this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?

These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity. We felt this pain at Google, so we started Project IDX, an experimental new initiative aimed at bringing your entire full-stack, multiplatform app development workflow to the cloud.

Project IDX gets you into your dev workflow in no time, backed by the security and scalability of Google Cloud.

Project IDX lets you preview your full-stack, multiplatform apps as your users would see them, with upcoming support for built-in multi-browser web previews, Android emulators, and iOS simulators.

As a Vim fanatic, I can't say I'll ever feel comfortable working in a browser, but some parts of IDX seem interesting. I wonder what the implications are for proprietary code.

I do think it solves an interesting problem where you're working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don't want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.

It reminds me vaguely of Shells.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hell no, no way I'd trust Google with my code. Personal or otherwise. Let me guess this would work only in Chrome.

[–] Hector_McG 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

All your codebase are belong to us.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hell no, no way I’d trust Google with my code. Personal or otherwise.

Ditto. But at the risk of playing devil's advocate, if you were writing free software code you were going to stick on a code forge somewhere anyway, would you still be against it?

Are there Google services that only work in Chrome? I don't use any of them, so I don't know. I do know Google is generally less annoying than Microsoft in that department.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Are there Google services that only work in Chrome?

this is the gateway to this

I do know Google is generally less annoying than Microsoft in that department.

how this? through Firefox I experience ms websites the same as with edge. google websites? experience is full of small differences from chrome

Edit:formatting

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

how this? through Firefox I experience ms websites the same as with edge. google websites? experience is full of small differences from chrome

Firefox is my main browser. In my experience, Microsoft services don't work at all on Firefox. I can't say I use much of either company's services, but Google tends to be more lax in some departments. For example, the Google Pixel is the only Android device that allows you to securely unlock the bootloader and install another operating system on it, rather than forcing you to root the device.

I'm not a fan of either company, but I get the impression Google is less actively hostile toward their customers than Microsoft. For the most part.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Microsoft don't allow Bing chat to run in anything but Edge. I don't know if there are others, but that's the one I've noticed recently.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?

What if your dev environment could disappear completely one day when we get bored of maintaining it after it doesn't immediately displace github?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That would be annoying.

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[–] dukk 63 points 1 year ago

What if your dev experience was entirely in the cloud?

No. Just no.

Fuck no.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Cringe. Not everything needs to be offloaded to someone else's computer.

And frankly, why would I pay some sort of fee (which they will eventually charge, even if they don't right now) for the "privilege" of having rustc fight for execution time on a vCPU somewhere in California?

Every day that passes I lean further towards pursuing a career in embedded.

[–] Hector_McG 27 points 1 year ago

It’s s toss-up as to whether they start to charge for it, or whether they ditch it after a couple of years, like they have done with so many other side-projects.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (8 children)

These days, launching applications means navigating an endless sea of complexity.

  • Meta + D
  • "vsco"
  • Enter

Damn, I'm exhausted, why does launching an application have to be so hard?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

CTRL + T terminal opens

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Meta+e .. emacsclient pops up instantly

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Hey, there's always double-clicking the icon too. Now that is exhausting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago
  • ctrl + t
  • nvim
  • calls ambulance
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[–] pythoneer 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even if it's very cool, the problem I have with newer google products is that they might just kill it at any time, even if it's successful.

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[–] yogsototh 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't see how this could be positive for any Software developer in the long run. I totally see how this could be positive for CEO/CTO, Project Managers, in the long run, and I see a few short term advantages for Software developers.

Let's be clear, I saw that coming since Microsoft bought Github, and I am scared by the direction this is taking. The end goal is to move more and more control and power to non-software people about Software development.

By forcing every developer to not use their own tools this will have a lot of advantage for CEO/CTOs but this is terrible for software developers:

  1. telemetry: they will try to find a formula to assess who are the best performer in a team. And as with SEO, any formula could be gamed, the best at this game, will not be the best software developers, but the one that will learn how to cheat.
  2. global team tooling enforcement: vim vs emacs etc... ? Forget about it, the only way to work on a project will be via this unique allowed editor.
  3. assets protection: impossible to download the code on your local computer to use external tools on it. The only way to have analysis tools will be via these "allowed" analysis tools. This will make code analysis and experimentation a lot more difficult.
  4. Locked by promoting vendor-specific applications. As you will focus to make your code/app/product work only for Google Cloud for example, you will naturally use Google-Cloud-only features that will make your code difficult (or impossible) to move to another Cloud provider, or god-forbid, host your product on a non-cloud or private made cloud.

And I can think of other possible drawbacks but my comment is already long enough.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a simple method for deciding whether or not to use something.

  • Is it a “cloud service”?
  • Is it made by google?

If either of these is a yes, I look for something else

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So, like 18 months before this gets added to the Google graveyard?

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] jim_stark 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Aren't we past that point?

VS Code is Electron based and it can even be deployed in the cloud. We are talking about one of the most popular IDEs.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

You are talking about transmitting every bit of code you write to the internet. Go ahead if you want that, I don't

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Google probably want that sweet, sweet development stages of the code, every interaction at debugging, documentation editing, everything, to train their AI.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

This is wrong on so many levels, I cannot fathom where I could start talking about it.

