Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

May 15, 2024 ndowd

At it’s annual Google I/O 2024 developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced that Project IDX, the company’s next-gen, AI-centric browser-based development environment, is now in open beta. The company first launched it as an invite-only service gated by a waitlist in August.

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

“As AI becomes more prevalent, the complexities that come with deploying all of that really becomes harder, becomes greater, and we wanted to help solve that challenge,” said Jeanine Banks, Google’s VP and general manager for Developer X and the company’s head of developer relations. “That’s why we built project IDX, a multi-platform development experience that makes building applications fast and easy. Project IDX makes it really frictionless to get going with your preferred framework or language with easy-to-use templates like Next.js, Astro, Flutter, Dart, Angular, Go and more.”

With this update, Google is adding an integration with the Google Maps Platform into the IDE, helping add geolocation features to its apps, as well as integrations with the Chrome Dev Tools and Lighthouse to help debug applications. Soon, Google will also enable deploying apps to Cloud Run, Google Cloud’s serverless platform for running front- and back-end services.

The development environment will also integrate with Checks, Google’s AI-powered compliance platform, which itself is going from beta to general availability on Tuesday.

But of course, IDX is not just about building AI-enabled applications — it is also about using AI in the coding process. To enable this, IDX includes many of what have now become standard features like code completion and a chat assistant sidebar, as well as innovative features like the ability to highlight a snippet of code and — similar to generative fill in Photoshop — ask Google’s Gemini model to change a code snippet.

Whenever Gemini suggests code, it does link back to the original source and its associated license.

Project IDX, which Google built with the open source Visual Studio Code at its core, also integrates with GitHub, making it easy to integrate with existing workflows. In one of IDX’s latest releases, Google also added built-in iOS and Android emulators for mobile developers right into the IDE.