Project IDX | Hacker News Reader

Project IDX

idx.dev

64 pointshasheddan17 comments

Looks promising - I’m a fan of the general pattern of taking dev tool inventions from big companies (in this case Google) and bringing them to developers everywhere.

How are you able to determine whether this is promising? There's no details at all, just vague marketing copy. There's no actual screenshots or videos of how the workflows an interactions work, just mockups. There's no indication of why this would better than the alternative except that it's "AI".

I'm sure the web page is enough to populate their waitlist and thus met its foals, but as a HN submission this feels awful. There's just nothing of substanance to talk about.

The feature that I'm most interested in is the ios emulator that will be available through the browser. Dealing with ios development with neither a mac nor iphone is annoying at best.

So far, I'm using Flutter and codemagic to do builds, relying on web and android debugging during development, and friends' bug reports through testflight for ios dealbreakers. Being able to debug ios during development would be nice.

I’m a fan of experiments putting editors in the browser, similar to what google does in house.

There are tons of hosted versions of VS Code.

Google service that doesn't allow you to join the waitlist with a `+` gmail address.

If you have a gmail address, you already failed.

This looks like something that targets independent developers. I know this won't be allowed in my organization. There are so many unanswered questions. Where would the code (or git repo) be hosted? Can we host on-prem? How will Google use our code - to train their AI models, or to make outright clones and keep them forever? What about the T&C and what about privacy? Who can see our code? What prevents Google from just cloning a project that is innovative, since their AI would already have the dataset and code?

Would it work like the no-code platforms where you're 100% dependent on those providers to even make your software run?

I only see red flags for corporate use. Sure, this may be nice to play with a few ideas, but I would definitely not trust it to host and build production software.

2025: blog post announcing the end of idx.

Sarcasm aside, it's a good rule of thumb to depend on a Google service if it is part of their enterprise suite a la Cloud/Workspace.

As Google products go, this seems very lightly branded. Just the monotone G logo at the bottom. I’m sure they’re not hiding or shying away from ownership but this seems unusual.

Also, if Apple did something like this, maybe not web-based initially; how much data would someone need to download to do use an AI code assistant on device only?

No thanks.

1) Not enough details.

2) If it's down, I'm fiddling my fingers.

3) Not everything needs to be online.

4) You going to use my code to train the AI? If not, how do I know you're not. If so, umm, just NO.

5) ETC...

it appears the blog post caught traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37052694

Great, can I run this in docker?

Will Flutter be an first-class citizen?

so is this like replit + AI or github codespaces with copilot?

Which is weird because google has a partnership with replit, unless replit has a hand in this project. If not, pretty ruthless.

replit has ai

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