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Maxim Saplin
Maxim Saplin

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Google's Slow Burn: Project IDX's Half-Year Echo

Is it confirmation bias or selective perception? Pieces of evidence of Google's organisational decay keep chasing me...

1.5 month ago I summed up my observations from 2023 connecting the accounts of 2 ex-googlers, AI developments and organisation evolution models.

2 days ago The Verge published an article where you can find a lot of negative sentiment towards the company with passages like that:

“Google culture changed dramatically last year with its first major round of layoffs, and I saw the writing on the wall,” the engineering director wrote in his note

Anyways, what does IDX has to do with that? In August I tested Project IDX - a VSCode clone by Google, running in the cloud, available via a web browser, giving an isolated remote dev environment (think GitHub Codespaces)... With a killer feature - next level AI Coding assistant. The impression was not good, the general IDE experience was mediocre and AI copilot was not good.

And as I discovered today while testing the system, I had submitted a few issues. I wouldn't have remembered that if it weren't for an email I received today.:

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Apparently, almost five months later, someone triaged my tickets and assigned them to the responsible party. I also checked the issue tracker and it seems there are over 250 tickets like mine, 7 in progress, 250+ open or assigned, and none done.

Short feedback loops, lean, agile...

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