depicted), and there was a decent-sized minority using Eclipse and Intellij, both of which had official support for Google tooling. The command line still largely ruled though, even though the official Google developer workstation was Goobuntu, Google-flavored Ubuntu. This reflected the overall developer population of the time. I think Cider actually was invented a little earlier than the article describes. I have vague memories of some engineers experimenting with web-based IDEs that would integrated directly with Critique (the code-review software) as early as 2013-2014. Its use was not widespread when I left in 2014; there was still the impression that it wasn't powerful enough for daily driving. When I came back in 2020, emacs/vim use was much lower, again probably reflecting differences in the general population of developers. Many more of the developers had been trained in the post-2010 developer ecosystem of VSCode, IntelliJ, etc, and this was reflected in tool usage at Google too. I'd say IntelliJ was the dominant IDE, with Cider a close second and Cider-V just starting to take market share. You still had to pry emacs and vim from a grizzled old veteran's hands. By 2022 I'd transferred to an Android team, and Android Studio with Blaze was the dominant IDE, even as general IntelliJ usage in the company was falling. Cider just didn't have the same Android-specific support. Company-wide Cider-V was growing the fastest, taking market share from both IntelliJ and Cider-V. By 2024 Cider-V was dominant and there started to be a concerted push to standardize on it, particularly since new AI agent tools were coming out and they couldn't be supported on all editors that Googlers wanted to use. As of my departure in 2026, the company-wide push was to standardize on Antigravity [1], which, as I understand it, won a turf war within the developer tools org and got blessed as the "official" Google AI coding agent. This also has the effect of concentrating developer time dogfooding Google's external AI coding offering, which hopefully should improve its quality. There's still significant Cider-V usage, but it's dropping, and execs are pushing Antigravity hard. [1] https://antigravity.google/ https://antigravity.google/

mghackerlady 5mo ago
How many new googlers use vim or emacs do you think? I can imagine at least a small amount of new vim people since vim will always be popular, but I would love to know if more than a handful of new googlers a year use emacs

j2kun 5mo ago

I am very opinionated, but I really don't like Cider V. I have been using neovim at Google since 2017 and it's been great.

semiinfinitely 5mo ago
same! how do you deal with cloudtop latency though? sometimes my neovim is very slow and laggy because of the remote connection / network file system
- wmedrano 5mo ago
  I use a workstation specifically to improve latency. Needed to get approval at some point to get a refresh though.
  - semiinfinitely 5mo ago
    like a workstation under your desk? is the latency bad when you remote access it not in the office?
    - wmedrano 5mo ago
      Yeah, under my desk. I rarely remote which is a good excuse for me to disconnect from work anyways.
- darkvertex 5mo ago
  Ever tried SSH'ing via "Mosh"? https://mosh.org https://mosh.org
- j2kun 5mo ago
  I have a (Google-issued) desktop in the same city I live in, so the latency is not so bad.
  - j2kun 5mo ago
    I will say that the latency of the filesystem is a different problem. Most of the google filesystem tooling is not built for command line tools that expect to index large subsets of the filesystem at once.

tomaytotomato 5mo ago

Do Java engineer at Google not use IntelliJ?

Degorath 5mo ago
Not anymore they don't (usual caveats apply: no longer work there; big company so YMMV). It was an option for a while, but getting it to work with the remote filesystems for the monorepo was a bit annoying (e.g. you'd create a new project in IDEA where you'd have to pick what parts of the monorepo you wanted to have in there, but it all happened up front).

jason1cho 5mo ago

Initially Cider was branded as a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs. Now, ironically with so many extensions and LLM computing, users seem to forget that they chose Cider because of its lightweight.

genxy 5mo ago
Everything turns into the thing it was set out to replace.

m3drano 5mo ago

The name Cider is not from Cloud IDE, stems from Critique (the code review), which is addressed via cr/ - Cider is the IDE in Critique: cIDEr.

laurentlb 5mo ago
As far as I remember, this "IDE in cr/" explanation was found afterwards.
pfooti 5mo ago
I use mondrian/ instead of cr/

lzl1234 5mo ago

How can they post this obviously internal thing from Google? How can they get clearance from security/IP?

