A former Google engineer recounts the evolution of IDE tooling at Google from 2011 to 2024. Starting from a fragmented ecosystem where engineers used whatever editor they preferred, the story traces the rise of Cider — an internal cloud-based IDE — from a simple web editor for technical writers to the dominant development environment used by 80% of Google engineers. The pivotal shift came in 2020 when the team adopted VSCode as the frontend for Cider V, inheriting its mature extension ecosystem while keeping Google's powerful backend for indexing the massive monorepo. The post highlights the productivity gains from standardizing on a single IDE, including easier AI feature integration, 100+ internal extensions, and tighter integration with Google-specific tools like code review and version control.
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