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.
As someone who used to work there, Google will never get product releases right in general because of how bureaucratic and heavyweight their launch processes are.
They force the developing team to have a huge number of meetings and email threads that they must steer themselves to check off a ridiculously large list of "must haves" that are usually well outside their domain expertise.
The result is that any non-critical or internally contentious features get cut ruthlessly in order to make the launch date (so that the team can make sure it happens before their next performance review).
It's too hard to get the "approving" teams to work with the actual developers to iron these issues out ahead of time, so they just don't.
Spot on. I would suggest a slightly different framing where the antagonist isn't really the "approving" teams but "leaders" who all want a seat at the table and exercise their authority lest their authority muscles atrophy. Since they're not part of the development, unless they object to something, would they really have any impact or leadership?
I always laugh-cry with whomever I'm sitting next to whenever launch announcements come out with more people in the "leadership" roles than the individual contributor roles. So many "leaders" but none with the awareness or the care of the farcical volumes such announcements speak.
Involving everyone who shows up to meetings is a great way to move forward and/or trim down attendees. Management who enjoys getting their brain picked or homework assignments are always welcome.
That's presuming a healthy culture. In an unhealthy culture, some people will feel pressure to uphold some comment that someone "senior" made offhand in a meeting several months ago, even if that leader is no longer attending project meetings. The people who report to this leader may otherwise receive blowback if the "decision" their leader made is not being upheld, whether such a leader recalls their several-month-old decision correctly or not, in the case they recall it at all. I have found it frustratingly-more-common-than-I-would-like where people, including leaders, retroactively adjust their past decisions so that they claim "I-told-you-so" and "you-should-have-done-what-I-said".
In response to your comment, yes, I would largely be in favor of moving forward only with whatever is said in the relevant meetings with the given attendees of a meeting. That assumes a reasonably healthy culture where these meetings are scheduled in good faith reasonable times for all relevant stakeholders.
Yep, that and (also used to work there) the motivations of the implementing teams end up getting very detached from the customer focus and product excellence because of bureaucratic incentives and procedures that reward other things.
There's a lot of "shipping the org chart" -- competing internal products, turf wars over who gets to own things, who gets the glory, rather than what's fundamentally best for the customer. E.g. Play Music -> YouTube Music transition and the disaster of that.
Hah, that exact transition was my last project there before I decided I had had enough!
The GPM team was hugely passionate about music and curating a good experience for users, but YT leadership just wanted us to "reuse existing video architecture" to the Nth degree when we merged into the YT org.
After literally years of negotiations you got... what YTM is. Many of the original GPM team members left before the transition was fully underway because they saw the writing on the wall and wanted no part of it. I really wish I had done the same.
That is so sad to hear. I absolutely loved Google Play Music – especially features like saving e.g. an online Universal Music release to my "archive" and then for myself being able to actually RENAME TRACKS with e.g. wrong metadata.
That and being able to mix my own uploaded tracks with online music releases into a curated collection almost made it a viable contender to my local iTunes collection.
And then... they just removed it forever. Bastards.
Yep, YTM is/was so clearly the inferior product it's laughable. Even as a Google employee with a discount etc (I can't remember what that was, but) on these things I switched to Spotify when they dropped it.
I worked on a team that wrote software for Chromecast based devices. The YTM app didn't even support Chromecast, our own product, and their responses on bug tickets from Googlers reporting this as a problem was pretty arrogant. It was very disheartening to watch. Complete organizational dysfunction.
I think YTM has substantially improved since then, but it still has terrible recommendations, and it still bizarrely blurs between video and music content.
Google went from a company run by engineers to one run by empire-building product managers so fast, it all happened in a matter of 2-3 years.
As someone who just GA'd an Azure service - things aren't all that different in Azure. Not sure how AWS does service launches but it would be interesting to contrast with GCP and Azure.
So I start using it for my project and after about 20 mins - oh, no. Out of credits.