lupire 5mo ago
OP is an ex-Googler
- fragmede 5mo ago
  Xoogler. We have slack and everything!
laurentlb 5mo ago
Although the tool is internal, a lot of information about it is not confidential. As the team had to collaborate with the VSCode team, we got clearance for sharing information about it. The screenshots in the article were posted publicly on GitHub (in vscode issues). You can also find screenshots in https://research.google/blog/smart-paste-for-context-aware-adjustments-to-pasted-code/ https://research.google/blog/smart-paste-for-context-aware-a... More generally, a lot has been communicated on developer infrastructure at Google.
- agmater 5mo ago
  I'd love for more screenshots should anyone have and can share. I still don't get a great picture of how it's running in the browser and I find UI choices fascinating. But I imagine I'd need an NDA to see the settings/options :')
  - laurentlb 5mo ago
    It's VSCode, so it's 90% similar to https://vscode.dev https://vscode.dev There are internal extensions, but they don't dramatically change the look and feel. I think many VSCode users are not familiar with the Comments UI, but it's used in e.g. the "GitHub Pull Requests" extension. Apart from that, some changes in the list of directories/files (for performance reasons) and a redesigned SCM integration.

w10-1 5mo ago

I had to laugh we he said it took a dozen people a couple years. That's a terribly small investment relative to the leverage over developer productivity, and pales in comparison to what eBay, IBM et al spent in similar large but specialized developer populations for integrated tooling. I'd like to hear the perspective of the developer/user; the IDE provider has some incentive to take credit and imply high utilization reflects success rather than Google policy. I'm interested in how tooling conditions developer expectations more broadly. I'd love to see a comparison of Linux OS development (all local+open+git, open but contributor hierarchy) vs Google (monorepo+required tooling, pre-allocated authority) from someone who's done both.

DannyBee 5mo ago
I was responsible for getting the investment and (and pushing on turndowns) in getting Google to one IDE, and also worked at IBM for a few years. I also spent lots of time talking with my counterparts in other places. So I know what others spend and were spendingin similar environments in terms of actual dollars, and where it roughly goes. So let me say - it was not a small investment, in part because the all-in costs of engineers are very different. I'm really unsure why you would think otherwise. Unlike others, Google is also remarkably good at quantifying the actual value something provides in developer productivity/etc. Most engineers handwave this tremendously. Google has an amazing amount of telemetry. So i laugh when you talk about "the leverage over developer productivity" because the vast majority of companies i've worked at or talked with have almost no useful idea about their developer productivity (IE can't even account for the majority of their developers time at work), or how to invest effectively to do something about it. They can often account for <30% of time developers are spending at work, etc. As for perspectives - there is plenty of sentinment and other data. Cider is overall one of the top 5 most loved tools at Google, and had well over 90% developer satisfaction IIRC.
- rossjudson 5mo ago
  Oh so it's YOUR fault. ;) Don't worry -- I came to love Cider for the simplicity. I tolerate Cider V, but its "anything" nature means it's not good at anything in particular. These days, I mostly use it to peek into what (Antigravity's internal equivalent) does. I was in the Eclipse camp, prior to the IntelliJ reversal. At the time there were at least double the number of active daily users of Eclipse, Google had hired some original Eclipse devs who did an awesome job making Eclipse work at Google scale, and basically I was back to where I had been (in productivity) before joining Google. The decision was made to go with Eclipse. Then it magically went into some sort of internal box/decision process, and came out IntelliJ instead. I've always thought this was because of a sufficiently highly placed Android person with a personal preference, but I could be 100% wrong. This made me sad. I escalated internally, compiled all of the usage numbers, did feature comparisons on what actually worked in each IDE, to no avail. Near the end, Eclipse's C++ support and refactoring actually worked reasonably well on Blobstore, which was NOT a small thing. IMO IntelliJ never worked very well in google3, and certainly didn't have anywhere near the level of fluidity and speed that Eclipse had (all the way back from its VisualAge Smalltalk roots -- something even most users of Eclipse never really understood or got into). That said, Eclipse just had the wrong architecture for a massive monorepo. It could be made to work (and it was), but it was never a good fit...and getting the upstream changes needed was apparently problematic. Plain simple Cider was better (in my mind) than IntelliJ's broken functionality that worked in the outside world, but not in google3 (at least not on the code bases that I worked in). Plain old Cider just kept adding smart features that solved problems and made it nicer. By the time Cider V was coming, it had big shoes to fill.

