Firebase made an IDE?

Firebase just launched an AI app builder. This should be huge, but it's got some problems...

SOURCE

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[MarioXCB]

Everytime I hear from Firebase its someone or some company accidentally leaking their keys and their whole database

[jonasmoor]

I love how he tests everything but basically none of them work.

[MarwanKingAI]

Tried it ourselves and hit a lot of the same walls. Firebase Studio has so much potential if they just dial in the backend flow; auth, DB, all the glue stuff. Thanks for all the hard work you do Theo! 🔥

[jackcottonbrown]

The trick is you need to add at the end of your prompt "Make it work or you go to jail"

[bibarud]

It's using Gemini 2.0 flash, so its code output isn't very good. There's an option to use your own API key and Gemini 2.5 Pro; the output then becomes much better.

[supbrotv]

The first time I discovered bolt I was able to create a fully functioning web based sampler/drum machine within a few hours of writing prompts and no code input, to say that I was impressed would be an under statement. That was the first and the last time bolt could build anything at all. It all went downhill from there. Now it cant build the same application using the same prompts.

[ShootingUtah]

Thank god for the hope of job security! We'll all be setting up auth for AI slop apps.

[yubtubtime]

One-shot vibe coding is a myth. What does work is more like grind coding where you, as programmer, focus on directing the AI to exhaust the solution space step by step.

Idk how it's being implemented, but Google, OpenAI, et al, seem to be limiting the reasoning depth of older models as they introduce new ones (just my personal speculation).

That means vibe coding (when it works) is less about coding and more about the economics of architectural stability vs time management.

It requires more than management skill though because it's really more about finding the right granularity at which to prompt the AI given the domain.

In some domains, AI might produce a decent landing page in one shot, in other domains the best it can produce is a function, then after a certain scale all it can handle is one execution block.

If you're a really systematic generalist with a solid foundation in software design/architecture, data structures, algorithms, and technical project management, then you can use AI to grind through problems much faster.

The harder the problem, the smaller the unit of work you can give the AI though, and the bigger of a tedious grind the whole process becomes.

AI is scary less because of the jobs it will replace in the end than it is because of the repetitive cognitive stress it's going to introduce.

It's just one more layer of commodification through mechanization where some poor soul still has to sit there staring at a screen all day to turn the proverbial crank that grinds the meat.

[Protoscribe]

Used to be Project IDX, which I actually changed to since alpha days (Not using built in AI) and one day I wake up and its changed to Firebase Studio. I automatically was going to jump ship because I want nothing to do with Firebase, however, still works the same as before. Now I know how they are going to monetize it though...

[emmanuelxs]

Yes we need a comprehensive comparison video of all this ai builder apps including chef by convex

[ChrisIsOutside]

You tried this out for a lot longer than I ever did, and my god, I just couldn't get anything to work. I was initially worried that my job was at stake, but when I tried it, I was like "even I can't make this work, " and I'm a developer.

[patruff]

My problem is it breaks VERY frequently even on simple requests like "Update the README" like how do you have an "Internal Error" for something that basically has no wrong answer

[Michael_Kove]

The IDX comeback was something I did not expect and back then (i mean really really back then) had A LOT OF expectations out of. I was disappointed it dissolved into abyss of internet, but happy to see it come back

[vikramgogoi]

10:39 Newbie here. I think it's a Tailwind problem. I had a similar problem when I used some code from ChatGPT. The text is white, and mixes with the background and for some reason the border of the button doesn't appear.

I like Project IDX without the AI stuff. I don't have to install and update stuff on my machine anymore. Saves a lot of space. I love Google for making Colab and IDX free.

[AlucardNoir]

None of the people that test these models ever try anything remotely comparable to production. That's why there's so much hype around them.

[alpuhagame]

The mental model of "giving a 3 sentence prompt" into AI and expecting it to complete even a basic "hello world" app needs to go away.
There's just too much unknowns and unknown unknowns that a single LLM cannot really predict.
Even if you are a seasoned engineer you would never be able to take in 3 sentences of a text and turn it into something a customer might want to use or even look at.
That's why software engineering still exists — it's not about coding or glueing parts together, it's about figuring out what the actual heck the problem is and how to solve it.

What needs to happen is not a single input textbox but a product spec template (or even a set of multiple templates) that you need to carefully fill in, with the help of an AI system.
Then AI would have much better context and could even fill in missing details on its own, like what engineers actually do.
And then after we have detailed enough product spec with all the edge cases, then I'm much more confident we can single-shot the entire app.
If you haven't read the paper, it's "Towards Specification-Driven LLM-Based Generation of Embedded Automotive Software".

I think this is where we should be going with AI-generated code.

[wego-k]

I noticed this issue with these AI tools being unable to implement backend and mostly with JS or TS related frameworks. But I work with laravel and python as well and when you give them specific and not too big context they are able to build a frontend and backend well. Especially with laravel and Inertiajs react, it works so well

[jordan.trahanov]

Theo says: Ok, Google... and my phone answers 😃

[Protoscribe]

The import repo just works, same as when it was IDX, keeping in mind it uses Nix to setup the system, so it rarely will fail. Only when you build your own Nix config and bring in something that doesn't exist in their package repo...

[PaulPlay]

Finally I can be locked into using Firebase without having to write code myself