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Evidence: High: 0 Medium: 1 Low: 7 No Data: 23

Theme Radar

nasretdinov 2025-11-18 16:13 UTC link

- A new "AI" IDE announced

- It's VS Code

Like clockwork!

TIPSIO 2025-11-18 16:19 UTC link

I actually like the workflow they are suggesting. There's something there for sure:

- Nano Banana => Mockup

- Antigravity/IDE => Comments/note

- Gemini => Turn to code

- Antigravity/IDE => Adjust/code

All on the same platform so can maximum automate / "agentic"

spuz 2025-11-18 16:21 UTC link

> Your new focus is architecting the solution, not implementing every single step. So congratulations, you have been elevated to a manager of agents.

I'm not sure many engineers will welcome this "promotion".

ayhanfuat 2025-11-18 16:29 UTC link

On the pricing page it says that for public preview they are offering a free individual plan with "generous rate limits". I gave it an HTML file and asked it to create Jinja templates from it and 2 minutes later (still planning, no additional prompt) I got this:

> Model quota limit exceeded. You have reached the quota limit for this model.

nateb2022 2025-11-18 16:30 UTC link

I went ahead and downloaded it, it looks to be a VSCode fork very similar to Cursor, with support for the following models:

  - Gemini 3 Pro (High)
  - Gemini 3 Pro (Low)
  - Claude Sonnet 4.5
  - Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking)
  - GPT-OSS 120B (Medium)

mccoyb 2025-11-18 16:31 UTC link

> Bajillions of dollars invested in the development of some of the most powerful computational artifacts to date.

> Fork VS Code, add a few workflow / management ideas on top.

> "Agentic development platform"

I'm Jack's depressed lack of surprise.

Please someone, make me feel something with software again.

msci100 2025-11-18 16:31 UTC link

So this is Google's version of Windsurf's Wave 10 before the whole team got poached? https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-wave-10-browser

Trying to understand how this is anything net new in the space.

antimora 2025-11-18 16:33 UTC link

Why is scrolling modified on this page? I how to disable it?

jihadjihad 2025-11-18 16:33 UTC link

> Spin up agents to tackle routine tasks that take you out of your flow, such as codebase research, bug fixes, and backlog tasks.

The software of the future, where nobody on staff knows how anything is built, no one understands why anything breaks, and cruft multiplies exponentially.

But at least we're not taken out of our flow!

kUdtiHaEX 2025-11-18 16:52 UTC link

2020: every day a new JS framework is announced

2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced

2025: every day a new AI IDE vscode fork is announced

sippeangelo 2025-11-18 16:59 UTC link

> Neither engenders user trust in the work that the agent undertook. Antigravity provides context on agentic work at a more natural task-level abstraction, with the necessary and sufficient set of artifacts and verification results, for the user to gain that trust.

I'm going to need an AI summary of this page to even start comprehending this... It doesn't help that the scrolling makes me nauseous, just like real anti-gravity probably would.

sangeeth96 2025-11-18 17:15 UTC link

With all due to respect to the folks working on Antigravity, this feels like a vibe-coded VSCode fork to me. Font sizes, icon sizes, panel sizes are all over the place (why?). To top it all off, the first request just failed with overload/quota exceeded errors (understandable, but still).

Looks like I'll wait to see if Google cares about putting the polish into a VSCode fork that at least comes close to what Cursor did.

giancarlostoro 2025-11-18 17:39 UTC link

I just have zero faith in Google. How long until we hear that someone mysteriously got banned by Google (as we see on HN every few months? it feels like it anyway) and hear about how now they have no AI tooling etc etc etc because its all married to their Google Account.

Additionally... Google Code was shut down in 2016? I have zero confidence in such a user hostile company. They gave you a Linux phone, they extended it, and made it proprietary. They gave you a good email account, extended it and made it proprietary. They took away office software from you via Google Docs, so now you don't even own the software they do.

No thanks.

ddp26 2025-11-18 17:44 UTC link

This whole blog post is seemingly about Google, not about the user. "Why We Built Antigravity" etc. "We want Antigravity to be the home base for software development in the era of agents" - cool, why would I as the user care about that?

cube2222 2025-11-18 18:33 UTC link

I'll be honest - this doesn't look half-bad.

It really seems like it's just standardizing into a first-class UI what a lot of people have already been doing.

I don't think I'm the target for this - I already use Claude Code with jj workspaces and a mostly design-doc first workflow, and I don't see why I would switch to this, but I think this could be quite useful for people who don't want to dive in so deep and combine raw tooling themselves.

uatec 2025-11-18 19:17 UTC link

"Congratulations, you have been elevated to manager to agents."