SimianSci 5mo ago

The biggest question on my mind is how the use of Cider V is being affected by the officially ordained Antigravity. Is the trendline starting to show that its adopting more Antigravity style tooling? or is this causing some sort of rift?

randomgoogler1 5mo ago
In my experience, antigravity IDE is much less seemless compared to Cider-V. I completely moved to using web-based antigravity for the agent and using cider-v to make manual changes and viewing code.
brainwad 5mo ago
If you are very into agentic coding then in 2026 you're using Antigravity. But if you are less into it Cider-V has a slightly less powerful (e.g. no web browser harness, no multi-agent parallelism) version that is backed by the same implementation. Since both are built on VSCode this is ~ trivial.
randomCloud 5mo ago
Antigravity isn’t supported internally so it’s not an issue. There is a similar internal product but the agentic part is shared between that and Cider.

phreeza 5mo ago

The most amazing thing to me about Cider-V was that Cider (without the V) actually went away after a relatively short amount of time, when virtually every other internal service that is officially EOL-ed lives on essentially forever.

buildbot 5mo ago
It would be nice if they extended their external services the same behavior…
DannyBee 5mo ago
That is because the Cider team did an amazing job of managing it, and spent tons of time going bug report by bug report to find and fix the blockers stopping people from preferring Cider-V over Cider, instead of the typical Google deprecation approach of "monkey knife fight"
- VirusNewbie 5mo ago
  fucking lol, that is how it usually goes with deprecation.
- computerdork 5mo ago
  haha, that's a great way to put it! And I get the overall gist of it, but why monkeys? :)
  - aleksiy123 5mo ago
    code monkeys
    - computerdork 5mo ago
      Don’t let them out of their cages, otherwise they’ll stop typing!
  - InfiniteRand 5mo ago
    Because it's international waters

cletus 5mo ago

There's more history than this. Disclaimer: Xoogler (2010-2017). When I first started the environment you used depended entirely on language. In the C++ and Python space, there was the vim and emacs divide. With Java it was more complicated. Some still used vim/emacs but a lot of people used Eclipse. Now Eclipse was a real problem at Google because of the source control system. Java IDEs are primarily built to import binaries, specifically jars. In the outside world, these dependencies are managed via Ant (very early days), Maven/Gradle or the like. At Google there's a mono-repo (Perforce/Piper) and you check out parts of it locally and rely on the rest via a network connection (to SrcFS IIRC, it's been awhile). This was neat because you could edit a file locally and the dependencies would just recompile (via Blaze). So for Eclipse a whole lot of initialization had to be done and the IDE would fall over. A lot. It had a team of ~10 working on it at one point. Then somebody did a 20% project called magicjar. Magicjar took a Perforce client and built all the dependencies as jars that could be imported directly without parsing the entire source tree (which was usually huge). This made it possible, even preferred, to use IntelliJ, which is what I did. Magicjar was great. Other people actually made CLion work reasonably well with C++ too. That was nice. This was a much bigger undertaking with many more corner cases just given how C++ works (ie headers and templates). So checking out a client was relatively heavyweight, even with a minimal local tree. And, if you worked on Google3, you had to do this a lot. You might need to do a config file change. This was the real starting point for Cider because it was way nicer to do config file changes with it. Obviously I don't know where all this went from there. VS Studio as a Cider frontend? Ok, that was news to me. Engineers being unhappy when things change and when the slightest thing works differently is the least surprising thing I've ever heard. Oh it's worth adding that in my time many people didn't use Perforce (P4) directly. They used somebody else's project, which was a Git frontend for it, called Git5. I believe it was already being deprecated while I was still there. But Git5 modelled a P4 change as a branch so you could play around with your Git commits locally and then squash them into a single P4 change. I actually liked this a lot.

ncruces 5mo ago
There are mercurial and jujutsu frontends now.
wmedrano 5mo ago

mcoliver 5mo ago

Meanwhile Google acquired windsurf, released antigravity, and recently handicapped it for Google business workspace users by removing the AI Ultra plan for workspace. So the only real way to use antigravity is either being a Google employee or using a personal account and AI Ultra. https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra-access https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra...

