from Hacker News

Firebase Studio

by sumitkumar on 4/9/25, 6:39 PM with 119 comments

  • by TheAceOfHearts on 4/10/25, 2:31 AM

    Here's my short review after playing around with Firebase Studio for ~30 minutes. First of all, I had to turn off Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection because otherwise projects wouldn't load.

    I gave it the following initial prompt:

    > An app where you input a question, then flip some coins to generate an I Ching prediction, and it generates a prediction / fortune for you. Then this combination of results can be fed to Gemini AI to produce a more detailed prediction text.

    It generated something that looked fine. When I input a question and press the button nothing happened. After asking it to fix the problem multiple times and having it fail, I looked at the browser console to figure out the errors it was getting. Then I copied those errors and told it to fix them. After a few iterations, it solved every error and would generate a result. It completely forgot the part where you are supposed to flip coins before getting a hexagram to generate a fortune. After a bit of prompting, I was able to get it to display the hexagram and input question. However, sometimes it becomes confused about which hexagram was generated.

    Overall, my impression is that these tools are still in the toy novelty stage rather than something you'd want to use for anything important.

    Here is a screenshot of the app output for the question: Will Hacker News like my vibe coded oracle? [0] As you can see, it says that the generated hexagram is 24 or 41, but in the fortune text below it says 11.

    [0] https://files.catbox.moe/i8t7rw.png

  • by tymscar on 4/10/25, 12:18 PM

    The ai part of the app is basically useless. After 2 hours of “vibe coding” a chess clock flutter app I got basically nothing in the end.

    It broke more and more each message. I tried fixing stuff myself but it would mess it up again. Would not recommend anyone to use it.

    Now for the non ai part: super cool. I love the nix environment. Its fascinating how they handle the previews for example. I got geekbench up and running an the cpu is a bit worse than an iphone 15 pro max, but it has 32 gigs of ram!

  • by lenerdenator on 4/10/25, 3:53 AM

    As a person currently working on a project that uses Firestore (the db component of Firebase), there is one thing - and only one thing - I want.

    A web GUI for Firestore that lets me work on documents like, idk, any other DBMS GUI would: the ability to select multiple records, and operate on them.

    That's literally it. I don't need AI, I don't need dark mode, I don't even need MongoDB compatibility. I just want to select multiple documents with my mouse and do things to them.

  • by efxzsh on 4/9/25, 11:33 PM

    It's a rebranding of https://idx.google.com/

  • by t-writescode on 4/10/25, 8:33 AM

    First off, this looks really cool and I'm excited to see more things like this.

    The overall chat in the HN conversation has got me thinking, though.

    Around 7 years ago in my career, one of my most common actions for one-off scripts was for me to create a WinForms application with, often, a couple text boxes and a "Run" button of some sort.

    The text boxes would be the inputs and the run button would ... run. There was also often like a text output or bunch of loglines or something. I wrote almost exclusively in C# at the time, so it was a way to shove a bunch of C# code into place and test it.

    I did this for random and arbitrary things I needed to process or solve, a lot like how I used Python or Ruby in the future.

    I bet it's actually pretty common for people to need "a script that does a thing", and I think, maybe, that's where a lot of the AI scripting of the most immediate use is going to be. If it can be a familiar interface for people to build (in the past, the IDE) and a familiar or simple place to interact with the generated script (the WinForms + buttons), these programs to generate scripts and do "stuff" could likely spread pretty wide.

    I think Jupyter Notebooks are another example of this, another precursor, of sorts?

  • by hnlurker22 on 4/10/25, 10:14 AM

    Software engineers, who are the most skilled in terms of holding ai's hand to create a product, should be cloning every single saas out there and making money by eating a share of the market. AI is a great way for engineers to become founders. Let's bring the competition.

  • by the_king on 4/10/25, 1:57 AM

    I was excited to try this out because I've had a lot of trouble getting the Supabase integrations to work on Lovable and Bolt.new.

    Sorry to say that Firebase Studio did an awful job. It did not successfully build even the first view of the app I asked for. It feels like I'm stepping back to release day of GPT-4.

    Am I missing a switch to use the good Gemini 2.5 somewhere? I could tell from their response speed that I was not using a thinking model.

  • by indigodaddy on 4/9/25, 9:22 PM

    this isn't new.. (edit, well actually they've added the "prompt from scratch" thingy like v0.dev/replit/lovable that idx.dev didn't have before) wasn't really gaining the traction they wanted so decided to rebrand. not a bad idea. I use idx.dev (now firebase.studio) and like it. They may not have a "template" for the exact stack/app type you are working with, but it's pretty easy to just setup a blank workspace and modify the nix.dev file as needed..

  • by simonw on 4/10/25, 4:38 AM

    I tried this on Mobile Safari and it clearly wasn't designed with mobile in mind, then when it got to the preview your app screen the preview panel was blank (it worked when I switched to Firefox on macOS).

    I do most of my vibe coding on my phone, so that's pretty disappointing!

