--- title: "A History of IDEs at Google" url: https://daily.dev/posts/a-history-of-ides-at-google-wby5ceelj source_url: https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/a-history-of-ides-at-google type: article source: "Hacker News" published: 2026-05-13T19:14:15.811Z updated: 2026-05-13T19:14:40.995Z tags: ["general-programming", "google", "devtools", "vscode"] reading_time: 8 upvotes: 6 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # A History of IDEs at Google **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 8 min read · 6 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary 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. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Death of the IDE?](https://daily.dev/posts/death-of-the-ide--7sujfgexb) · Elevate · 29 upvotes · 15 comments - [I stopped choosing between IDEs and built a hybrid workflow that uses the best of VS Code, Cursor, and Google Antigravity](https://daily.dev/posts/i-stopped-choosing-between-ides-and-built-a-hybrid-workflow-that-uses-the-best-of-vs-code-cursor-a-1l34qgyxo) · XDA Developers · 9 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#general-programming](https://daily.dev/tags/general-programming), [#google](https://daily.dev/tags/google), [#devtools](https://daily.dev/tags/devtools), [#vscode](https://daily.dev/tags/vscode) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/a-history-of-ides-at-google-wby5ceelj)