Project IDX

Paraphrased from the blog article, "How we built Project IDX: A high-level overview":

Project IDX is an experimental browser-based development experience that Google has designed to make the end-to-end multi-platform app development workflow faster and more frictionless.

IDX was built on Code OSS, the Visual Studio Code product that Microsoft has open-sourced under the standard MIT license.

Every IDX workspace comes with a full Debian-based VM and provides full access to the terminal so you can install your favorite tools. VMs automatically hibernate and activate as needed. IDX workspaces are built on top of Google's Cloud Workstations offering which enable provisioning and scaling of VMs.

System software such as tools for running services, scheduling jobs (such as Supervisor), and other custom written jobs such as preview server are packaged within custom Docker containers.

With IDX, you can get going in a Flutter environment with just one click instead of wasting hours trying to set up the dev environment.

When you create a new workspace, Google Cloud Workstation brings up our container and executes the entrypoint script responsible for setting up everything you need to start coding.

It promotes collaboration and sharing by making it effortless for users to engage in activities like pair-programming and sharing code previews.

Project IDX has smart code completion, an assistive chatbot, and contextual code actions like "add comments" and "explain this code." 

AI features of IDX are powered by codey and Gemini.

IDX uses Nix package manager and build system to provide reproducibility, atomic upgrades and rollbacks, isolation, sandboxing, and package versioning and conflict resolution.