A History of IDEs at Google

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Google historically allowed engineers to choose their own IDEs, leading to fragmentation, with senior figures like Jeff Dean initially believing a uniform IDE was unnecessary.
Internal tooling projects emerged to integrate Google-specific tools (like Bazel) into various IDEs, with some projects becoming officially staffed, such as the IntelliJ integration team formed around 2015.
In 2016, a cloud-based IDE named Cider was developed, initially popular for quick edits by technical writers but later gaining features like code completion via language-server protocol, appealing to engineers for its speed and backend indexing.
In 2020, the Cider team shifted to using VSCode as the frontend, creating Cider V, which leveraged VSCode's mature ecosystem and extensibility, though it required significant integration work over a couple of years.
By 2023, Cider V was used for 80% of development in Google's main codebase, offering strong integrations (e.g., version control, code review) and enabling internal extensions, with AI features enhancing productivity and highlighting the benefits of a standardized IDE platform.

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