Comment by aiuto

> Over time, engineers realize that Code Search is more important than their IDE.

You nailed it.

One particularly hard problem Google faced w.r.t. IDE integration was the intersection of thousands of RPCs defined by protobuf declarations => generated protobuf code in 10 different languages being dong transparently by blaze + not checking in generated code => where does the IDE based indexing find the generated source files, and then tie that back to the original .proto file declaring the RPC declaration. Blaze had the information available through a query, but needed ways for the user (the IDE) to optimize the query plan so that it could deliver just the proto related dependencies with sub-second response time to keep the human users happy.

Once you found the .proto file that defined your data they could leverage the the monorepo and search over it. Let's say I am a Java programmer working on a server endpoint and want to change the format of some data I am stuffing into a protobuf. I could find the original declaration, and then find all the instances of objective-C code that our iOS apps were using to consume it. Trivially easy with the combination of global code search and a global dependency graph.

Caveat: Code search and a monorepo let you do some amazing things. But there is a LOT of cost which Googler's tend to nostalgically gloss over. piper, citc, kyte, critique, and depserver* represent (wet finger in the wind guess) probably $100M of development effort.

Context: Googler from 2007-2025, worked on API serving infrastructue, desktop apps (yes, we checked out source code to windows laptops), blaze/bazel, and a few others. I've seen all the developer tooling problems.

*depserver is a essentially a service that holds the entire blaze dependency graph every file up to every buildable object across the code space. That drives the automatic testing infrastructure.