Recently, I saw that Google has also released an AI IDE that competes with Cursor, named IDX, so I decided to give it a try. Experience link:
https://idx.dev
The domain name is quite nice, but the name is a bit abstract 😅. According to the instructions on the website, Project IDX is an AI-assisted Web IDE for full-stack, multi-platform application development in the cloud. IDX supports a wide range of frameworks, languages, and services, and integrates with Google products (like Firebase). The AI here is naturally Google’s ancestral Gemini.
When creating a new project, there are quite a few project types to choose from. Of course, the top recommendation is still Google’s own tech stack, such as Angular, Flutter, and Go. I chose a Go project to test it out since I happened to modify a piece of Go code that evening, so let’s see how IDX performs as a Web IDE.
Of course, there are two highlights:
-
Cloud development for Android native projects. This is indeed attractive because I deeply despise bulky IDEs like Android Studio. If there could be a lightweight Web IDE, I would be interested in trying it out.
-
You can directly pull existing projects from Git repositories. I thought about it and figured that a Web IDE would probably support this 😅.
Guidance for creating a Go project.
Alas, when I opened it, it looked completely like a web version of VSCode! On the right side is a simulated browser where you can view the output of the Go service in real-time. Unfortunately, after testing a few lines of code, the auto-completion feature was very weak, slow, and not intelligent. It is nowhere near as good as the domestic Doubao MarsCode. Moreover, it lacks the ability to predict comments. I immediately lost interest in continuing the experience. I feel that the Web IDE of MarsCode probably has similar functionalities, but at least in terms of code AI completion, it should be much stronger than Google’s.