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
barbolo 5mo ago
It was a sad surprise last week when we tried to upgrade the workspace AI plan for some of our team members to Ultra and it was gone. We're moving to Claude/Codex.
- nimchimpsky 5mo ago
  [dead]
- mcoliver 5mo ago
  Yeah I've considered that as well. Was loving having everything in the same ecosystem and have been pleased with the Gemini 3.1 models. I still think this is a blip and Google will come around. It doesn't make any sense.
  - aix1 5mo ago
    You're not missing much -- Claude is a better model for coding. That's what basically everyone at Google DeepMind uses and what I expect most other Googlers would choose to use IF they had access: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-ai-tool-divide-internal-tensions-2026-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-ai-tool-divi...
    - knightabu 5mo ago
      I am Not a googler, just a very good google user but hope those Googlers using them third party service providers' (other than Google) LLMs read this (manually critically thinking, not skimming via a LLM layer, losing structural human nuance) : https://www.oreilly.com/radar/dont-automate-your-moat-matching-ai-autonomy-to-risk-and-competitive-stakes/ https://www.oreilly.com/radar/dont-automate-your-moat-matchi...

skybrian 5mo ago

> a team dedicated to the IntelliJ integration was formed around 2015 I don't know which team that was, but to add to that, official support for IntelliJ at Google started quite a bit earlier. I was the second person to join a team writing IntelliJ plugins. We wrote a Blaze plugin not too long after Blaze launched, as it was becoming more popular. Google tells me that Blaze launched in 2006, so I think it must have been 2007 or 2008.

laurentlb 5mo ago
I'm not sure about the dates. At some point (2014?), the use of IntelliJ was discouraged in favor of Eclipse. One year later or so, the decision was reversed and the effort focused on IntelliJ (and Eclipse were considered deprecated).
- jeffbee 5mo ago
  Was there never a detour via Eclipse Theia? I thought it might have had some traction internally, since Cloud Shell is based on it.
  - DannyBee 5mo ago
    Not on the developer side. The cloud side, yes, a bit.
    - rcleveng 5mo ago
      still on the cloud side, cloud workstations and also the cloud shell gui mode are all theia. I never understood theia TBH
- jvolkman 5mo ago
  IntelliJ was unsupported ("community supported") when I joined in the summer of 2015. I built a new protobuf editor plugin during that period as a side project, mostly for myself, which suddenly became used by thousands of Googlers when IntelliJ became the supported IDE again in ~2016? I eventually handed it over to JetBrains and I think it ships by default with IntelliJ now.

wmedrano 5mo ago

Luckily, they still support the text editor + CLI tools workflow so I can still use Emacs effectively.

alwinaugustin 5mo ago

Real IDEs are built by Jetbrains.

deleted 5mo ago

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piker 5mo ago

Man in building Tritium[1] I have always used the analogy that developers would never program in a web-based IDE. Thus, lawyers would never live in a web-based legal IDE either. In exchange for that we’ve paid the onboarding price of trying to get desktop software installed to even run a demo. This is super timely to push us back towards a reality that web may be viable. [1] https://tritium.legal https://tritium.legal

