Google is working on its own IDE that works in a web browser and can automatically generate parts of code with artificial intelligence. Project IDX should work on the basis of Codey, Google’s counterpart of GitHub CoPilot, which works on Google’s language model PaLM 2.
Google mentions the project in an announcement IDX. There is now a website available, but the product itself does not yet exist. There is only a waiting list for developers to register for. It is not yet known when the alpha version will be available to testers.
IDX will be an integrated developer environment, or IDE, that works in the web browser. The tool is mainly aimed at app developers. IDX has integrated several frameworks. Google specifically mentions Angular, Next.js, React, Svelte, and Flutter as options, but there are more. Support for Python and Go should also be added later. Furthermore, it should be possible to import GitHub applications into the tool.
In the ide, developers can have AI generate code using Codey. That is an artificial intelligence model similar to GitHub’s Copilot. Google already showed Codey earlier this year during the I/O developer conference. Codey is based on PaLM 2, the large language model that also runs Google’s AI chatbot Bard. Developers retain the copyright to their code in IDX. Google writes in the terms and conditions not whether the company may train its own LLMs based on code written in the ide.