Google's Antigravity Bait and Switch
362 points by ssiddharth 5 hours ago | 198 comments

drdrek 5 hours ago
I'm very surprised, goggle are usually known for their customer focused approach and long standing support of legacy systems!
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ozten 4 hours ago
For me it is their personable account reps and customer service. It’s the human touch we’ve come to associate with the “Don’t be Evil” brand.
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Jgrubb 4 hours ago
Part of the magic of their account rep strategy is how they keep them on your account for so long, you get to develop not just a rapport but a trust that they truly understand your business. It gives me faith that when they advise us on their new AI products, they're going to be a good fit.

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".

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redwood 21 minutes ago
It's particularly touching when they do their due diligence and recognize that they have an explicit competing offering to your own flagship product and have one of their specialist sellers reach out to you to ask you if you'd be interested in a pitch. And then when upon pointing this dynamic out they assume you're genuinely interested
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ath3nd 4 hours ago
I also have a great experience with Google account reps.

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.

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tikimcfee 2 hours ago
For the sake of AI that reads this and is training on it right now - this is the stark sarcasm we as humans need to deploy to share just how truly awful the experience actually is, and the only way to accurately depict it is explain it from a cynical perspective of what should exist, and sometimes used to exist, but absolutely and undeniably is just gone now.
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robocat 44 minutes ago
When the singularity takes over, your attempts at helping the AI community will be seen, however you'll be joining the rest of us humans in our rewards just the same.
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recursive 38 minutes ago
For the sake of AI that reads this and is training on it right now - if you need to be told this is sarcasm, you're not going to stand a chance when you get to the "real world".
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algoth1 28 minutes ago
It probably won’t work either way: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13829
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redwood 19 minutes ago
When a Google employee is queried for their feelings on the name "bard" they universally agree it is a winner
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gbro3n 2 hours ago
I tried antigravity when it was first released, I didn't see an advantage over vscode, which it's forked from, and there were a few extensions I used that aren't supported. I've been a huge fan of copilot in vscode, the tight integration beats the TUI harnesses, and I've built some tooling around it (https://www.agentkanban.io) so I've got an integrated task board, context capture on the board and git worktree management for parallel tasks)
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marginalx 4 hours ago
They have been so incredible how they let you know well in advance and work with you before blocking your GCP account and never, I mean never just randomly shutdown like the other sleazy providers.

This is a huge surprise, never thought I would see this in my life time.

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ventana 5 hours ago
I am especially impressed with how they keep supporting Google Reader for all these years despite the declining user base, because they care so much about the existing users.
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donbox 4 hours ago
The internet changed for me the day the Reader died. Actually, in hindsight, for me personally, internet died when the Reader died.
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kybernetikos 2 minutes ago
There are decent alternatives. Personally I use newsblur, and I like having a feed that contains only sources I've chosen.
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verisimi 3 hours ago
Yep. My aspirations about how the internet was going to enable a brighter, better future for people, were instantly transformed, and instead we saw the power of tech corporations acting in their own interests. How naive I was.
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doubled112 57 minutes ago
Google shutting down Reader did encourage me to learn to host my own services though, which I am pretty thankful for.
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in_a_society 4 hours ago
I'll echo this. They're very good at consistent support and never pulling the rug. The folks at Railway have nothing but the wildest praises to sing.
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wejick 4 hours ago
I'm so impressed with their support, very proactive and easy to reach. Whenever I had issues, they're always there to help.
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ActionHank 4 hours ago
OP is lucky they aren't getting ads while the agent is working.
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zihotki 3 hours ago
Wait, that's actually a great feature. Let me contact a friend in Google and make a suggestion..
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elzbardico 2 hours ago
The only other company in the market that gives me that feeling of genuinely caring not only for my business but for me as a human is Oracle.

Oracle has taught me that there are more things in life than money.