codethief 5mo ago
Hi Drew, I remember your "Show HN" from a while back and have been secretly rooting for you ever since! (I'm not a lawyer but for some reason I have many friends that are, and now I happen to do work for a firm in the legal publishing sector, so I often hear about how terrible "word processing" can be and think there've got to be better tools!) May I ask, how are things going? Also, will your IDE always be focusing on transactional law or have you considered expanding to other legal areas and/or markets?
- piker 5mo ago
  Hi! It's a super interesting time to be in legal tech. Thank you for asking. When this project got started, "VS code for transactional lawyers" was the target. We pretty well have that on offer at this point, but it sits in a weird spot making it harder to sell than it would be in, say, 2024. Right now, "AI forward" lawyers are spinning out of law firms in droves to start "AI native" firms backed for example by YC. They're so comfortable with Claude that they for the large part bypass a need for Tritium (or at least they think they do ;). OTOH, large law firms are inundated with legal tech products right now and have a hard time even understanding how an IDE benefits their lawyers. We're also trying to stay away from VC funding (other than from a certain awesome one ;), so we're missing a key signal for enterprise buyers. As I mentioned above, it's super hard to even set up a hands on demo because we have to get the desktop app installed on their infrastructure. But I'm shocked to learn that Googlers are happy to work in a browser, and distributing Tritium via browser is trivial, so we're going to 180 on that right here and now. That all said, we eliminated the "free tier" as advised back in the Show HN thread, and we've managed to find a very small market in individual users. We're also finding some opportunities with the AI natives using an "unreal engine for legal tech" model that makes Tritium source available and handles the boring editor-related parts of their innovation. I should probably do a post on this, but there's actually a topic we're working on that perhaps the HN audience will find even more interesting... coming soon! [edit: I realized that I haven't responded to your question re: other markets, but accidentally did with the hint. We have some ideas.]

hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago

I can't imagine people enjoying web based IDEs. I used to work for a company that has everything made internally, including IDE -- they used the same method OP described -- using VSCode on web. The experience is horrible. I guess maybe it was fancy back in mid 2010s, but my experience was a couple of years ago.

FrojoS 5mo ago
From the article: “ Cider was a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs. All the magic happened on a backend that indexes the entire codebase, so that all the data was ready whenever someone opened the webpage. ” Sounds like all other editors were slow compared to Cider.
- hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
  OK, this was probable me telling other people I have never worked in a large repo without telling other people that...
  - randomCloud 5mo ago
    Pretty much. Also it’s not that slow and you can’t just checkout all of g3
  - flakiness 5mo ago
    It is basically VS Code Web. Try https://vscode.dev/ https://vscode.dev/ to see how you feel. If you don't like it you won't like cider.
    - hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
      I have used something like that (mentioned in my original reply ^). It was even worse -- there were about 3-4 plugins available. Basically that company (a well known social media company, not FB) tried to implement everything on their own. Infra is their own (kinda makes sense because it is so huge), IDE is their own, communication is their own (which has an interesting feature that if someone screen shares an internal doc, other people can click a link to access that doc, too, very useful). I was very jealous about their tooling team (that's what I call real programming), but nevermind I quit after a few months due to some unrelated reason.

dobx2010 5mo ago

Java backend development got pushed to Cider-V from IntelliJ to a degree because the company stopped supporting IntelliJ internal plugins, so not all developers organically moved to Cider-V (and some still use Android Studio to do the non-Android Java development). The forced move got a lot of resistance because of lack of power refactoring features among others in Cider-V.

aboodman 5mo ago

I was there 2004-2014 and never used an IDE the entire time. From my perspective the most popular editors were emacs and vim. Life was probably different in the Android and Java areas, but there was also a massive chunk (50%+?) of people writing C++ and Python, and I think IDE-less is/was the standard for those folks.

tantalor 5mo ago

Going from Cider to Cider-V was a huge loss for user experience. I just can't get used to the VSCode UI. The in-house stuff was much better.

bhickey 5mo ago

Before cider there was Brightly. My recollection was that it was developed by a team in Atlanta and got cancelled before it reached general availability. People were pissed at the time (ex. "cancelling brightly considered harmful"). That died down when Cider delivered on what Brightly had promised. The days of using Eclipse were particularly bleak. These days I use Antigravity for the overwhelming majority of my work.

spwa4 5mo ago
There was also the code search, uh, I forgot the name "quick change", I believe? Very handy for seeing a problem, quickly solving it (sending out a CL) marking it autosubmit and just moving on.
- randomCloud 5mo ago
  I assume quick change became critique?
  - hcnews 5mo ago
    There was a code reviewer starting with M before Critique iirc (Mondrian I wanna say?). The M code reviewer was completely written in Python iirc.
    - spwa4 5mo ago
      No I mean that in code search you could click "edit" and just change something, which would then post a CL immediately, which you could set to auto-approve, for quick changes. I believe it was part of cider (the first non-vscode version)
      - bruckie 5mo ago
        The first version was part of Code Search proper, and wasn't super useful for much more than just typo fixes, since it was essentially just a textarea edit box. That was eventually deprecated and replaced with a button that did the same thing, but opened in Cider instead.

