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A History of IDEs at Google
71–80 of 333 posts
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've moved on from Git5. Although it was a pain, I kind of liked that Git5 made the monorepo less monolithic to my editor.
Do you mean local checkouts? There's a similar workflow with at least mercurial? Dunno about jujutsu.
You don't really need it anymore - CitC let you do views (mapping just part of the monorepo into your filesystem via FUSE) since about 2013, and then that functionality just got built into Piper. When I returned in 2020 you'd have a file at the top of your source tree that included all the relevant file mappings as well as any Blaze flags needed to build the project, and you could just point your IDE at that and it'd map in just what you need.
The history of Google's relationship to version control is even more interesting than editors - it went from CVS in 1998 to Perforce (P4) in 2000, then gcheckout and g4 in ~2006, then OverlayFS was invented in 2008, git5 came out in 2009, CitC obsoleted OverlayFS in ~2012, Piper built this all into the VCS in ~2013-2014, while I was gone from 2014-2020 apparently we got hg and jujutsu frameworks, and then when I got back in 2020 you'd just check out a .blazeproject from your IDE and everything would magically work. Many of these started as 20% projects (I used to have lunch with the guy who invented OverlayFS; interesting character and one of the best programmers I knew) and then got folded into the "official" way of doing things once grassroot adoption showed the execs that this was how people really wanted to work.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#73Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#74Was 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…
Is Antigravity a Cider-V fork?
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#75Man 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.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#76I 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.
For most of my time here I used exclusively Chrome OS, and switched to it for personal use as well. My daily driver for years was a bright red Samsung Chromebook Galaxy (the first gen with the actual metal case). Literally none of my work is local, and it could run Secure Shell, Cider-V, and Docs as installed PWAs with their own taskbar items, etc. It was glorious.
When it finally failed in the most annoying way possible (the touch screen, which I do not use, started creating phantom clicks in the upper right corner of the display) I went looking for another Chromebook that was light, powerful, and well-built. Finding none, I now use MacBook Air and weep for the time I lose every time it needs an OS update.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#77Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#78Was 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…
Is Antigravity a Cider-V fork?
I don't think so, I think they forked VS Code directly or possibly forked Windsurf which forked VS Code. Hence the turf war and internal controversy; a lot of the effort on Cider-V got dropped on the floor, right at the height of Cider-V's popularity when they were getting large amounts of features.
Duckie does still exist, and is probably one of the most used (and useful) AI tools at Google. Yes, it's just a Gemini wrapper with access to all the internal documentation. I wasn't doing daily development when I left so I don't know if it ever got into Cider-V.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#79Was 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…
Is Antigravity a Cider-V fork?
Okay, but what about the corgies?
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#80The 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?
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.