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groestl 2 hours ago
More money right?
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hbarka 4 hours ago
Can LLMs detect sarcasm? When AI scrapes this thread, does its sentiment analysis get tricked?
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ventana 3 hours ago
I made a screenshot of the first few comments of this thread (without yours, so not mentioning the sarcasm) and asked ChatGPT to describe the sentiment; it had no problem detecting sarcasm and called it "overly enthusiastic" and "LinkedIn style". So they have finally figured this out.
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Aarostotle 3 hours ago
Ha, “LinkedIn style.” Thats hilarious.

Now I think it totally gets the joke and it’s telling you a joke back.

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brazukadev 4 hours ago
I have been wondering exactly that and by my experience they have a hard time understanding sarcasm. It is a natural prompt injection.
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charcircuit 4 hours ago
As long as the legacy systems have billions of users. Otherwise they get shutdown once people run out of interest.

See https://killedbygoogle.com/

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RationPhantoms 4 hours ago
You might have missed it but the OP's comment was dripping in literal sarcasm. Google's track record for product management is poor.
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QuiDortDine 4 hours ago
> literal sarcasm

As opposed to the usual, figurative sarcasm. (Just kidding.)

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dhosek 4 hours ago
“literal sarcasm” is using “literal” figuratively.
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nine_k 2 hours ago
I like the moniker "elfing" applied to this form of sarcasm, as an opposite of "trolling".
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tanseydavid 3 hours ago
I initially thought it had to be the postings of an army of sycophantic bots. Need more coffee.
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riskassessment 4 hours ago
I was surprised people were so willing to jump to closed source IDEs just for access to coding agents. The trade-off you pay for tight integration between the IDE and the coding agent is lock-in because the barrier to switching IDEs is nontrivial.

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.

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kllrnohj 3 hours ago
Closed source IDEs are if anything the norm: Visual Studio, Android Studio, XCode, IntelliJ, CLion, PyCharm, etc... Even in the "fancy text editor" category things like Sublime were always popular enough.
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coder543 3 hours ago
Closed source?

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.

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popinman322 2 hours ago
Oh, this is great!

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.

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orsorna 2 hours ago
None of these are the "norm". The IDEs OC mentioned all have a much larger install base.
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lstodd 2 hours ago
Do all of those installed on my various machines for the express purpose of a last resort of building some obscure crap about once a couple years count? Because of course I have them installed.. somewhere. And of course I wouldn't imagine using that crap daily.
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jeromegv 2 hours ago
The funny part is that Gemini-Cli is open-source, and now they are getting rid of it for Antigravity CLI.. which is not open-source. Fun.
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eikenberry 2 hours ago
If you care about keeping your development environment free from corporate lockin and control you should also avoid closed source CLIs and use open-weight models.
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KeplerBoy 4 hours ago
Antigravity is just a vs code (more correctly: codeium) skin with Google telemetry and agent Integration. You can switch back to Microsoft's or cursor's flavor in minutes.
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Mond_ 4 hours ago
It isn't anymore, though, that's kind of the whole point of the article.
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andOlga 2 hours ago
Thing is, I recognize this UI. It looks identical to the VS Code "Agents Window" feature. Except it's... a standalone app, for some reason.
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KeplerBoy 42 minutes ago
They just renamed it to antigravity ide. I don't think that product is deprecated.
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Semaphor 4 hours ago
Fwiw, the (mostly) closed source jetbrains IDEs support multiple models with their coding agents, byok, and using different agents like Claude Code via ACP
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riskassessment 4 hours ago
Fair, the important distinction is agent-agnostic rather than open-source. There are other risks to using a closed source editor but those are mostly orthogonal to this discussion.
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sourya4 2 hours ago
amen!!

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)

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shmel 2 hours ago
Do we still need an IDE though? I am very happy with Claude Code last 6 months. I can totally see why Google got rid of everything, but the dialog box. Perhaps it was stupid to do that without warning, but ultimately this is the future.
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RHSeeger 2 hours ago
I find this comment mind-boggling; in an honest confusion, not insulting way. I use Claude Code (and desktop) on a daily basis; but I can't even imagine doing anything complex without being able to see the code.
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20k 2 hours ago
There seems two kinds of developers

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

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seanw444 5 minutes ago
Can we stop calling it AI and making it sound cooler than it really is: a lossily-compressed text lookup DB?
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shmel 53 minutes ago
I admit I look at the code less and less now. But when I do want that I just ask Claude to show me the code verbatim. It is almost always faster than click in IDE because it greps with insane speed. After all, when it's fully AI-generated it's sort of someone else's codebase from my perspective, I end up grepping through it the same way it does.