s-xyz 5mo ago

I wonder if the IDE will eventually die, and be replaced by something fundamentally different, like Claude Code Desktop, Codex Desktop, Lanes.sh, or Factory.

malkia 5mo ago

Xoogler here (2014-2017). My team (part of Ads) used primarily Java, and we used the Eclipse, then we started switching the IntelliJ. Cider was used also a lot, but I've heard even back then some folks were free to use whatever they like - vi, emacs, you name it.

achille 5mo ago
Yep, I made my own! (Xoogler 2017-2023) this is my noogler IDE story, one of my favorite, proudest hacks! I developed a fork of the IntelliJ IDE on my second week at google out of raw frustration over latency. At the time I was commuting 2-3hrs/day SF<>MTV on the gBus. Connectivity on the bus wasn't optimal, and there was high latency. Cider didn't have deep integration, and wasn't able to let me explore and understand the internal APIs effectively. I found it easier to enter a debug session within Intellij then 'vibe' and explore the internal apis via superComplicatedObject.ini<tab>. Faced with an alien architecture + ADHD-unfriendly flow-crushing remote desktop latency -- and the lack of discoverability, I started hacking at it and without any knowledge of the system and architecture. Just tracing Intellij execution, subprocesses and network calls. I was able to hack together a prototype in a few days that allowed me to run IntelliJ on my Mac, while the heavy bits ran on my corp desktop. The system would mount the remote filesystem over sshfs, would monitor and patch network connections and setup transparent shim binaries. Half of Intellij was running on the Mac (the front end) and the other half ran on Linux. Intellij didn't "know" that that it was running on a mac. This was initially implemented in a ~250 line shell script that patched everything. It was called MDProxy[1] and ended getting adopted and supported during COVID as more development went remote. This became a source of many peer bonuses and spot bonuses. circa 2017* remote coding options at the time: typing | code latency | integration -------------------------- cider low | meh mdproxy low | great ssh+vi med | meh rdp+iJ crushing | great [1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/intellij/blob/6b8f03c21172033abb2ca37d6310416070419475/base/src/com/google/idea/blaze/base/command/buildresult/BuildEventProtocolUtils.java#L42 https://github.com/bazelbuild/intellij/blob/6b8f03c21172033a...
- dotwaffle 5mo ago
  > flow-crushing remote desktop latency Yeah, I was working out of the Sydney office. Almost everything was incredibly slow due to that latency, not just chromoting but also just accessing most sites through beyondcorp.

fleaflicker 5mo ago

Another real killer feature of web-based IDEs is zero setup for new engineers. You won’t have to spend a day fiddling with your local env. Everything just works immediately. There are commercial alternatives like GH codespaces but not as good as Cider-V.

rcleveng 5mo ago
I'd rather have a remote hosted devcontainer and a local IDE. No fiddling, settings pushed on the container (same with plugins to use etc). The keybindings with the web ide's always are a drag to me, actually the lack of good keybindings.

squirrellous 5mo ago

Something that amazed me around the time Cider V was first introduced is that some folks have been at Google for so long, they have never used VSCode, and didn’t recognize the UI at all.

rossjudson 5mo ago
100% up-to-date VSCode is still pretty trashy, IMO. It's a mixed bag of plugins without cohesion, no awareness of code other than what that mixed bag attempts to provide (poorly). It is and always has been little more than a progressively more complicated mobius loop of autocompletion-oriented UI experimentation. Ah, I feel so much better now. ;) VSCode never made it past the first 10% of what Eclipse did (does). VSCode did succeed at being something for everybody, available everywhere.
- saltmate 5mo ago
  Do you have an example of what eclipse can do that VScode can't?

