This new IDE from Google is seriously revolutionary.
Project IDX is in a completely different league from competitors like VS Code or Cursor or whatever.
It’s a modern IDE in the cloud — packed with AI features.
I was not surprised to see this sort of thing coming from Google — with their deep-seated hatred for local desktop apps.
Loading your projects from GitHub and then install dependencies instantly without any local downloading.
It’s a serious game changer if your local-based IDE is hoarding all your resources in your normie PC — like VS Code does a lot.
Tari for the last time, VS Code is a code editor and not an IDE!! Learn the difference for goodness sake!!!
Ah yes, a code editor that eats up several gigabytes of RAM and gobbles up all your battery life that your OS itself starts complaining bitterly.
Such a lightweight code editor.
Most certainly not an IDE.
Anyway, so I could really see the difference between VS Code and IDX in my past PC.
Like when it came to indexing files in a big project, to enable language features like Intellisense & variable rename.
VS Code would sometimes take forever to load and it might not even load fully — bug?
I would have to reload the window multiple times for the editor to finally get it right.
But with IDX it was amazing. The difference was clear.
Once I loaded the project I had the all the features ready. Everything happened instantly.
Because all the processing was no longer happening in a weak everyday PC but now in a massively powerful data center with unbelievable speeds.
Having a remote server take care of the heavy lifting drastically cuts down on the work your local PC has to handle.
Including for project debugging that take lots of resources — like Android Emulator tests.
The Android Studio Emulator couldn’t even run in my past PC without crashing miserably, so seeing the IDX emulator spring into life effortlessly with near-zero delay was pretty exciting.
Templates are another awesome convenience — just start up any project with all the boilerplate you need — you don’t even need to fire up the CLI.
And no you’re stuck with those templates there — you can just start from a blank template and customize it as much as you want — like you would in local editors.
Another huge part of IDX is AI of course — but lol don’t think they’ll let you choose between models like all those others.
It’s Gemini or nothing. Take it or leave it.
Not like it’s nearly as bad as some people say — or bad at all.
And look, it indexes your code to give you responses from all the files in the codebase — something that’s becoming a standard feature you’d expect across editors.
And it looks like it has some decent multi-step agentic AI editing features.
I was impressed — It tried creating the React app and it failed because there were already files in the folder — then see what happened…
It intelligently knew that it should delete all the files in the project and then try again.
It automatically handled a failure case that I didn’t tell it about beforehand and got back on track.
And guess what?
After it tried deleting the files and it didn’t work — cause I guess .idx can’t be deleted — it then decided to create an empty subfolder to create the React project in.
I never said anything about what to do about non-empty files in the folder in this case, it just knew. It didn’t keep trying blindly for something that just wasn’t working.
Pretty impressive.
Okay but it did fail partially miserably when it came to create the React file.
It put the CSS code in the JSX file where it was obviously not supposed to be.
So clearly whatever model they’re using for this still can’t compare to Claude. Cause Claude-powered Windsurf would never make this mistake.
But not like the CSS itself was bad.
But of course this will only continue to improve. And Clause will also get even better — as you might have seen from the recent Claude 3.7 release.
So even if you stick with your local IDE, IDX is still a solid, rapidly improving, AI-powered alternative for writing code faster than ever.