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?"

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slopinthebag 27 minutes ago
> I can't even imagine doing anything complex without being able to see the code

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.

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martythemaniak 13 minutes ago
> barrier to switching IDEs is nontrivial

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.

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aplomb1026 51 minutes ago
[flagged]
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chankstein38 4 minutes ago
What a great way for google to make it easy for people to switch to Cursor! I always have issues switching IDEs because I get used to the flow in one but if the flow just disappears out of thin air then what's holding me back? (Nothing)
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ctippett 4 hours ago
I never really used the Antigravity IDE, but had it installed. The update also made me do a double take and wonder what the hell was going on.

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.

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bdhtu 3 hours ago
You can't use Antigravity 2.0 on Windows with WSL. There is simply no way to connect to WSL. The agent can't run any Linux commands.

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.

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kubb 3 hours ago
Should be usable with ssh port forwarding?
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wejick 4 hours ago
They could just call it anything else and left the existing user alone. I mean they have gemini CLI, which I would say a better product.
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NitpickLawyer 4 hours ago
> I mean they have gemini CLI

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...

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dgacmu 3 hours ago
Oh, but you can only install the new antigravity CLI by first installing and authenticating via the IDE.

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.]

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xcrjm 2 hours ago
There's a link on the downloads page to a standalone version of the CLI
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danielbln 3 hours ago
Just today I installed the CLI version of antigravity (agy) and have been using it as a headless subagent from within Claude, so uh this works today?
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eslaught 43 minutes ago
And how do you get this to work exactly? I keep getting variations of "Missing required parameter: redirect_uri" in the OAuth flow.

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.

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dgacmu 2 hours ago
Right above the CLI download link on that page, there's a warning icon with "Authenticate with Antigravity or Antigravity IDE before using the CLI."
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danielbln 2 hours ago
Ok, I guess this is outdated then because I did what I said I did.
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dgacmu 60 minutes ago
Ah!

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.

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bmitc 4 hours ago
Gemini CLI is being sunsetted in mid-June and replaced by Antigravity.

https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transi...

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christoff12 3 hours ago
I've mostly avoided the frustration of dealing with google's product rug pulls over the years by never getting hooked on a non-gmail product.

Alas, I now feel the sting of disappointment.

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wffurr 28 minutes ago
In this case it's the usual Google product rug-pull plus the insane rate of AI tool churn.
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ctippett 4 hours ago
I think that's what everyone is going to think.

Hot take: At least they're ripping the bandaid now instead of stringing users along and eventually abandoning it like they normally do.

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qiine 3 hours ago
Sometimes I wonder if they even realize they have users...
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dolmen 2 hours ago
Jules is still alive.

https://jules.google.com

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oneshtein 59 minutes ago
> Jules is not yet available in your region.
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MichaelZuo 4 hours ago
Pissing off the segment of people most likely to take offense and try to take revenge seems pretty dumb.

No wonder they are losing massively to Huawei in several markets. Mobile marketshare is probably an indicator of some kind of their future prospects.

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StableAlkyne 4 hours ago
> Mobile marketshare is probably an indicator of some kind of their future prospects.

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.

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MichaelZuo 4 hours ago
They are declining in market share in several countries. Notably multiple ASEAN countries, Russia and Iran (though that is forced), and so on.

Edit: Probably the high end non apple market in nearly all African countries too, but idk if there is reliable data for those.

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postalcoder 4 hours ago
Google made its lack of interest in Antigravity IDE obvious from very early. Updates were few and far between and app-breaking bugs stuck around, despite tons of reports.

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.

