The biggest question on my mind is how the use of Cider V is being affected by the officially ordained Antigravity.
Is the trendline starting to show that its adopting more Antigravity style tooling? or is this causing some sort of rift?
I had to laugh we he said it took a dozen people a couple years. That's a terribly small investment relative to the leverage over developer productivity, and pales in comparison to what eBay, IBM et al spent in similar large but specialized developer populations for integrated tooling.
I'd like to hear the perspective of the developer/user; the IDE provider has some incentive to take credit and imply high utilization reflects success rather than Google policy.
I'm interested in how tooling conditions developer expectations more broadly. I'd love to see a comparison of Linux OS development (all local+open+git, open but contributor hierarchy) vs Google (monorepo+required tooling, pre-allocated authority) from someone who's done both.
The last year I’ve been doing all my dev on a vscode VM thingy my company set up. It’s just been getting better and better. It’s like local dev but, tbh, better. It’s at the point where I don’t even install dev tooling locally any more at all. My computer is just a thin client.
The aspect I miss is the distributed compilation hinted at in the article. I remember back at the end of 1990s using distcc and things, but that never seemed to happen in the Java world and the tooling like maven etc is structured to make everything one long dependent chain. Shame.
"the advantages of having a single, extensible platform become even more obvious"
-- imagine the impact that could be unlocked if we got the Android and Chromium workflows into CiderV/Critique!
The article is framed around "all Googlers" but there is still a very large contingent of Googlers who cannot use these tools.
The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative.
I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be.
But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no?
Google is an ads company with a large amount of infrastructure to back it up.
Sure, the money is mostly in ads, but serving searches, AI, youtube, and all the rest at the scale Google does it requires a technical tour-de-force. Does Google do it better than everyone? Absolutely not. But it does it better than many.
Certainly it isn't the _only_ way to do it--other companies also manage to do it. But not all that many at the same scale. It's an existence proof that you can.
Most of what they do really really well, though, is accomplished by massive amounts of spending. That isn't a knock on it.
Consider that they spend more on trying to build up and support this central IDE than most companies dream of losing in productivity to not having this.
That most engineers use the same IDE at Google allows the company to collect a huge amount of telemetry about what features they are using, how often, and how much. Quite similar to the entire codebase being in a single repo, it allows a certain visibility into what is happening that just isn't possible other places.
When Google wanted engineers to use AI features, it turned them on in Cider-V by default. And if you turned them off, later updates would turn them back on. This is very good for your adoption metrics, but might not tell you exactly what you want to know about engineer happiness.
Such a dominant IDE also allows management to ignore the long-tail of users who aren't using it.
Visibility doesn't always get you value though. See the many companies that unify their ticketing to something like Jira, and end up running reports on in. The actual accuracy of the aggregates is rarely great, and instead leads to people doing "jira optimization" to make reports look good.
I once worked at a place where VPs were looking at sprint burndown charts, and asked what happened if the line didn't look a lot like the line expected by JIRA. The telemetry is therefore often a curse, as any metric becomes a target. How many companies today have KPIs about having automated code reviews, which are then ignored by the devs, because said reviews are just wrong on almost everything?
The learnings of Seeing Like A State don't apply just to governments.
I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
Very little development in Google3 happens locally. You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk, and this is true no matter what OS it runs. (Android and Chromium are different though.)
You have access to an extremely powerful remote workstation that from a UI perspective functions almost identically to a local workstation, via Chrome Remote Desktop. Plus, no one builds things locally, even on that machine. There is a huge, absolutely amazing distributed build system that everyone uses for everything. (Again, Android and Chromium are different.)
So you don't really need a powerful local machine. I held out for a long time--there were a lot of growing pains in the early days. But eventually it got really, really good.
When I joined, I started with a MacBook and lost it within three months :(
Afterwards I was issued a 12" Pixelbook and it was surprisingly much more usable than I had expected! I could ssh into a Linux box for running builds and tests. Cider worked perfectly. It was snappy enough to serve as a thin client even on a 4K screen.
