Project IDX
idx.dev
Project IDX is an entirely web-based workspace for full-stack application development, complete with the latest generative AI (powered by Codey and PaLM 2), and full-fidelity app previews, powered by cloud emulators.

What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?

These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity. We felt this pain at Google, so we started Project IDX, an experimental new initiative aimed at bringing your entire full-stack, multiplatform app development workflow to the cloud.

Project IDX gets you into your dev workflow in no time, backed by the security and scalability of Google Cloud.

Project IDX lets you preview your full-stack, multiplatform apps as your users would see them, with upcoming support for built-in multi-browser web previews, Android emulators, and iOS simulators.

As a Vim fanatic, I can’t say I’ll ever feel comfortable working in a browser, but some parts of IDX seem interesting. I wonder what the implications are for proprietary code.

I do think it solves an interesting problem where you’re working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.

It reminds me vaguely of Shells.

  • @Spectacle8011OPA
    6•11 months ago

    On which, it’s suspicious that this is probably driven or associated with AI.

    The landing page mentions this:

    Code faster with generative AI

    Work quickly and efficiently with AI assistance from Google built-in, including code generation, code completion, translating code between programming languages, explaining code, and more, all powered by Codey, a foundational AI model trained on code and built on PaLM 2.

    I left it out of the main post because I um, didn’t think it was particularly newsworthy.