Gist: https://gist.github.com/antimirov/ee2fe0dbee8c5a5f4b19112266...
Your coding environment stands a lower chance of disruption when you use an open source IDE with a CLI agent. Yes it's slightly annoying to separate the agent from the IDE but the benefit is that it's much easier to switch between Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI (now antigravity CLI), etc which means you can more easily benefit from pricing and coding performance differences which seem to change monthly.
It seems like Google is hitting the reset button on the product they call "Antigravity", existing users be damned. Fine, if you've never installed or used the previous version before... but for existing users the "bait and switch" is incredibly disorientating.
My take is they saw the market size for a general agentic tool as being larger and more significant than a specialised IDE. It shows a pretty large lack of respect for users in the later group though.
Google's lack of focus is astounding. They sprinkle random products here and there and seem to then tepidly pick the product surface that is doing least bad and then tepidly focus on that. Compare that to every other AI lab, large and small that knows its identity and shaped its products around that.
Perhaps it's a sort of resource curse. Google doesn't need any one of these products to succeed, and it shows.
This is a huge surprise, never thought I would see this in my life time.
Maybe it’s an OS difference but on my Mac when the new crappy antigravity updated, I got a very helpful dialog box explaining the changes and offering to download and install Antigravity IDE. Of course I did so and both run happily at the same time. Well, they did the one time I launched both, but now I’m back to just using the IDE.
Because google can't help but constantly shoot its customers and itself in the foot.
Recently I started to get harassed to upgrade. Big button in gmail, large notifications on top of my mail in the mobile app etc. Also two other buttons to get me to turn on AI features I don't need.
I already pay a lot, I don't want to pay double just not to be harassed.
Having buttons to features that I would have to pay extra for is one thing. But having notifications and large buttons to upgrade when I am already a paying customer is harassment.
> This unexpected shift completely broke my preferred workflow
it might not have been so unexpected if you knew you were one of ~15 people that start their day with Antigravity
it was kind of cute when it wasn't mandatory, but now that it appears to be mandatory my question is : is this some kind of new social coping mechanism?
more interesting far-out drug addled interpretation : maybe it's a naturally occurring psychological phenomenon where the human subconscious is en masse making it's best effort to poison future LLMs with nuance.
Cursor still supports both the IDE and the Agents window, open at the same time, in the same project. I frequently use both and switch back and forth between them. They also link to each other from the top bar and right-click context menus so you can switch to one or the other seamlessly. Best of both worlds. Switch back to Cursor.
This is correct. I have switched back to Cursor, with sota models, after I discovered that I lost control when I gave in to industry drumbeat of using cli based agents and which presented _something_ to review and then went back again in full swing.
Worse, I selected "Terminal Command Auto Execution: Proceed in Sandbox", and it keeps switching to "Always Proceed" (with a nice warning about how it is very dangerous). I have changed it 10 times then just gave up and switched to Codex.
On a related note, the AUR package previously named antigravity has been renamed antigravity-ide[1] after some lively discussion, and the new thing lives at antigravity2-bin.[2]
There's your mistake right there. There is history. User beware.
Overall the experience was pretty bad for what is expected from them and I'm wondering what the thought process behind this is, I dislike this single prompt box review workflow and is a reason I don't use any of the tui stuff and it's odd that they are leaning so hard to mimic CC when others like cursor are embracing the same workflow but still sculpting around the code. I want to edit as I'm working and have access to all my normal tools and fragmenting my work to this new vision and a separate text editor defeats the point.
For now I'll probably switch to using it as a fallback when I've exhausted my quota elsewhere and start to rely on it less before the next rug pull when I wake up and the IDE is gone. Aside, Gemini has been surprisingly good and I really liked their take on the implementation and review workflow.
https://www.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1tig3ix...
Oddly enough, I reach out to the Gemini web chatbox frequently, even though the heavy duty stuff goes to Claude.
Can't disable it now in Anti-gravity because the menu has been completely removed.
After reading the blog post I clicked the update button and the whole app was replaced, without much warning, with this conversation UI. It was even more jarring than I expected from the post because I figured there must be some messaging about what would happen and some way to just get to my files... but nope!