Chromebooks are pretty much only good as thin clients, so much so that when I have the money I plan on building a powerful rackmount workstation and connecting to it via chromebook/box
How common? I'd wager most people still use a mac, followed second, but far by regular goobuntu laptops. Chromebooks goes 3rd because Windows is practically banned.
From what I'd heard contractors get issued as little as a Pixel tab and dock? Everything else is in the cloud (either gLinux desktops or cloud shells) AFAIK.
I do most of my development on a MacBook air and a Chromebook. The ~only thing I do from my local machine is ssh into a beefy workstation and use chrome.
Was there 2009-2014 and then again 2020-2026. I think there are a lot of aspects of IDE use and culture at Google that this post omits.
My recollection from 2009-2011 is that emacs and vim were the dominant editors (just as the TV show Silicon Valley depicted), and there was a decent-sized minority using Eclipse and Intellij, both of which had official support for Google tooling. The command line still largely ruled though, even though the official Google developer workstation was Goobuntu, Google-flavored Ubuntu. This reflected the overall developer population of the time.
I think Cider actually was invented a little earlier than the article describes. I have vague memories of some engineers experimenting with web-based IDEs that would integrated directly with Critique (the code-review software) as early as 2013-2014. Its use was not widespread when I left in 2014; there was still the impression that it wasn't powerful enough for daily driving.
When I came back in 2020, emacs/vim use was much lower, again probably reflecting differences in the general population of developers. Many more of the developers had been trained in the post-2010 developer ecosystem of VSCode, IntelliJ, etc, and this was reflected in tool usage at Google too. I'd say IntelliJ was the dominant IDE, with Cider a close second and Cider-V just starting to take market share. You still had to pry emacs and vim from a grizzled old veteran's hands.
By 2022 I'd transferred to an Android team, and Android Studio with Blaze was the dominant IDE, even as general IntelliJ usage in the company was falling. Cider just didn't have the same Android-specific support. Company-wide Cider-V was growing the fastest, taking market share from both IntelliJ and Cider-V.
By 2024 Cider-V was dominant and there started to be a concerted push to standardize on it, particularly since new AI agent tools were coming out and they couldn't be supported on all editors that Googlers wanted to use.
As of my departure in 2026, the company-wide push was to standardize on Antigravity [1], which, as I understand it, won a turf war within the developer tools org and got blessed as the "official" Google AI coding agent. This also has the effect of concentrating developer time dogfooding Google's external AI coding offering, which hopefully should improve its quality. There's still significant Cider-V usage, but it's dropping, and execs are pushing Antigravity hard.
How many new googlers use vim or emacs do you think? I can imagine at least a small amount of new vim people since vim will always be popular, but I would love to know if more than a handful of new googlers a year use emacs
Cider-V is very nice. It's VSCode so all the extensions just work - Vim mode, themes, etc.
It's also nice that it stores all my preferences in the cloud, so switching machines is seamless (helpful when my macbook broke a couple weeks ago and I had to use a loaner chromebook for a day).
It's also well integrated with google3 and codesearch, and seamlessly runs tests on remote machines with tmux integration and all.
Not all of google tooling is my favorite (like their source control), but the IDE is great.
The biggest question on my mind is how the use of Cider V is being affected by the officially ordained Antigravity. Is the trendline starting to show that its adopting more Antigravity style tooling? or is this causing some sort of rift?
I had to laugh we he said it took a dozen people a couple years. That's a terribly small investment relative to the leverage over developer productivity, and pales in comparison to what eBay, IBM et al spent in similar large but specialized developer populations for integrated tooling.
I'd like to hear the perspective of the developer/user; the IDE provider has some incentive to take credit and imply high utilization reflects success rather than Google policy.
I'm interested in how tooling conditions developer expectations more broadly. I'd love to see a comparison of Linux OS development (all local+open+git, open but contributor hierarchy) vs Google (monorepo+required tooling, pre-allocated authority) from someone who's done both.
