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Maxim Saplin
Maxim Saplin

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Project IDX by Google 〉Web, Flutter, AI... It's not there yet 💩

Google has announced their take on developer tooling and AI coding. Project IDX is available as public preview.

What they did was wrapping VSCode into own cloud hosted environment, setting up templates for Web and Flutter projects, adding AI coding assistant and giving promises of frictionless and more productive dev environment...

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The moment I imported my Flutter GitHub repo I faced a myriad of problems:

  1. Enable Nix for this workspace option in the import dialog was breaking everything, IDE failed to start
  2. With Nix disabled I got my project imported and opened in Google hosted VSCode (or 'Code - OSS' to be correct)
  3. It was very slow (loading files, getting packages, building)
  4. Linux, Android, Web are available as devices, though:
    • Linux doesn't work, requires CMake to be installed (and you can't do apt install)
    • Android starts building only after you do flutter upgrade -force - older version of Flutter is installed by default and has older gradle version
    • Android, even when it gets built there's no UI of the emulator seen anywhere
    • Web, well, after starting the app you get a pop-up window with a preview, though it is empty
  5. IDX AI - in the intro video there was demo of AI knowing codebase (there's an extension setting I enabled). Tried asking about my solution, got nothing

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Tried it with Chrome.

Project IDX is very early in development, see no point using it now.

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