That's not exactly really where I hoped my career would lead. It's like managing junior developers, but without having nice people to work with.

lbrito 2025-11-18 19:39 UTC link

The agentic spam is exhausting. I just wanted to code.

Too early in my career to not give a shit and retire, but too late be excited about these things and eager to learn. What a time...

throwaway13337 2025-11-18 19:53 UTC link

I gave it a fair shot.

It is a vs code fork. There were some UI glitches. Some usability was better. Cursor has some real annoying usability issues - like their previous/next code change never going away and no way to disable it. Design of this one looks more polished and less muddy.

I was working on a project and just continued with it. It was easy because they import setting from cursor. Feels like the browser wars.

Anyway, I figured it was the only way to use gemini 3 so I got started. A fast model that doesn't look for much context. Could be a preprompt issue. But you have to prod it do stuff - no ambition and a kinda offputting atitude like 2.5.

But hey - a smarter, less context rich Cursor composer model. And that's a complement because the latest composer is a hidden gem. Gemini has potential.

So I start using it for my project and after about 20 mins - oh, no. Out of credits.

What can I do? Is there a buy a plan button? No? Just use a different model?

What's the strategy here? If I am into your IDE and your LLM, how do I actually use it? I can't pay for it and it has 20 minutes of use.

I switched back to cursor. And you know? it had gemini 3 pro. Likely a less hobbled version. Day one. Seems like a mistake in the eyes of the big evil companies but I'll take it.

Real developers want to pay real money for real useful things.

Google needs to not set themselves up for failure with every product release.

If you release a product, let those who actually want to use it have a path to do so.

Voultapher 2025-11-18 20:47 UTC link

Quoting their own video:

> You can verify your code quality at a glance, then ship with absolute confidence.

Proclaiming absolute confidence after a glance leaves me with scant confident in the merit of the confidence.

eugene-kim 2025-11-19 16:51 UTC link

Lots of commenters are simply calling this a VSCode fork and I think they're missing something important as far as how this product fits into the market.

Anthropic and OpenAI are investing a lot into this space and are now competing directly with companies like Cursor. Cursor's biggest moat at the moment is their tab completion model, which doesn't exist in the Anthropic's and OpenAI's current offerings and is leagues ahead of Github Copilot's.

Antigravity is a VSCode fork that adds both Google's own tab complete and an agent composer, similar to products like https://conductor.build/. Assuming that Google doesn't shoot themselves in the foot (which they seem to like doing), we'll see if wrappers like Cursor / Windsurf / Cognition can compete against the big labs. It's worth noting that the category seems to be blurring, since Cursor has trained not only their own tab complete model but also their own agent model.

dnw 2025-11-18 16:20 UTC link

Jules

elif 2025-11-18 16:25 UTC link

Few horse racers became automobile racers.

If existing engineers don't change it doesn't matter because new engineers will take their place.

jakebasile 2025-11-18 16:29 UTC link

How many forks of VS Code am I supposed to have installed at this point?

AstroBen 2025-11-18 16:30 UTC link

I don't think this is speaking to the engineers

riskassessment 2025-11-18 16:35 UTC link

> html

Would be willing to bet this is the issue. Adding html files to context for gemini models results in a ton of token use.

Namahanna 2025-11-18 16:40 UTC link

Looks to be. The UI has almost the exactly the same bits, and I even got 'Cascade' references as using it.

modeless 2025-11-18 16:42 UTC link

Thank you for saying what this entire blog post doesn't. It's actually disrespectful of Google to launch this without even a mention of the fact that it is based on VSCode.

SR2Z 2025-11-18 16:42 UTC link

If you're building something new you'll need some skilled people around

collingreen 2025-11-18 16:43 UTC link

There is cool stuff out there! Look beyond the companies with $B valuations and you can find smart, passionate people making neat stuff.

bakies 2025-11-18 16:44 UTC link

After a bunch of people leave the company it's already like nobody knows how anything is built. This seems like a good thing to accelerate understanding a codebase.

meetpateltech 2025-11-18 16:50 UTC link

Put this in your browser console to force default scrolling

  var css = 'body { height: auto !important; overflow: auto !important; } .smooth-scroll-wrapper { transform: none !important; position: static !important; } div[style*="position: fixed"] { position: static !important; overflow: visible !important; inset: auto !important; }';
  var style = document.createElement('style');
  style.innerHTML = css;
  document.head.appendChild(style);
  console.log("Default scroll forced.");

phantasmish 2025-11-18 16:51 UTC link

Google likes to fuck with basic browser functionality for some reason. Scrolling, sometimes also how “click” intents through touch are triggered (that is, using js listeners for touch events instead of watching for the browser to communicate a “click” on an element; this does usability-killing shit like make a touch-to-stop-scrolling get interpreted as a click on whatever happens to be under your finger). I have no idea why they do this, but they do it a lot, so it must be a cultural thing.