  • private us company
  • feeding their ai just to eventually negate myself the chance of those small side projects that pay small money
  • us company
  • chromium browsers
  • governments shouldn't allow for source code, as trivial as it may be, to be centralized in another nation
  • us corporation
  • google (in my experience) devastating ux, ui, docs
  • go and try to use aws, azure, you name it services (this ip/fqdm doesn't seem to be part of google services! would you like to try out or service? start with our free plan with the performance of a C64, and choose to upgrade whenever you want!)
  • us based private corp
  • chromium browsers
  • this functionality is now deprecated (rewrite all of your f**** code, you absolute dumbass...) Ugh...
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

You know they'll be saving every line of code and analyzing it and feeding it into their ML models.

Fuck that. Anything I do is staying right here with me unless it's something I choose to share on GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I do think it solves an interesting problem where you’re working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.

You can just push the changes to a different branch and then merge it to your normal feature branch later. Takes like 5 seconds.

[–] sirdorius 6 points 1 year ago

Exactly. And if you you're worried about dirtying your commit history with an unfinished commit, just rebase it out later.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.

Someone needs to tell this man about rebasing.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

"Hey you guys, come and use our totally free online thing. We promise we won't use anything you do for our own gains! Pinky swear!"

[–] muhyb 22 points 1 year ago

Cloud is a plague.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Mmh. Don't like that

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think a lot of comments are looking at this thing the wrong way. This is not a feature that is designed to make things easier or nicer for developers. The target audience for this is managers.

Managers don't want you to have a unique configuration for "your workflow", they want a uniform workflow that they can just plug you into. They want to replace the unique person that is you with a corporate drone representation of you, as they have done with so many jobs already. When they can streamline your work down to " here is a ticket, push that button and you are ready to go", they reduce the rampup time of putting someone new into your seat to a fraction of what it was before.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A good manager knows that an employee is productive whenever they're comfortable. With that said, I agree. This is an excuse for upper management and C-suite executives to make employee-hostile policies.

Instead of buying developers a powerful workstation and letting them do install their own software and create workflows that they’re comfortable with, they can be handed a Chromebook and told to start producing code like the code monkey they're seen as.

The "benefits" will be touted as:

  • Cheaper hardware costs.
    Developers don't need a powerful machine to run tooling or compile software, and cloud IDEs and build servers are pay-as-used. The reasoning would be: paying $300 for a Chromebook and $25 monthly is cheaper than $1200 for a new machine every few years.

  • Reduced support burden.
    If developers don't need to install their own software, they won't need to submit requests to IT.

  • Infrastructure security.
    Less software is less surface area. Since all the developer's software is hosted in the cloud, their computers don't need to run anything but a VPN, web browser, and restricted user permissions.

  • "Productivity"
    Browsing Lemmy on company time? Not anymore! Your development machines are distraction-free, and we made sure of that with our root CA and enterprise policy settings.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Things have been headed this way for a loooong time. That said, unless I can self-host something like this, I'm not interested.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I might be open to the idea, but it would need to be a trustworthy company that doesn't cancel stuff left and right. An ide would be too annoying to switch constantly to take this risk.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

The sad truth is that people are stupid enough to use this.

[–] tatterdemalion 12 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I do think it solves an interesting problem where you’re working on your desktop and decide to move to your laptop and continue working on the same codebase, but don’t want to commit early so you can pull down the changes to your laptop.

This has been a solved problem for decades. SSH.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What's bad about committing early? Do people not know about --amend?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I'm not able to self-host it a la VS Codium, then it's very much a honeypot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like for stealing your code?

Also vscodium vs vscode-server. What's the difference? I've heard the ladder has Spyware or something?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Yummy yummy give me your codei !!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

We don't need everything in the cloud or in a browser

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is a play against VSCode and the developer moat MS/GitHub have built right? In which case, go at it I guess.

The Shell -> Mainframe style IDE has been coming for a while. And makes some sense, however much of a local app person you are. I’m kinda surprised Google hadn’t made a move yet. On which, it’s suspicious that this is probably driven or associated with AI.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

VS Code also supports the devcontainter format, where you can get a well-defined fully configured dev environments locally or remotely. It also automatically asks whether you want to use them if the project has a devcontainer.json file.

So you can get the benefit of a standardized environment without going all-in on cloud.

https://containers.dev/

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

On which, it’s suspicious that this is probably driven or associated with AI.

The landing page mentions this:

Code faster with generative AI

Work quickly and efficiently with AI assistance from Google built-in, including code generation, code completion, translating code between programming languages, explaining code, and more, all powered by Codey, a foundational AI model trained on code and built on PaLM 2.

I left it out of the main post because I um, didn't think it was particularly newsworthy.

[–] philm 4 points 1 year ago

So cancer + a different form of cancer = ...?

I really don't get why you want an editor to be based on DOM, it feels just like sluggish ... cancer...

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