The name Cider is not from Cloud IDE, stems from Critique (the code review), which is addressed via cr/ - Cider is the IDE in Critique: cIDEr.
The last year I’ve been doing all my dev on a vscode VM thingy my company set up. It’s just been getting better and better. It’s like local dev but, tbh, better. It’s at the point where I don’t even install dev tooling locally any more at all. My computer is just a thin client.
The aspect I miss is the distributed compilation hinted at in the article. I remember back at the end of 1990s using distcc and things, but that never seemed to happen in the Java world and the tooling like maven etc is structured to make everything one long dependent chain. Shame.
You want bazel. Once you've internalized the bazel (blaze) system, you want all builds and tests to work that way.
"the advantages of having a single, extensible platform become even more obvious" -- imagine the impact that could be unlocked if we got the Android and Chromium workflows into CiderV/Critique!
The article is framed around "all Googlers" but there is still a very large contingent of Googlers who cannot use these tools.
The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative.
I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be.
But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no?
Google is an ads company with a large amount of infrastructure to back it up.
Sure, the money is mostly in ads, but serving searches, AI, youtube, and all the rest at the scale Google does it requires a technical tour-de-force. Does Google do it better than everyone? Absolutely not. But it does it better than many.
Certainly it isn't the _only_ way to do it--other companies also manage to do it. But not all that many at the same scale. It's an existence proof that you can.
Most of what they do really really well, though, is accomplished by massive amounts of spending. That isn't a knock on it.
Consider that they spend more on trying to build up and support this central IDE than most companies dream of losing in productivity to not having this.
I am very opinionated, but I really don't like Cider V. I have been using neovim at Google since 2017 and it's been great.
I can't say for sure because I never used it, but neovim is the jam.
same! how do you deal with cloudtop latency though? sometimes my neovim is very slow and laggy because of the remote connection / network file system
I use a workstation specifically to improve latency. Needed to get approval at some point to get a refresh though.
like a workstation under your desk? is the latency bad when you remote access it not in the office?
How can they post this obviously internal thing from Google? How can they get clearance from security/IP?
The thing I most love about Cider-V is that moving between it and (often remote) VSCode when working outside google3 becomes mostly painless.
That most engineers use the same IDE at Google allows the company to collect a huge amount of telemetry about what features they are using, how often, and how much. Quite similar to the entire codebase being in a single repo, it allows a certain visibility into what is happening that just isn't possible other places.
When Google wanted engineers to use AI features, it turned them on in Cider-V by default. And if you turned them off, later updates would turn them back on. This is very good for your adoption metrics, but might not tell you exactly what you want to know about engineer happiness.
Such a dominant IDE also allows management to ignore the long-tail of users who aren't using it.
Visibility doesn't always get you value though. See the many companies that unify their ticketing to something like Jira, and end up running reports on in. The actual accuracy of the aggregates is rarely great, and instead leads to people doing "jira optimization" to make reports look good.
I once worked at a place where VPs were looking at sprint burndown charts, and asked what happened if the line didn't look a lot like the line expected by JIRA. The telemetry is therefore often a curse, as any metric becomes a target. How many companies today have KPIs about having automated code reviews, which are then ignored by the devs, because said reviews are just wrong on almost everything?
The learnings of Seeing Like A State don't apply just to governments.
Initially Cider was branded as a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs.
Now, ironically with so many extensions and LLM computing, users seem to forget that they chose Cider because of its lightweight.
Everything turns into the thing it was set out to replace.
I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.
Very little development in Google3 happens locally. You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk, and this is true no matter what OS it runs. (Android and Chromium are different though.)
You have access to an extremely powerful remote workstation that from a UI perspective functions almost identically to a local workstation, via Chrome Remote Desktop. Plus, no one builds things locally, even on that machine. There is a huge, absolutely amazing distributed build system that everyone uses for everything. (Again, Android and Chromium are different.)