Then I downloaded the Antigravity IDE (as opposed to just Antigravity) and when I went to install it, it turns out I already had it installed!
So Google actually did an arguably ok thing with the apps - they split them into an IDE and an agent coordinator, and they kept the IDE installed so you can use it right after the update - but they didn't tell you what they were doing!!
If they had just said "Antigravity is now two apps. Which would you like to open?" everything would have been fine.
I don't know anyone who looked at antigravity and thought "this is a great idea, surely this big corporation wouldn't screw me over right?". Tying your development environment to the whims of google is.... maybe its simply OPs first rodeo with capitalism
Google does not care about you. They will fuck you over. If its in their business interests they'll format your harddrive without a second thought
--someone important
https://antigravity.google/assets/image/blog/agy2-layout.jpg
Place your bets now.
1. Doesn't tell you your weekly qutoa (at least on Pro plan/all the time)
2. Your agent cant access the quota to not run some tasks at low quota
3. You cant see the context size
4. Your agent can't see the context size
5. You can't compact/compress
6. You have to keep starting new chats which also kill any processes it has running (e.g. a telegram listener)
7. Doesn't have a straightforward linux/wsl install (I ended up using the Windows IDE and pointing it to wsl).
And that's from just migrating a gemini-cli model and trying to set it up for an hour. Incredible downgrade for no reason.
But I have to say that I never understood the Antigravity IDE. I much prefer using Gemini CLI in combination with vscode. It works like a charm. Now, I'll do the same with Antigravity CLI and vscode. It works fine.
So much for AI getting cheaper.
It's centered around git worktrees. The goal is to organize all your AI sessions into somewhat logical places and make it easy to context switch. The secondary goal is to remove the need to open a separate code editor anytime you want to look at a file (We have a built in file editor powered by Monaco [vscodes editor])
Check it out https://harness.mikelyons.org
AI is powerful, but currently does not meet the engineering bar for quality and thoroughness. We need new paradigms and tools to support a new relationship with the codebase as an artifact.
The premise is that we can use these LLMs to get real engineering work done if we make tools to support a higher-level human understanding of the codebase, and the ability to spot the gaps in the LLM's plans. With these we can surgically ensure all the critical considerations are covered, spec the work at an incredibly granular level, and implement our plans as a collection of ultra-tiny tasks each given to isolated agents, this specifically ensures the agent's attentional mechanism aren't overwhelmed/polluted.
The project is very early still, so if you're interested, please reach out or signup for the email-list and i'll contact you. Pricing page is highly aspirational at the moment, money is not the focus at this phase.
Thanks.
I have to reenable a “Classic UI” plugin to fix it. This is annoying enough, but if they did something like the OP’s experience they’d lose a paying customer of 14 years overnight.
IDEs aren’t social media apps- they’re tools. Familiarity is not just important, it is VITAL.
These week announcements are effectively Google doing a rug pull to its customers. Now simple changes cannot be done anymore within antigravity without it to consume its full quota.
Personally I downgraded my Google One subscription. I cannot justify paying Pro anymore, and thankfully I'm not AI dependent enough to pay Ultra.
And mind you, I'm not an anti AI extremist. But I dont think there's any need to adopt the new tool as your new full workbench, a Claude style chat in a nearby terminal has the same benefit and exposes you to a ridiculously smaller personal risk.
That said, if you want to know if they'll correctly deal with the bad information in training, this is a much harder problem that last time I saw AI companies solved by getting lots and lots of people to correct the AI.
Recently screen sharing a document I noticed a new "omg please use gemini" button they placed OVER THE DOCUMENT itself. That's in addition to the magic star thing in the right and the gemini menu item. If you're using Chrome there are the browser ai buttons, too.
That was definitely true in the hand-crafted code era, but I've found all the agentic-type things to be basically the same? Even if you're fairly involved in the code, you're still just mostly reading diffs and editing the odd line, the kind of basic work that's the same across all modern editors.
this is why i've built all of my setup using a dotfiles-like approach with the explicit intention of always being agent/model-agnostic: https://github.com/ma08/botfiles
the key insight is that if you own the context layer and keep your skills, hooks etc. portable enough, it's actually very easy to swtich agents at will (even mid-task)
Edit: I forgot to mention the curiosity and humility they bring to our calls. If I point out another vendors approach to a problem that we have, they always lean in and want to help improve their offerings from our feedback. They know it's not enough just to "be Google".