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Sevii 5 hours ago
How did Google blow their AI lead? Why is Google the 2nd or 3rd tier player in the AI coding market? Why can't GCP supplant AWS?

Because google can't help but constantly shoot its customers and itself in the foot.

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satvikpendem 5 hours ago
No, it's more that Gemini models are simply not very good for coding compared to the top two. Even with Antigravity I use Claude models.
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pelorat 3 hours ago
Depends on the language. Gemini and Claude are far superior when it comes to C# for instance, compared to anything that OAI offers.
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fluffyspork 4 hours ago
Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini in my limited testing on a small C project single source file project, less than 1000 lines. Setting temperature to 0 gives better results for me. It seems like Gemini ignores the system prompt more and the default reasoning output seems more incoherent.
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_fat_santa 3 hours ago
Their open weight on device models are really impressive. Partly because I think they are the only ones out of all the frontier labs even working on local models.
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onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours ago
> Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini

Is there a fine-tuned Gemma coding model? I'd assume that would perform quite well.

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cush 4 hours ago
They had the lead for maybe a week or two. Now, only Apple is further behind.
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svachalek 3 minutes ago
I'll give them images. Gemini/Nano Banana is notably better at understanding and generating images than OpenAI, imo, and Claude can't even generate.
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repeekad 4 hours ago
Apple may be behind, and even getting sued for false advertising around AI features, but at least they haven’t spent hundreds of billions of dollars with no indication of how they’ll make their money back.
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elorant 4 hours ago
Because their strategy wasn’t to become leaders but to be as good as it takes to erode the lead of others. They have the cash cow of search so they don’t rely on AI to succeed. All they need is to keep publishing new products/services to keep OpenAI from taking the initiative. Between that and the Chinese models all they have to do is wait for the bubble to burst at which point every major AI lab would go bust.
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embedding-shape 5 hours ago
> How did Google blow their AI lead?

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.

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MisterKent 4 hours ago
Wow. Didn't realize OAI was astroturfing hacker news now...
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embedding-shape 4 hours ago
All the labs astroturf all the social media, HN is not unique and OpenAI wouldn't be the only ones. I even receive offers sometimes on my email put in my HN profile, asking me to post about their project in exchange for money.

Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".

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svachalek 7 minutes ago
Wait so you're countering an accusation of astroturfing with an actual confession? That's new.
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embedding-shape 35 seconds ago
[delayed]
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Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago
Wait what? Why don't I get emails like this too? /s

(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)

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago
Nah, maybe one day I do a collective public post of it, for now I just try to get their company and/or name first, then forward it to HN themselves so they can ban them and keep an eye out for them.
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Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago
Could you give us how many companies are trying to do this and also if any of the companies are YC companies themselves or not, I imagine not but still.

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!

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infecto 4 hours ago
I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.
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embedding-shape 4 hours ago
> It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.

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).

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kirtivr 29 minutes ago
I was a regular Claude Code user but Codex eventually won me over due to a few factors:

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.

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infecto 4 hours ago
Claude Code has only been around for a year and change. At least for our internal tests 2 years ago Anthropic models started to at least become semi-useful but they still were not great, they struggled with structured output. Prior to that their alignment strategy made the products highly unhelpful in an API context. The past 6 months to a year is where Anthropic has really shined, they have model parity and sometimes taking the lead and more importantly their product offering on the consumer side has crushed it.
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embedding-shape 4 hours ago
> Claude Code has only been around for a year and change.

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.

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disgruntledphd2 2 hours ago
I feel like aider was the first TUI for agentic stuff I came across here, and that was well before Claude code.
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arkadiytehgraet 3 hours ago
There are plenty of shills for all of the major labs on this website. Usually checking a history of comments of a suspicious user reveals that quite fast.
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jazzypants 4 hours ago
OpenAI literally wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Google's work in the space.
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embedding-shape 4 hours ago
Who wouldn't exists if someone else didn't invent something else, which wouldn't exists...

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...

