Almost all companies today are thinking about integrating AI, and nearly every app has AI capabilities. Similarly, Google faces tough competition in many areas, especially from Microsoft. Recently, Microsoft released Microsoft CoPilot X for its development environment, Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
With a slightly different approach, Google focuses on full-stack development, exploring how its coding-based AI can be advanced. For example, Codey and the PaLM 2 Model Power Studio Bot are used in Android Studio, and Duet is used in Google Cloud.
Google also has a developer environment called Project IDX, which is accessible through your browser. It’s an AI-enabled, browser-based development environment for full-stack web and multi-platform apps. Project IDX supports multiple frameworks, such as JavaScript and Dart, with support for Python, Go, and others in the works.
What’s Under the Hood of Project IDX?
This isn’t something Google created from scratch, but a new integrated development environment (IDE) leveraging open-source Visual Studio Code. Project IDX aims to boost developers’ productivity, helping them write faster and higher-quality code as well.
At its I/O 2023 event, Google announced its work on AI-based models, including PaLM 2 and a dedicated AI model called Codey for programming tasks. This provides better code completion support. Codey and PaLM 2 models are also used in Android Studio, Duet in Google Cloud, and more.
For beginners, Project IDX is quite useful. You can ask general coding questions or questions related to your specific code. You can also understand the code by asking the app to explain it and getting contextual code actions like adding comments. As a cloud-based IDE integrated into your Project IDX, Google has integrated it with Google’s own Firebase Hosting and Google Cloud Functions.
Challenges and opportunities
The IDX chatbot isn’t working as smoothly as expected and cannot manipulate existing codes directly. Unlike Codespace, AWS Cloud9, GitHub, and Amazon, which offer cloud-based development environments, Project IDX doesn’t recognize the codes selected in the editors. However, Google offers Cloud Code IDE Plugins to bring code to every popular IDE.
Developers can use existing codes from the GitHub repository. Each workspace will have access to a Linux-based Virtual Machine (VM), and soon, it will also have Android and iOS simulators embedded in the browser. This is still in the early stages of development, and Google is constantly working on Project IDX to improve and add new capabilities over time. It could build a nice sandbox for Google to showcase its AI capabilities to coders. However, it remains to be seen how useful it will be as it turns into a full-blown IDE that developers will want to use for their projects.
AI-Based Browser Development Experience
Its user interface is quite similar to Microsoft Visual Studio, marking a push from Google for a browser-based developer environment. With its help, programmers can build, manage, and deploy new code for full-stack web and multi-platform applications that support popular frameworks and languages. You can also import your existing GitHub project into Project IDX.
Similar to others, Google uses Code OSS for this, which is linked to Microsoft’s Visual Studio repository on GitHub. Thanks to this, future developments of Project IDX will allow developers to code and save anywhere and anytime. This has been achieved by assigning a Linux-based VM in the Google Cloud to each Project IDX workspace.
Project IDX has a built-in web preview to preview your apps and can utilize fully configured Android emulators and embedded iOS simulators directly from the browser. Recently, Project IDX was announced as a subsume of Flutter and Google’s other cross-platform developer solutions.
Stack has also released its Overflow AI to help programmers with their codes. Given the current development progress, Google is still quite behind its competitors. Microsoft’s GitHub CoPilot, Amazon’s CodeWhisper, and other similar AI coding features are already available. What do you think about Project IDX? Will it catch up to its competitors? Let’s discuss this in the comments!