A History of IDEs at Google

Google’s long-running “let everyone use whatever editor they want” era is getting a juicy rewrite, and commenters are treating it like a workplace drama with keyboards. In Laurent Le Brun’s post, the big reveal is that Google went from a messy mix of coding tools to heavily backing its own browser-based option, Cider, because one giant shared codebase is easier to handle when people are using similar tools. Translation for non-tech readers: instead of every employee customizing their own desk, Google started handing out nearly the same desk to everyone.

The community reaction? Instant split-screen chaos. One camp is basically saying, “Honestly, this is convenient.” A former user praised how easy it was to jump between Google’s tool and regular VS Code outside the company, which is about as close to a love letter as software comments get. But the spicier crowd zoomed in on the unsettling part: if most workers use the same editor, Google can watch exactly which features people use and then flip on new tools — including artificial intelligence helpers — for everyone at once. That sparked the biggest eyebrow-raise in the thread.

Then came the side drama: commenters were weirdly stunned that engineers at Google often use Chromebooks, with one basically asking, “Wait, the world’s biggest tech company doesn’t give everyone a monster laptop?” And another commenter threw cold water on the company-unity storyline entirely, pointing out that lots of Googlers still can’t use these tools. So yes, the article is about software history — but the comments turned it into a battle over convenience, control, and whether “one tool for all” is genius or just expensive corporate babysitting.