dogscatstrees 5mo ago

I think it's also worth mentioning Piper, Critique, and the infamous monorepo. [1] Piper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_(source_control_system) [2] Crituque: https://books.google.com/books?id=V3TTDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA399#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=V3TTDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA399#v=on... [3] Monorepo: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2854146 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2854146

exclipy 5mo ago

I jumped from Google to Facebook on 2019 and while I had thought Google had best in industry developer tooling, Facebook had it better. Google’s dinky browser based Cider was cute but Facebook in its transition from Atom to VS Code was far ahead. Google might have invented asynchronous web based code review with Mondrian and Critique, but Facebook’s Diff was better with its stacked diff support. Google’s Buganizer was outdated and clunky compared to Facebook’s Tasks. I left Facebook the year after but I do wonder where Meta’s tooling is up to nowadays. Is it still a glimpse of the future?

exclipy 5mo ago
Oh yeah, not to mention the drag and drop GUI mercurial client in the IDE. I still haven’t seen anything as good on the outside. Regular engineers could use stacked diffs proficiently and regularly, without it being seen as a super advanced 10x engineer power user thing.
exclipy 5mo ago
And the instant start cloud dev servers complete with shareable full stack preview links! Chefs kiss
cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
I left Google end of 2022, but we already had the mentioned new version of Cider based on VS Code for a few years before that. It's possible FB did it first, but I don't think Google was far behind at all. I'm fairly certain there was the new VSCode based Cider by early 2020. Certainly was by end of 2020 and entirely common by the time I left. (I didn't get to use it much because I worked on embedded stuff that was on the Chromium stack and in git, not in Google3) Buganizer (v1 and v2) was delightfully primitive and simple. That was the point. PMs couldn't play games with it.
surajrmal 5mo ago
There is enough flow of engineers between the two companies that many of the things Facebook has done better have been copied by Google. I think in many ways it goes both ways.
5mo ago

kjgkjhfkjf 5mo ago

When I left Google in the mid 2010s, there were a couple unusual constraints: 1. They had the majority of their code in a vast++ monorepo. 2. There was a policy that forbade having code from this monorepo on your laptop. Most companies and projects have orders of magnitude less code, and don't restrict where that code can be stored. It's interesting to learn about Cider and the other things Google built to address their unusual situation, but it's worth keeping in mind that their approach probably isn't ideal in ~most modern dev scenarios.

throwaway2037 5mo ago
> There was a policy that forbade having code from this monorepo on your laptop. Was this due to security and/or technical reasons?
- brainwad 4mo ago
  It was a security policy. It used to be common to have local checkouts on workstations, but now everything is in the cloud.
eddd-ddde 5mo ago
I actually think these constraints _help_ the average project as well. By enforcing remote builds and execution you completely remove the need for something like docker. You also get cloud backups for your code automatically.

9front 5mo ago

Is the V in Cider-V the Roman numeral 5 or V like in Visual?

kps 5mo ago
V as in VSCode.
- cobalt 5mo ago
  so, visual :P

istillwritecode 5mo ago

xoogler from 2005 to 2018. People in developer tools always wanted a mandate to use their tools when their tools didn't gain enough users.

LAC-Tech 5mo ago

This idea of forcing every programmer to use the same IDE is incredibly depressing. I only associate that with really low tier outfits here in NZ, to think that leading companies want to do this too is disheartening (because of course everyone and their dog will copy it). Fight for your autonomy as a dev, because they will always want to take it away.