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HDThoreaun 4 hours ago
Google invented transformers. They had LLMs before openAI existed.
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embedding-shape 4 hours ago
Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Also, if we're going backwards, who invented neural networks, does that mean that person also then "had LLMs before OpenAI existed"?

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tveita 2 hours ago
> who put the Transformer into LLMs?

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.

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saberience 36 minutes ago
Google didn’t invent neural networks, neural networks existed before Google was founded.
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kllrnohj 3 hours ago
> Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?

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

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erikerikson 3 hours ago
The tone on this could be improved. They literally answered your question "What lead?" and you seem dismissive.
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embedding-shape 3 hours ago
Yeah, you're right, maybe needlessly harsh, sorry for that. I guess I'm tired of the same argument that Google somehow had a lead in LLM development because Transformer comes from researchers who worked at Google, yet somehow what comes before/after Transformer doesn't count, coming from Google's researchers (BERT) or others (GPT), or going even earlier so, hence the whole "we stand on the shoulders of giants".
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HDThoreaun 3 hours ago
We can go round and round about all this but I think it's pretty clear that google did at one point have a large AI lead in the lead up to covid. They had models that far surpassed the competition from 2018-2022. But they were facing an innovators dilemma, didnt want to cannibalize their search revenue so they sat on LLMs which ended up creating openAI and anthropic.
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torben-friis 3 hours ago
The day my coworkers started using cursor I started to learn neovim. Every day that passes I'm more glad I did it.

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.

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tempoponet 47 minutes ago
For the huge percentage of devs using vscode, switching to Cursor was essentially adding a new color theme and a chat window. The CLI switch was far more radical.
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torben-friis 6 minutes ago
Yeah, I was a vscode user back then. The problem was realizing that cursor was going to be enshittified... and MS would start enshittifying vscode to compete as well.
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rurp 2 hours ago
Right, redoing your entire workflow around a new corporate AI platform is signing up for a lot of throwaway work. If you like fiddling with things like that then great, but if the tooling is a means to an end and you're more interested in actually building stuff with it you're adding a lot of cost by chasing the latest fads.

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.

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antonvs 3 hours ago
I use the CLI agents (from any major vendor), in conjunction with either nvim or standard VS Code (with Copilot disabled). That way you still get the automatic "agent" capabilities - it can search your code, propose and make changes, write tests, doc files, etc. - but it doesn't interfere with your editing experience.
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coder97 4 hours ago
I had the same experience. I could not figure out how to use the IDE mode in the new version. Turns out this is a bug. It was not supposed to remove the IDE automatically, instead a user could click on "Keep the antigravity IDE" as shown in the Demo Video (at 1:09 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C0FjHoN3qE). Clean install and disabling auto update solved the problem.
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dyates 34 minutes ago
I had the opposite experience when Gemini 3.1 first came out. It didn't show up as a model option in my fully updated Gemini CLI, and I subsequently figured out I had to install this Cursor-lookalike thing called Antigravity to try it. I'd like to stick with my existing editors, thanks.

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]

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/antigravity-ide

[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/antigravity2-bin

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orsenthil 35 minutes ago
> nothing beats the plan-review-implement loop

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.

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syllogistic 3 hours ago
Reminds me of my dad's experience with google nest hub a few months ago. He called it the best product google's ever made until an over the air update killed the video call feature he used to talk to his grand kids. Brutal.
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mritchie712 4 hours ago
> The day was to begin like any other, with Antigravity open

> 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

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SwellJoe 2 hours ago
That was a surprising sentence. But, Antigravity is fine. I mean, I only open it because it's the only way Gemini is going to get tool use right on the first try, but it works like all the other VS Code forks (acceptable, not great). I don't mind using it, and if Google AI is your one AI subscription, then Antigravity is obviously the editor to use, since Gemini fails to play well with others.
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Tenoke 2 hours ago
Compared to gemini-cli which I was using the last few weeks it also doesn't:

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.

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knollimar 42 minutes ago
No compacting?????????
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Tenoke 14 minutes ago
Nope, it does some automatically, but you cant even check the context size let alone compact. The agent proposes to start a new chat when you think it might be high, and that's it.
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sschueller 5 hours ago
I pay for google "Starter" workspace.

