Code references are less important inside Google editors, because we have a code viewer tool inside the web browser.

Most people read, explore, follow references, and share permalinks to the view-only tool. It’s a lot better than viewing code in GitHub. It’s super fast, is connected to language servers and can actually trace referenced, and overall has a million little features optimized for reading code.

We also have a code reviewer tool, and a separate tool to run and view CI runs.

So what’s left for the editor? Syntax highlighting?

I would tend to view code, run tests and CI, and review in separate tools specialized for their specific use case. The code editor was just a place where I would type in my changes.

I’d imagine this workflow feels weird to people who learned in one-stop-shop IntelliJ and GitHub world. But I can’t emphasize how much better these other tools were compared to GitHib. So a code editor that also lets me read, review, and test code didn’t really matter for me when I had a collection of smaller tools specialized for each individual task.

Pair programming was very in vogue and I used to get in a little later than some which was a great excuse to just hop on someone else’s machine who’d already gone through that pain

Gold.

They didn't. Just licenced ip and some developers.

> released antigravity

Is a crappy, half finished Windsurf fork that constantly coredumps on linux

It's been a while since I visited any google pages and I'm shocked how insipid and soulless their UX still is.

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

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?

Best of luck on your web-based demos! Dropping people into a working dummy environment with a few tutorial prompts should really help conversions.

That's why 80% of developers use a web based VS Code/Cursor

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.

    > There was a policy that forbade having code from this monorepo on your laptop.

Regular engineers could use stacked diffs proficiently and regularly, without it being seen as a super advanced 10x engineer power user thing.

(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.

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.

But the downside is that you do get the Cider team constantly messaging and asking for reasons you won't switch. I gave feedback that their Vim bindings were broken (it would sometimes fail on holding down directional hjkl for no reason) but I'm not sure if they've fixed it since I left in 2023.

Cider is good for writing g3docs though.

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.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/google

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.

Meta on the other hand, really just has ads.

I re-read this several times trying to figure out where the irony was hidden. But... it's not there?

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-a...

More generally, a lot has been communicated on developer infrastructure at Google.

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.

They subsequently shuttered Atlanta and it would take five or more years before they'd allow engineers there again.

It was very Google. Lost some truly talented (Hi Bruce!) software engineers who would go on to make terrific software elsewhere.

Very handy for seeing a problem, quickly solving it (sending out a CL) marking it autosubmit and just moving on.

You are talking, i believe, about the support for blaze builds in intellij, which was fairly early on, as you point out.

I suspect Laurent is remembering some of the google3 mobile/android efforts, which were much later.

This is just on the "java" side, too. There were other plugins being built that were fairly specific to google3 support.

Blaze was started late 2005 or early 2006. Eclipse+IntelliJ was also at that time.

The IntelliJ blaze plugin was already started and out when I joined in 2007. My first job was to keep it from being rewritten yet another time, get teams to use it, and also keep it from being cancelled.

There is a similar internal product but the agentic part is shared between that and Cider.

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.

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.

Afterwards I was issued a 12" Pixelbook and it was surprisingly much more usable than I had expected! I could ssh into a Linux box for running builds and tests. Cider worked perfectly. It was snappy enough to serve as a thin client even on a 4K screen.

Sounds like all other editors were slow compared to Cider.

I'm a UXE, so I tend to use the same tools an external developer might. But I never got the impression that Cider was a recent development.

The keybindings with the web ide's always are a drag to me, actually the lack of good keybindings.

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.

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.