  • by kylecazar on 4/10/25, 1:40 AM

    There are so many Google products that overlap it's mind boggling

  • by m3kw9 on 4/10/25, 12:31 AM

    I’m afraid it will use my google cloud billing and start charging. My prompt “replicate Salesforce”

  • by chaosprint on 4/10/25, 5:18 AM

    The final result is very poor. Google looks like Hooli with chaotic management. The design has lost its aesthetics, and the gradient color is very ugly.

    However, the aistudio updated today is good.

    So it seems that the output is so different because the person in charge is different?

    From this perspective, there is no hope for Firebase, because the person in charge has poor management logic. even with the best resources in the world, it doesn't help

  • by alittletooraph2 on 4/10/25, 6:51 PM

    I know it'll probably get better over time but it's pretty awful compared to what you can do with v0 right now.

  • by aitchnyu on 4/10/25, 6:12 AM

    About the editor, do they allow Flutter development in a Monaco stack? Last time I checked, it was tied to their Intellij-based IDE which needs regular force updates.

    About the executables, are backend apps running on a temporary VM which can run Postgres etc? Does the Android emulator launch from web?

  • by sumitkumar on 4/9/25, 6:39 PM

    Firebase Studio is an agentic, cloud-based development environment that gives you powerful tools and AI agents directly in your browser. With Firebase Studio, you can prototype, build, test, publish, and iterate on full-stack AI apps from a single place.

  • by piokoch on 4/10/25, 8:17 AM

    Currently I would not invest in any solution that enforces usage of a single LLM model provider, as the scene is really dynamic with the best player changing every month. Now Gemini 2.5 looks really great, but Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek and others are probably working on the next, better model.

    So, Aider + whatever seems to be working best, seems to be the best strategy that works for me. Aider has this nice feature that I can specify what files are added to the context, so I pay less and I do not confuse AI with stuff unrelated to a given task.

  • by neural_thing on 4/10/25, 3:32 AM

    So much worse than Devin/Replit.

    Also, the system prompt encourages it to use Genkit, so it tried to add AI to an email sending function...

  • by aamederen on 4/10/25, 10:55 AM

    It makes the most sense (to me) for app platforms like Firebase to invest deeply in the AI application development wave. Creating something from scratch with prompts is impressive but the gap between something that works locally to something that people can use is still large enough to require some dev & ops expertise.

  • by josefrichter on 4/10/25, 3:43 PM

    This looks very much like Replit. I like Replit, built a bunch of hobby projects mostly for myself, even though some of them are deployed and publicly accessible.

    You will inevitably run into some doom loops, but we're still at the beginning. These things will probably be super powerful in 2 years time.

  • by tamad on 4/11/25, 7:48 PM

    I’m a teacher, so different than most folks posting here. I have a little coding experience, but it’s definitely not my thing professionally. I just made several utility apps with this that I’ll be using in the classroom.

  • by rambojohnson on 4/10/25, 10:17 AM

    Using AI to build AI to help AI build more AI with AI

  • by sexy_seedbox on 4/11/25, 5:45 AM

    Asked FBS for a simple web form, it immediately went with NextJS, TailwindCSS and a whole bunch of build tools. Ask it again to change it to vanilla JavaScript, now it's stuck in an infinity loop... bad vibes : (

  • by amelius on 4/10/25, 10:37 AM

    Can't we just have an AI that runs like a window manager? I.e. it has access to all apps on my desktop. And it can help me coding, but it can also help me write documents, draw stuff, edit photos and videos, etc.

  • by varispeed on 4/11/25, 9:17 AM

    Firebase for me is a synonym of running up large unexpected bill.

    Is that possible?

    Billings systems seems to be so opaque and complex.

    and can it learn my private keys and then expose them to someone else?

  • by atomicnature on 4/10/25, 3:24 AM

    It's amazing.

    I've wanted a small prompt-manager chrome extension for a while.

    Was procrastinating.

    Was able to build one for myself with Firebase studio in 30 mins.

    Here's my PromptPal - built in just 30m (disable ad-blocker to avoid issues - there's some interference for some reason):

    https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaix...

    No frustration whatsoever

    Their prototyper is awesome

    And code mode also great

    I was able to push to github as well with no problems. And the tool generates nice commits for every single change one makes.

  • by kaishiro on 4/10/25, 11:05 PM

    I’m not sure I’ve ever felt my age more than reading “vibe coding” a half dozen times in this comment section.

  • by oulipo on 4/10/25, 4:47 PM

    I've been quite unimpressed with Google products for a while

  • by antouank on 4/10/25, 10:43 AM

    > Out of capacity. Please try again later.

  • by bpiroman on 4/10/25, 3:20 AM

    next level vendor lock in

  • by dankobgd on 4/10/25, 10:12 AM

    Stopped reading after ai

  • by romanovcode on 4/10/25, 1:44 PM

    - Create Angular app (success)

    - Add SSR (fail)

    - Give the correct command to add SSR (success)

    - Add i18n (fail)

    - Retries like 6 times, completely messes angular.json file up to no recovery, project doesn't even build

    Outputs: It seems I am running circles, I cannot help you with that.

    Wow, AI will really replace developers soon. /s

  • by sam1234apter on 4/9/25, 7:56 PM

    Google just launched their vibe-coding product Firebase competes directly with Cursor, Lovable, Windsurf etc