And I don’t mean like some designers will highjack scroll to deliver a different experience like slide-like transitions or something (which may or may not be, differently, awful) but they’ll override it just to give you ordinary scrolling, except much worse (as on this page).

Seems like a lot of work to do just to make something shittier, but what do I know, I probably can’t implement a* on a whiteboard from memory or whatever.

tencentshill 2025-11-18 16:53 UTC link

They want everyone to see what the webpage looks like on their Mac.

linhns 2025-11-18 16:55 UTC link

This is why I have much respect for the Zed team as they are chasing originality, not just slap something onto VS Code and call it a new IDE.

ethmarks 2025-11-18 17:00 UTC link

Interesting that they include non-Gemini models. Both Claude and GPT oss are both on Google Cloud, so I assume that Antigravity is using GC as the provider and not making API calls to Anthropic or OpenAI.

salawat 2025-11-18 17:00 UTC link

You weren't the target audience. The target audience was manager types tired of being told no by engineers. Always listen to the quiet parts left unspoken/unacknoeledged.

dansalvato 2025-11-18 17:03 UTC link

I can't believe these "smooth scrolling" scripts are still a thing. I was wondering why I was having a hard time scrolling the page on my phone, when I got to my PC and felt the reason.

It's incredible to think how many employees of this world-leading Web technology company must have visited this site before launch, yet felt nothing wrong with its basic behavior.

IncreasePosts 2025-11-18 17:04 UTC link

Is the extension system in VSCode not powerful enough to make these just normal extensions for a vanilla VSCode executable? Or is everyone just going for lock in, since if you download MyFork, you can't start using some other extension that uses OtherGuysModel?

thisisit 2025-11-18 17:04 UTC link

Written by AI now summarise and explained by AI.

pooyamo 2025-11-18 17:04 UTC link

>vscode fork

I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something based on their own GUI stacks like Flutter or Compose Multiplatform.

It seems only Zed is truly innovating in this space.

crazygringo 2025-11-18 17:12 UTC link

You can ask agents to identify and remove cruft. You can ask an agent why something is breaking -- to hypothesize potential causes and test them for validity. If you don't understand how something is built, you can ask the agent to give you an overview of the architecture and then dive into whatever part you want to explore more.

And it's not like any of your criticisms don't apply to human teams. They also let cruft develop, are confused by breakages, and don't understand the code because everyone on the original team has since left for another company.

conartist6 2025-11-18 17:21 UTC link

Challenge accepted

dannyfritz07 2025-11-18 17:21 UTC link

wow, you weren't kidding about the scroll induced nausea.

candiddevmike 2025-11-18 17:22 UTC link

AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents.

golergka 2025-11-18 17:22 UTC link

As somebody who worked on two IDEs which didn't fork VSCode but still used Monaco for code editing views, I think forking VSCode is almost always the right solutions for a new IDE. You get extensions, familiarity and most importantly, don't waste valuable time on the boring stuff which VSCode has already implemented.

Nothing bad with using code other people made open. Our whole industry is built on this.

rglover 2025-11-18 17:22 UTC link

If you want to feel something with software, leave the industry and never look back, saving programming as something you do for your own joy/reward (I'm not being hyperbolic—I'd argue we're in the early days of the web's "dark ages").

Unfortunately, once money came into the picture, quality, innovation, and anything resembling true progress flew out the window.

pdntspa 2025-11-18 17:32 UTC link

Why is it so hard for these to be VSCode extensions and not forks?

femiagbabiaka 2025-11-18 17:34 UTC link

2020: every day a new electron fork is announced

2024: every day a new electron fork is announced

2025: every day a new electron fork is announced

fhinkel 2025-11-18 17:36 UTC link

The UI is certainly buggy, and things are getting fixed all the time. Guess it was more a "let people try the agent manager" instead of overfocusing on looks.

wiseowise 2025-11-18 17:46 UTC link

You wouldn’t. It’s made to suck out investor money and show that google does something, not to actually bring value.

My crystal ball says it will be shutdown next year.

Epistemic Quality

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Propaganda Flags

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Solution Orientation

0.00 problem only

Emotional Tone

detached

Stakeholder Voice

0.00 0 perspectives

Temporal Framing

present unspecified

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accessible low jargon none

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