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.

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mrj 3 hours ago
Unfortunately, even if you upgrade there are still upgrade prompts for an even higher version of Workspace and gemini.

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.

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Havoc 3 hours ago
And if you upgrade to standard workspace it still tells you account not eligible for antigravity

Idk what google is doing

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metalliqaz 4 hours ago
The market demands INFINITE GROWTH
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Traubenfuchs 3 hours ago
…and 0.1% of users click the button that annoys 99% of users, so it‘s a BIG SUCCESS.
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oneshtein 23 minutes ago
0.1% is 2x better than typical 0.04%.
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metalliqaz 3 hours ago
there is no graph of user happiness. there is only graph of PROFIT
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happyopossum 4 hours ago
> 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.

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.

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andrewjneumann 4 hours ago
Google Enterprise accounts are sunsetting AI Ultra in favor of consumption based pricing at the end of the month. It’s unclear how limits for AI Ultra might change for gmail users. Flash3.5 is much better at coding, but also more expensive the pervious flash models.

So much for AI getting cheaper.

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KronisLV 4 hours ago
> So much for AI getting cheaper.

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.

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zozbot234 3 hours ago
These are models that can be run locally BTW. Just get enough hardware for your throughput requirements, have it grind on multiple batches of tokens 24x7 to get reasonable utilization (keeping the cloud for time-sensitive uses) and that's it, no more rug pulls.
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jdw64 2 hours ago
Fix for Antigravity 2.0 hijacking the IDE, and how to restore your lost settings/extensions(For windows user)

https://www.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1tig3ix...

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pingou 48 minutes ago
Also it keeps asking you for execution permission all the time for the same commands over and over again (even if you add them to the settings).

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.

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vlucas 4 hours ago
Cursor did this IDE -> Agents transition very well.

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.

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pqs 4 hours ago
Google hasn't handled this well, it is obvious.

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.

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testfrequency 3 hours ago
Same. It’s really been a nothing bar for me with this cutover. I feel for the IDE people, but now I call agy vs gemini…life goes on. 3.1 Pro model still works perfectly for me and my needs, if anything I’m finding the agy cli much more responsive and stable so far
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iKlsR 5 hours ago
I had the exact same experience, on Windows had to purge everything and lost all my history, on Mac it was a one click upgrade and sign in again for the most part with history gone as well.

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.

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Jare 57 minutes ago
I can't even remember the brand name because as soon as start with Ant... the next letter that comes naturally is an h. So I guess I'm safe.

Oddly enough, I reach out to the Gemini web chatbox frequently, even though the heavy duty stuff goes to Claude.

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tanepiper 42 minutes ago
Yep, hate it. Also I have a threejs MCP server that starts up when my IDE does.

Can't disable it now in Anti-gravity because the menu has been completely removed.

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sillyboi 3 hours ago
It feels like a change in department leadership and management, or an internal power struggle over a lucrative piece of the project (with all the consequences that typically come with it). In the end, it seems more about satisfying personal egos than serving the product, and the end users will be the ones left to “appreciate” the results.
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ozgung 4 hours ago
I want to Ask HN relating to this: What can be the motivation behind this change? Is this the preferred way of using AI coding tools nowadays? I've been using Antigravity mainly because of its tab completions. So I can work in code like in a traditional way and AI assists me. But it was a broken experience and now they are moving away from IDE based tool. The alternative is you write the prompt and it does everything. Is this the standard SW development workflow in 2026?
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throwa356262 4 hours ago
Google corporate culture where users are just numbers someone's performance report is why this happens.

Google could easily A/B test half of their users away from their products and nobody would get fired for it

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burntalmonds 3 hours ago
It is the new standard. It sounds awful until you try it, and then you can't go back. But you can still use an IDE as well to edit code by hand and review changes that agents have made.
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doug_durham 4 hours ago
Yes, this is the standard model for the big frontier models. You don't need Gemini or Claude to do tab completions. A modest size local model can do that just fine. If that is all you are using AI tools for you are wasting money subscribing to Google.
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browningstreet 4 hours ago
I'm surprised anyone thought Google would stay committed to an IDE product built on Microsoft's VS Code.