No wonder they are losing massively to Huawei in several markets. Mobile marketshare is probably an indicator of some kind of their future prospects.
Also the Antigravity CLI doesn't remember your credentials in WSL. It asks you to log in every time you run the program.
And after 4 chat sessions, my ~/antigravity-server folder now takes up 4 GB.
Oracle has taught me that there are more things in life than money.
What lead? Maybe because I'm mostly using AI/LLMs for development, but neither Google, Anthropic, xAI or anyone else has ever been in the lead, OpenAI always had the best models in my mind, as long as you're comparing the "top" plans between all of them.
Besides, they all seem to shoot themselves in the foot, OpenAI included, seems the only thing that differs is how often and how big the damage is.
The day was to begin like any other, with Antigravity open (yes, there are tens of us!), expecting to get some work done before my attention fragments. But Google had other plans. They had rolled out a new version of Antigravity the day before, at I/O 2026, presenting it as a shiny, standalone Codex-style experience.
Before I launched it, Antigravity had automatically "updated" my existing installation to the new one and, in the process, nuked the IDE, the actual Antigravity I had been using for months. When I clicked my usual shortcut, my entire IDE was just gone, and in its place stood a single conversational prompt box.
This unexpected shift completely broke my preferred workflow. Antigravity, as part of the Google AI Ultra plan, is my daily driver, my workhorse. I don't mind agentic workflows for quick demos or MVPs, but production software, in my opinion, requires predictable output. For that, nothing beats the plan-review-implement loop that made me a huge fan of Cursor and earlier versions of Antigravity.
Frustrated, I jumped online and found that Google actually hosted a separate download package specifically for the legacy Antigravity IDE. How to interpret that it was at the bottom of the page, I'm leaving as an exercise to you. I figured I could just download this installer and run it alongside the new tool to get my day going. I downloaded and ran the package but the exact same 2.0 chatbot interface loaded right back up, much to my annoyance.
The 2.0 update, it turns out, aggressively rewrites the default application paths to the point where it's impossible, at the time of writing, to have both versions of Antigravity installed and functioning at the same time. Even reinstalling the IDE, hoping it might rewrite the rules correctly, doesn't work as the chatbot still hijacks the launch every single time.
After messing around reinstalling both pieces of software only to get the exact same result, I headed over to the Antigravity subreddit. Sure enough, plenty of other people were posting about the same exact scenario. The only way forward was a total purge of everything Antigravity related on the machine before trying again.
With my system entirely cleared of the 2.0 binaries, I ran the standalone IDE installer one more time. Without the chatbot there to interfere and hijack the execution paths, the clean installation finally worked.
Unfortunately, getting the interface back didn't mean everything was normal. The forced update and subsequent purge wiped out my chat history and settings. While I could, thankfully, copy over most of my setup from my old Cursor config, the prompt history from the old Antigravity installation is gone(-ish). The upgrade fiasco did leave a folder called antigravity-backup, which I hope contains all my old history and profile info.
Right now, I just don't have the time or the tokens to fiddle with it and get my history back. It's going to stay right there in stasis until I have some actual time to spare.
Forcing this kind of transition on users via a background update is in incredibly poor taste. Background updates are meant for performance patches and version upgrades, not for secretly shipping an entirely different piece of software. Hijacking a development tool to replace it with another crosses the line, from an inconvenience into a major hassle.
I'm now going to look for ways to stop auto-updates altogether, if it's even possible in the first place. We should be able to trust that our tools will remain the tools we actually signed up to use. I'm fully plugged into the Google ecosystem, but sheesh!
Idk what google is doing
Google could easily A/B test half of their users away from their products and nobody would get fired for it
The problem with AI products vs other rent-seeking is that AI is very expensive to build out and run… so they are desperate to push you into relying on it quickly.
