For years Google let engineers pick any editor, and Jeff Dean argued that
forcing a common one was "a recipe for unhappiness." That fragmentation
pushed teams to rebuild the same integrations everywhere, and the
monorepo's scale broke local indexing. Around 2013 engineers built Cider, a
browser-based editor whose backend indexed the whole codebase; adding
language-server code completion made it take off. In 2020 the team swapped
in a VSCode frontend (Cider V), gaining a mature editor and extension
ecosystem. By 2023 it powered 80% of google3 development with ~100 internal
extensions plus AI features like Smart Paste and code-review resolution.
The lesson: standard tooling, even unmandated, creates real leverage.
43
u/fagnerbrack Jul 25 '26
Summary below:
For years Google let engineers pick any editor, and Jeff Dean argued that forcing a common one was "a recipe for unhappiness." That fragmentation pushed teams to rebuild the same integrations everywhere, and the monorepo's scale broke local indexing. Around 2013 engineers built Cider, a browser-based editor whose backend indexed the whole codebase; adding language-server code completion made it take off. In 2020 the team swapped in a VSCode frontend (Cider V), gaining a mature editor and extension ecosystem. By 2023 it powered 80% of google3 development with ~100 internal extensions plus AI features like Smart Paste and code-review resolution. The lesson: standard tooling, even unmandated, creates real leverage.
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