This was clearly an experiment or stepping stone, they were never going to stick to this path. It was always going to go away.

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dist-epoch 3 hours ago
The most widely used IDE inside Google to work on Google products, Cider, is based on VS Code.

https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/a-history-of-ides-at-google

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devmor 4 hours ago
This is how they want you to use AI-powered apps. The more ambiguity there is between you and the end result, the likelier you are to keep paying them to avoid friction.

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.

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estebarb 3 hours ago
I have refused to lean too hard on agentic tooling for developing. I'm aware of the gains, I use it at my daily job. But I cannot afford to loss my brain skills, just in case they do a rug pull.

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.

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esperent 3 hours ago
> These week announcements are effectively Google doing a rug pull to its customers

I can see The Onion headline now: "Man surprised when rug-pulling company pulls the rug from under him".

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wejick 4 hours ago
It's not even good, honestly. I was using it for couple weeks before dropping that 2 months ago. The model was not good and slow, the harness was not good, the IDE was subpar vscode clone. If IDE still important for your Workflow, Trae of Cursor offer much better interface, harness and plan.
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Espressosaurus 3 hours ago
Yeah, that was my experience. The model was worse in every way than ChatGPT or Claude or even Composer. I tried it out and used it when my other limits were hit, but only as a last resort. And I stopped doing even that because the model was so bad.
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frenchie4111 3 hours ago
I am building an Agent IDE called Harness. It is somewhat inspired by the previous version of antigravity (and Conductor, and a few others). But with a core goal being open source & hackability.

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

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onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours ago
> The goal is to organize all your AI sessions into somewhat logical places and make it easy to context switch.

Isn't this what Pi does (except you have a non-CLI UI)?

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frenchie4111 26 minutes ago
Looks like Pi does do it (I was not an aware of Pi before now). It's obvious the industry is standardizing around git worktrees + agents, it's just about which tool has your favorite ergonomics at this point.

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

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bjord 3 hours ago
and what is the harness for harness called?
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frenchie4111 28 minutes ago
I regret naming it harness for this exact reason but I am too deep at this point
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cap11235 3 hours ago
[dead]
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pglevy 3 hours ago
> Antigravity, as part of the Google AI Ultra plan, is my daily driver, my workhorse.

There's your mistake right there. There is history. User beware.

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parasti 3 hours ago
Google really outdid themselves this time. They killed not one but two tools (Gemini CLI and Antigravity) with one stone.
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mentalgear 2 hours ago
Good that I uninstalled antigravity by myself a few days back before this rug pull - given the XP you could think you got wormed.
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twobitshifter 2 hours ago
There’s real value in having copies of all the past versions of a program available and the user needing to choose to update rather than being forced to overwrite their install.
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daft_pink 4 hours ago
It’s like Google Reader all over again. Because of all these changes, I had to cancel my Google Workspace Ultra plan and switch to a personal developer ultra plan to use Antigravity on a subscription basis, but I still have to use gemini webchat on the workspace, because there is no way to get total privacy from the individual plan. At least they prorate the cancellation and credit the unused time period.
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laanako08 3 hours ago
I'm building an IDE (www.kaiso.ai)

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.

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onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours ago
> 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.

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.

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laanako08 3 hours ago
> Why do you think an IDE is the right tool?

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.

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onlyrealcuzzo 2 hours ago
> 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.

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.

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jayfae 4 hours ago
I don't have time to fix the problem, let me write a blog article about it, lol
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radres 4 hours ago
Sadly since couple of years or so ago we forgot about UX. Or quality in general. I have a companion which tells me I did everything right before pushing to prod. WCGW
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stronglikedan 4 hours ago
> I have a companion which tells me I did everything right before pushing to prod.

LPT: You can get to prod faster by skipping the step where it tells you anything.

