Today, we’re kicking off the next chapter of AI assistance in Project IDX with Interactive Chat, our next-generation assistive chat experience, now available to all IDX users, in preview. Interactive Chat supercharges your conversations with Gemini by embedding interactive actions in Gemini’s responses that can react to and make changes to your project and dev environment — with you fully in control.
Going beyond conversational AI
We’ve always imagined IDX as a way to build anything — from simple frontend apps to monorepos that span frontend (Flutter, Web, Android, etc), backend (Docker, Node, Python, etc), your AI stack (Genkit, LangChain, etc) and more.
With Gemini in IDX, hundreds of thousands of users have benefitted from cutting edge AI assistance, contextualized to their codebase, while working across any part of their stack. Interactive Chat can propose additions and updates to your project files, helping you not just add features and fix bugs, but refactor components and more. Interactive Chat can also run terminal commands with your approval, so Gemini can help you manage running Docker containers and install dependencies, even proposing recovery steps when terminal commands fail.
Let's take a closer look at how Interactive Chat supercharges your development experience in Project IDX. Interactive Chat is a little like bringing in an expert full-stack developer into your project as a collaborator.
Action
Turning prompts into action
Interactive Chat translates your natural language instructions into direct actions within the IDX workspace. Instead of just offering suggestions, it performs the tasks you describe. Ask it to "Run my unit tests," and it will. Need to "Extract this function into a new component?" Just type the prompt. Even debugging becomes simpler; ask "What process is running on port 8080?" and get an immediate answer.
This action-oriented approach streamlines all kinds of development workflows. Project setup, including dependency installation and boilerplate generation, is significantly faster. Both client-side and server-side development benefit from this new interactivity.
Consider managing your Docker workflow. With Interactive Chat, a single prompt like "Create a Dockerfile that can run this Next.js app using Node 20" initiates a chain reaction. It generates the Dockerfile, builds the image, runs the container, and manages the background process, all stemming from that one instruction. This same principle applies to other server-side tasks, like setting up and running Express.js servers. What used to be multiple manual steps is now a single, concise prompt.
Integration
Automate tedious setups
Project setup can be a real drag. Interactive Chat cuts through the tedious configuration and boilerplate, letting you build faster. Instead of wrestling with dependencies and settings, simply tell IDX what you need. Want to add Tailwind CSS to your React project with TypeScript? Just ask. Need Express for your Node.js backend? Done. Interactive Chat generates files, installs packages, and configures your project, so you can jump straight into coding the fun stuff. No more manual package.json tweaks – just pure, productive development.
The future of Interactive Chat
This is just the beginning for Interactive Chat.
We're already exploring exciting new possibilities like multimodal interactions, making it even easier to communicate your coding needs. Try Interactive Chat today and share your feedback in our community channel – help us shape the future of AI-assisted development.