If they offered 3 Flash (or 3.1 Flash Lite too but might be hoping for too much) with comparable usage limits then the transition to Antigravity CLI wouldn't have bothered me much at all.
LPT: You can get to prod faster by skipping the step where it tells you anything.
I can see The Onion headline now: "Man surprised when rug-pulling company pulls the rug from under him".
Does anyone think that the brand new version of Antigravity will still exist in a recognizable form two years from now? Google will almost certainly have killed or "upgraded" it again to a new platform by then.
This was clearly an experiment or stepping stone, they were never going to stick to this path. It was always going to go away.
For now, that's DeepSeek: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ (they have a discount until the end of the month, even after that they will have pretty good prices)
Or GLM or Kimi, Mistral is also surprisingly passable. Or just have to open the wallet and give money to OpenAI or Anthropic for the subsidized tokens.
> Google Enterprise accounts are sunsetting AI Ultra in favor of consumption based pricing at the end of the month.
This whole thing feels a bit like what GitHub did with Copilot, though.
Isn't this what Pi does (except you have a non-CLI UI)?
Why do you think an IDE is the right tool?
I'm working in a similar space, and it's not clear why an IDE would benefit.
Specifically to you - if you're hoping to make this a business - please know if you do make a killer IDE feature - Cursor et al will immediately copy it...
I'll give your tool a try if it's not too much effort to try it and you want some feedback. Let me know.
Now I think it totally gets the joke and it’s telling you a joke back.
Hot take: At least they're ripping the bandaid now instead of stringing users along and eventually abandoning it like they normally do.
I don't like Google either, but I don't think this is a fair comparison.
It's easy for anyone to beat Google in China when the state has decided to block their servers.
Other companies usually have a soulless void of an automatic system which gives you no confirmation your messages and inquiries are received whatsoever. Not Google. There is always a human on the other side so you know you are in good hands. Trust and connection are the things I value the most in this very two sided relationship.
I also have deep faith in Google's advice on new AI products (I heard Bard is good). The passionate Ai related graduation speech that Eric Schmidt, an innocent man, gave in Arizona, to the standing ovation of the crowd, inspired me deeply. I am now an even bigger Google fan than I ever was.
IntelliJ: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
PyCharm: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/master/...
Android Studio: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/adt/idea/+/r...
Yes, they might offer extended proprietary editions/plugins in addition, but the IDEs themselves are open source.
While I'm at it I've got to give them credit for Gemma as well. Stellar, first class model for the size.
Uhhh, about that :)
Gemini CLI (the open source cli) is being deprecated, and the recommended replacement is Antigravity CLI (which supposedly comes with the new Antigravity, not the IDE). shrug. Surely this will be maintained long term...
https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transi...
For me I liked the ergonomics of a few other tools, but none of them were exactly what I wanted so I made my own. And, I kept it open source so anyone can tweak the ergonomics to be what they like
I wish the industry could learn the art of leaving shit alone.
I didn't start with an IDE but ended up there after some time. The core of my approach is an entirely new workflow. Underlying all of it is a "planning canvas" which is a network graph visualization of the codebase symbols, structures, and relations, where each node of the graph is a custom data-structure that captures a set of considerations. The workflow is generally as follows: Talk to the agent -> Agent responds with a plan(s) -> Plan is visualized on the planning canvas. At this point we can see visually which parts of the codebase the agents plan touches and via the fields of the custom data-structure, also see which considerations the agent failed to specify. Its here where we as humans can catch "this thing isnt connected, or is missing a trigger, or has a concurrency story, etc.", and either specify ourself, or force the agent to improve their plan in this specific manner. Once satisfied, we can formalize the impoved plan into a spec-of-specs, where each isolated sub-spec is farmed to an agent for implementation, which undo/redo being handled at the plan-level just in case we change our minds.
> Cursor et al will immediately copy it...
This is always possible, with anything and everything, but thus far they havent done it and i want this to exist, so i persist.
> I'll give your tool a try if it's not too much effort to try it
If you're open to it, signup (so i have your email) and ill reach out to get us going.
Edit: Probably the high end non apple market in nearly all African countries too, but idk if there is reliable data for those.
It's a little crazy they still depend on microsoft as an intermediate between all their tools.