So you don't really need a powerful local machine. I held out for a long time--there were a lot of growing pains in the early days. But eventually it got really, really good.
Could you even put all of google3 on local disk if it were allowed?!? You'd need quite a RAID array. I suspect it'd be almost impossible in practice.
What is Google3?
The mono repo that holds most source code (pronounced google-tree). It's referenced in the OP.
I've never heard that pronunciation.
When I joined, I started with a MacBook and lost it within three months :(
Afterwards I was issued a 12" Pixelbook and it was surprisingly much more usable than I had expected! I could ssh into a Linux box for running builds and tests. Cider worked perfectly. It was snappy enough to serve as a thin client even on a 4K screen.
Chromebooks are pretty much only good as thin clients, so much so that when I have the money I plan on building a powerful rackmount workstation and connecting to it via chromebook/box
How common? I'd wager most people still use a mac, followed second, but far by regular goobuntu laptops. Chromebooks goes 3rd because Windows is practically banned.
Since it's mostly browser tabs, as long as you have ample memory (eg 16gb) it's good enough.
From what I'd heard contractors get issued as little as a Pixel tab and dock? Everything else is in the cloud (either gLinux desktops or cloud shells) AFAIK.
I do most of my development on a MacBook air and a Chromebook. The ~only thing I do from my local machine is ssh into a beefy workstation and use chrome.
Do Java engineer at Google not use IntelliJ?
Was there 2009-2014 and then again 2020-2026. I think there are a lot of aspects of IDE use and culture at Google that this post omits.
My recollection from 2009-2011 is that emacs and vim were the dominant editors (just as the TV show Silicon Valley depicted), and there was a decent-sized minority using Eclipse and Intellij, both of which had official support for Google tooling. The command line still largely ruled though, even though the official Google developer workstation was Goobuntu, Google-flavored Ubuntu. This reflected the overall developer population of the time.
I think Cider actually was invented a little earlier than the article describes. I have vague memories of some engineers experimenting with web-based IDEs that would integrated directly with Critique (the code-review software) as early as 2013-2014. Its use was not widespread when I left in 2014; there was still the impression that it wasn't powerful enough for daily driving.
When I came back in 2020, emacs/vim use was much lower, again probably reflecting differences in the general population of developers. Many more of the developers had been trained in the post-2010 developer ecosystem of VSCode, IntelliJ, etc, and this was reflected in tool usage at Google too. I'd say IntelliJ was the dominant IDE, with Cider a close second and Cider-V just starting to take market share. You still had to pry emacs and vim from a grizzled old veteran's hands.
By 2022 I'd transferred to an Android team, and Android Studio with Blaze was the dominant IDE, even as general IntelliJ usage in the company was falling. Cider just didn't have the same Android-specific support. Company-wide Cider-V was growing the fastest, taking market share from both IntelliJ and Cider-V.
By 2024 Cider-V was dominant and there started to be a concerted push to standardize on it, particularly since new AI agent tools were coming out and they couldn't be supported on all editors that Googlers wanted to use.
As of my departure in 2026, the company-wide push was to standardize on Antigravity [1], which, as I understand it, won a turf war within the developer tools org and got blessed as the "official" Google AI coding agent. This also has the effect of concentrating developer time dogfooding Google's external AI coding offering, which hopefully should improve its quality. There's still significant Cider-V usage, but it's dropping, and execs are pushing Antigravity hard.
[1] https://antigravity.google/
How many new googlers use vim or emacs do you think? I can imagine at least a small amount of new vim people since vim will always be popular, but I would love to know if more than a handful of new googlers a year use emacs
Cider-V is very nice. It's VSCode so all the extensions just work - Vim mode, themes, etc.
It's also nice that it stores all my preferences in the cloud, so switching machines is seamless (helpful when my macbook broke a couple weeks ago and I had to use a loaner chromebook for a day).
It's also well integrated with google3 and codesearch, and seamlessly runs tests on remote machines with tmux integration and all.
Not all of google tooling is my favorite (like their source control), but the IDE is great.