A History of IDEs at Google: From Jeff Dean's Emacs to Cider to AI-First Antigravity

r/programming·medium signal

A detailed blog post by Laurent Le Brun chronicles Google's internal IDE evolution: from fragmented personal preferences in 2011 (Jeff Dean dismissing common IDEs), to Cider (web-based editor reaching 80% of engineers), to VSCode integration in 2020, to the AI-first Antigravity IDE (built after acquiring Windsurf for $2.4B). The 253-upvote r/programming post resonates as the industry watches AI reshape developer tooling.