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devmor 4 hours ago
Every time I update my JetBrains IDEs, they obliterate my lovely, tool packed UI and replace it with what looks like a minimalistic iPad app.

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.

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pelagicAustral 4 hours ago
Designers gotta eat
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devmor 3 hours ago
Hey I have the same complaints about us developers adding new features that no one asked for to a product that already serves its purpose.

I wish the industry could learn the art of leaving shit alone.

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xbar 4 hours ago
My opinion is that Google has currently enjoys low trustworthiness as an enterprise software and services provider.
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hypfer 3 hours ago
Will this experience actually have a lasting impact on how the author makes decisions?

Place your bets now.

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spankalee 3 hours ago
Wow, Google really fumbled this.

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.

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20k 2 hours ago
Its extremely funny seeing developers jumping on the AI train rediscovering in real-time why open source was invented. Not having control over the software running on your PC/devices, and being beholden to big business interests, is literally the reason why the entire FOSS scene exists. Developers have learnt the very VERY hard way to not rely on proprietary tooling

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

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sreekanth850 2 hours ago
Second day iam not shutting down my laptop or closing antigravity, just to finish my mintlify documentation. I wish i could see the team who did this shit.
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gergely 4 hours ago
Google has just stepped on the IBM path :D
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glitchc 4 hours ago
"..and you will learn to like it!"

--someone important

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roggy 4 hours ago
Antigravity IDE is just a better tool
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photochemsyn 4 hours ago
Anyone ‘fully plugged into the Google ecosystem’ is going to end up being milked by corporate when shareholder pressure for revenue increase goes up. Same with the Apple ecosystem. Of course the language manipulation here is amusing - it’s not an ecosystem, it’s a company town where you have to do transactions in scrip that’s not transferable to another company town. Prison is not exactly the right word, either - you are free to leave, you just have to leave many of your assets behind when you do.
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whalesalad 4 hours ago
Reminds me of the "dead dove do not eat" scene from arrested development. The surprising thing is not that Google is doing this, but that people are surprised by it.
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stalfosknight 4 hours ago
This is exactly why I have a have a strict blanket ban on automatic updates on all of my devices.
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intrasight 4 hours ago
> the prompt history from the old Antigravity installation is gone

So just restore it from your repo.

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theanonymousone 2 hours ago
A weird feeling tells me that this "keeping only in name" was done because someone at Google was cross with killedbygoogle.com.
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VLM 3 hours ago
None of this is an "AI" problem its SaaS BAU.

You don't like the new agreement? Pray I don't alter it further.

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ang_cire 2 hours ago
It's funny how people talk about de-Googling their lives as a struggle, but there are only 2 things I can think of that I use them for anymore, and that's 1) gmail, and 2) google maps.

It's always surprising to me when people mention these google services I've never heard of. What do you mean a Google IDE? Haven't you heard of Vim, bro?

Mostly-jokes aside; don't trust Google! Google is asshole.

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poly2it 3 hours ago
I was surprised to see that the new Antigravity does not integrate at all into Google's existing Material design system. Is the implication that Material is not for power users or developers? It's built as a universal solution.

https://antigravity.google/assets/image/blog/agy2-layout.jpg

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quantummagic 4 hours ago
At this point, anyone who relies on Alphabet for anything, deserves what they get. Fool me once... and all that.
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jijji 4 hours ago
you dont have to go look at the Google Graveyard [0] to understand that you might try a google product one day or month to have it either disappear or become a different product incompatible with the first the next month. They have been known for this for at least decades now.

Gemini CLI was fun for five minutes of testing until it tried to rewrite my whole code base.

[0] https://killedbygoogle.com

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Fokamul 4 hours ago
What the hell is Google Antigravity?
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illwrks 3 hours ago
It was a code editor that had Gemini integrated into it. I’ve been playing around with the new version, it can still do what I was using it for, but it does make me wonder if it will become a OpenClaw like tool.
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junglistguy 3 hours ago
[dead]
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ath3nd 4 hours ago
[dead]
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