Google Announces an AI Browser-Based Dev Environment Based on Visual Studio Code

Google just announced a new AI-based “browser-based development experience” for creating full-stack web and multiplatform apps. And it’s going to look pretty familiar since it’s based on Microsoft Visual Studio Code, not that Google bothered to ever mention that.

“Project IDX is a browser-based development experience built on Google Cloud and powered by Codey, a foundational AI model trained on code and built on PaLM 2,” several members of the previously secret Project IDX team write in the announcement post. “It’s designed to make it easier to build, manage and deploy full-stack web and multiplatform applications, with popular frameworks and languages. Project IDX is also built on Code OSS, so it should feel familiar no matter what you’re building.”

“Code OSS,” as incorrectly Google calls it there, links to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code repository on GitHub. And I will just briefly express my sadness that this company couldn’t get out of its way long enough to explicitly acknowledge its reliance on all the work that’s already gone into this project, let alone actually reached out to Microsoft for some sort of a shared announcement or, God forbid, partnership. Moving on.

Project IDX lets web and app developers “develop from anywhere, on any device, with the full fidelity of local development.” It achieves this by assigning a Linux-based virtual machine (VM) in the Google Cloud to each Project IDX workspace. You can import existing GitHub projects into Project IDX or create new projects using templates for frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte, and Vue, and languages such as JavaScript and Dart (and, soon, Python, Go, and other languages).

To preview your apps, Project IDX includes a built-in web preview, and it will soon offer a fully-configured Android emulator and an embedded iOS simulator, all directly in the browser. And with that, I think I’m beginning to understand why Tim Sneath, who was previously in charge of Flutter, left Google recently: it is very clear that Project IDX will one day subsume Flutter and Google’s other cross-platform developer solutions.

And not surprisingly, given all the AI news this year, Google is also investigating how its coding-based AI advances like Codey, and the PaLM 2 models that power Studio Bot in Android Studio and Duet in Google Cloud, might be applied in Project IDX. For now, that work is in its early days: for now, Project IDX features smart code completion, an assistive chatbot, and contextual code actions like “add comments” and “explain this code,” Google says, but more is on the way.

For publishing, Project IDX integrates with Firebase Hosting so you can share and deploy your apps.

This looks very interesting. For more information, check out the Project IDX website and join the waitlist so you can get started.