rossjudson 5mo ago
It's not about forcing everyone to use the same IDE. It's about making sure that there's at least one IDE that everyone can use. Over time, engineers realize that Code Search is more important than their IDE. Some of the most productive engineers I know at Google are proud (and adaptable) VIM users, always have been, and nobody is going to tell them they should use anything else. They're also just fine with AI tooling, and fit it right into their VIM workflows.
- jim33442 4mo ago
  Yeah I just use vim and jetski CLI, way faster than dealing with any of these IDEs
- aiuto 4mo ago
  > Over time, engineers realize that Code Search is more important than their IDE. You nailed it. One particularly hard problem Google faced w.r.t. IDE integration was the intersection of thousands of RPCs defined by protobuf declarations => generated protobuf code in 10 different languages being dong transparently by blaze + not checking in generated code => where does the IDE based indexing find the generated source files, and then tie that back to the original .proto file declaring the RPC declaration. Blaze had the information available through a query, but needed ways for the user (the IDE) to optimize the query plan so that it could deliver just the proto related dependencies with sub-second response time to keep the human users happy. Once you found the .proto file that defined your data they could leverage the the monorepo and search over it. Let's say I am a Java programmer working on a server endpoint and want to change the format of some data I am stuffing into a protobuf. I could find the original declaration, and then find all the instances of objective-C code that our iOS apps were using to consume it. Trivially easy with the combination of global code search and a global dependency graph. Caveat: Code search and a monorepo let you do some amazing things. But there is a LOT of cost which Googler's tend to nostalgically gloss over. piper, citc, kyte, critique, and depserver* represent (wet finger in the wind guess) probably $100M of development effort. Context: Googler from 2007-2025, worked on API serving infrastructue, desktop apps (yes, we checked out source code to windows laptops), blaze/bazel, and a few others. I've seen all the developer tooling problems. *depserver is a essentially a service that holds the entire blaze dependency graph every file up to every buildable object across the code space. That drives the automatic testing infrastructure.

hona_mind 5mo ago

[dead]

insumanth 5mo ago

I still have high hopes that antigravity can work if they have good agentic harness to support with seamless integrations to gemini and 3rd party models. Current Issues * It is still buggy. They are fixing it fast, but not as seamless as VS Code. Extensions support is not good. * Harness while it is good, is not on par with others. Harness makes all the difference * Gap between Gemini models and others. Hopefully they catch up soon (IO-2026?)| If you use Antigravity, what needs improvement to become mainstream?

ryukoposting 5mo ago

One less-discussed side effect of google's idiosyncratic project structure & tools is that their open source projects can be a goddamn nightmare to work with. Want to make a CI/CD pipeline for your ChromiumOS builds? Have fun trying to make a container that precisely mimicks a Gentoo chroot that changes every 2 weeks.

rudraneel93 5mo ago

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rudraneel93 5mo ago

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LadislavSopko 5mo ago

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anymouse123456 5mo ago

Was at the big G many years ago. It was long series of incredible and impressive feats of truly singular engineering talent continuously wasted solving problems of our own making that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

setheron 5mo ago

I'm at Meta now but I was at Google as well. I really enjoy contrasting the two toolchains and where they rise and fall short of each other. I must say the debugging experience at Meta has been spectacular. I liked the way CitC exposed Snapshots and easy to make projects. (+ A bunch of other dozen opinions) I was also at Amazon circa 2011 and it's funny to think about the experience back then. I remember i toiled to get Eclipse CDT to work whereas everyone else worked without any language intellisense. The work paid off though and I was able to drop P95 of the real time service I was on by 50% with the aided code intelligence + hooking it into callgrind.

xenodium 5mo ago

While most IDEs converged to a unified web solution, pockets of devoted users continued to volunteer improvements/integrations for their preferred editors. During my time there, a relatively small, but fairly active Emacs group, would often share tips, tricks, and elisp integrating the latest internal tools.

Akuehne 5mo ago

As a noogler, I feel like I missed all the cool toys. And now I'm stuck with whatever they've acquired.

plexescor 5mo ago

[flagged]

mattlondon 5mo ago

From what I've heard rumor-wise, everyone has abandoned the web UI editors and are now using (or being told very loudly by management to use) Antigravity exclusively for everything.

lacymorrow 5mo ago

[flagged]

ianhxu 5mo ago

Been using Cider for two years now. Early on I struggled, trying to use IntelliJ, and even tried the thin client version — but both are basically in maintenance mode. Cider is the de facto standard. It really is the best IDE in terms of integration with internal tools, but it also inherits Google internal tooling’s general disregard for UX quality and aesthetics.

rockemsockem 5mo ago
The aesthetics are literally vs code though .....

aiuto 4mo ago

> There's more history than this LOL. Understatement of the year, Laurent. :-)

aiverdict 4mo ago

[flagged]