I've filed bugs with JetBrains before and had them take months getting to my ticket, often with multiple hand-offs between team members; being able to provide a potential fix should make the process much faster.
We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, I don't think one party is more responsible than someone else, unless you're specifically involved with the specific technology, then you can attribute it to them.
So yes, Google's researchers might have invented the Transformer, but OpenAI researchers invented GPT. Does it matter we credit "LLMs" more to one than the other? I don't think so, especially in this context it's highly irrelevant. Google didn't have the "LLM lead" before LLMs even existed...
Is there a fine-tuned Gemma coding model? I'd assume that would perform quite well.
Gradually I moved to asking questions about the code instead, something like "if X and Y, will Z still hold? did we not forget to check this?" I realized that this is what I am doing in my head when looking at the code. And Claude understands well enough what I mean and checks it.
What I found mind-blowing though is that surprisingly often it says me something like "while looking this up for you I think found a potential bug, would you like me to quickly check it?" or "I noticed that actually when X and Y true, Z holds indeed, but I believe there is a rare situation (...) when we don't want Z because it makes zero sense, what do you think?"
I mean, it's totally possible they just aren't doing anything complex.
That being said, for even the simplest stuff I do I benefit from looking at the code, making changes etc.
Cool, I'm thinking along the same lines.
> but thus far they havent done it and i want this to exist, so i persist.
Cool, we are in the same boat [=
> If you're open to it, signup
I'll check it out.
Will they make it work headless before the June deadline when they turn off gemini-cli? I guess we'll see...
[Edited to add: danielbln below is correct, this appears to just be stale documentation for antigravity-cli, it can be used completely headless now.]
NB still generates better looking images though for the most part - gpt-image series is still affected by the yellow saturation issues though its been heavily mitigated.
Alas, I now feel the sting of disappointment.
Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".
Also, if we're going backwards, who invented neural networks, does that mean that person also then "had LLMs before OpenAI existed"?
1. Developers that create the mess and don't have to deal with the consequences
2. Developers that fix the mess and have to deal with the consequences
I've noticed that the former category is significantly more pro AI than the latter
Google did nothing to help you , but your response to the dire situation is to be commended.
huge waste of firefly credits tho.
Google did, as they already said.
OpenAI was better at marketing and a lot more willing to cannibalize the search market as a newcomer. So Google blew their lead in research by not recognizing the product value quickly enough, or failing to win an internal political war on it anyway
IDEs made by JetBrains are huge. At this point, they're basically the standard option for several JVM languages.
Google?
> who invented neural networks
People like Geoffrey Hinton, who was notably at Google Brain from 2013 to 2023?
The people who say Google was ahead were paying attention long before you were.
(on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)
Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).
The solutions proposed by Gemini and Google's AI summaries all hallucinate agy subcommands that don't exist, hilariously.
Edit: after bouncing around several GitHub threads, I realized that the agy TUI framework is wrapping the URL in a way that causes spaces to be inserted where the URL wraps. That's hilarious.
1. Less interaction required over long horizon tasks.
2. You actually get the amount of tokens they advertize. It's been an open secret on r/Claude that over the last several months, due to supposed "bugs" in Claude, users on the Max plan have seen over 50% of their tokens used on a single prompt. Super annoying.
3. Really strong image generation capabilities.
That's not to say OpenAI's current generosity will last, but for now I definitely see Codex as the stronger option between the two.
and what is the metric for companies sending you messages, like I have never gotten a single message (aside from one/two companies here and there and I even made a HN post about one of the companies)
and what do these companies really have a metric for in terms of sending spam for? karma points, I mean emsh I remember we both had close enough about the same karmas not too long ago, surprised to see you at 13k+ karma, so good to see that but is the metric karma, hype (you had made the rust browser ..) or what exactly? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that!
I do understand the point of these companies sending mail though, I mean I can't say that if I had a company at the moment I might not do the same either, but I think that you might get frustrated too with it, so what would your recommendation be to people sending you mails in general?
I would be curious to know that too!
We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.
You're right, I just re-tested on my server and was able to get it to work now. Thank you! Does appear to just be stale documentation.