I didn't even get to try a single Gemini 3 prompt. I was out of credits before my first had completed. I guess I've burned through the free tier in some other app but the error message gave me no clues. As far as I can tell there's no link to give Google my money in the app. Maybe they think they have enough.
After switching to gpt-oss:120b it did some things quite well, and the annotation feature in the plan doc is really nice. It has potential but I suspect it's suffering from Google's typical problem that it's only really been tested on Googlers.
EDIT: Now it's stuck in a loop repeating the last thing it output. I've seen that a lot on gpt-oss models but you'd think a Google app would detect that and stop. :D
EDIT: I should know better than to beta test a FAANG app by now. I'm going back to Codex. :D
Don't think so, I expect that system to use Spanner, so my best guess is that the user generated an image at the end of the credit reset window (which is around noon EST).
The first patch release (released on launch day) says: "Messaging to distinguish particular users hitting their user quota limit from all users hitting the global capacity limits." So, collectively we're hitting the quota, its not just your quota. (One would think Google might know how to scale their services on launch day...)
The Documentation (https://antigravity.google/docs/plans) claims that "Our modeling suggests that a very small fraction of power users will ever hit the per-five-hour rate limit, so our hope is that this is something that you won't have to worry about, and you feel unrestrained in your usage of Antigravity."
With Ultra I hit that limit in 20 minutes with Gemini 3 low. When the rate limit cleared some hours later, I got one prompt before hitting limit again.
If by "Ultra", you're referring to the Google AI Ultra plan, then I just want to let you know that it doesn't actually take Google AI plans into consideration. It seems like the product will have its own separate subscription. At the moment, everyone is on the same free plan until they finalize their subscription pricing/model (https://antigravity.google/docs/plans).
On a separate note, I think the UX is excellent and the output I've been getting so far are really good. It really does feel like AI-native development. I know asking for a more integrated issue-tracking experience might be expanding the scope too much but that's really the biggest missing feature right now. That and, I don't like the fact that the "Review Changes" doesn't work if you're asking it to modify reports that are not in the current workspace that's open.
you'd hope so, the same way you'd hope that AI IDEs would not show these package/dependency folder contents when referencing files using @ - but i still get shown a bunch of shit that i would never need to reference by hand
One would think this would have been obvious when it fails on the first or second request already, yet people here all complain about rate limits.
When I downloaded it, it already came with the proper "Failed due to model provider overload" message.
When it did work, the agent seemed great, achieving the intended changes in a React and python project. Particularly the web app looks much better than what Claude produced.
I did not see functionality to have it test the app in the browser yet.
VSCode is Electron based which, yes, is based on Chromium. But the page you link to isn't about that, its about using VSCode as dev environment for working on Chromium, so I don't know why you linked it in this context.
Which came from "the KDE HTML Widget" AKA khtmlw. Wonder if that's the furthest we can go?
> if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem
Probably nowhere, people rather not do anything that contribute to something that does decisions they disagree with. Forking is beautiful, and I think improves things more than it hurts. Think of all the things we wouldn't have if it wasn't for forking projects :)
On the other hand if that had stopped google from having a browser they push into total dominance with the help of sleazy methods, maybe that would have been better overall.
I still prefer a open source chromium base vs a proprietary IE (or whatever else) Web Engine dominating.
(Fixing IE6 issues was no fun)
Also I do believe, the main reason chrome got dominance is simply because it got better from a technical POV.
I started webdev on FF with firebug. But at some point chrome just got faster with superior dev tools. And their dev tools kept improving while FF stagnated and rather started and maintained u related social campaigns and otherwise engaged with shady tracking as well.
> I still prefer a open source chromium base vs a proprietary IE (or whatever else) Web Engine dominating.
Okay but that's not the tradeoff I was suggesting for consideration. Ideally nothing would have dominated, but if something was going to win I don't think it would have been IE retaking all of firefox's ground. And while I liked Opera at the time, that takeover is even less likely.
> Also I do believe, the main reason chrome got dominance is simply because it got better from a technical POV.
Partly it was technical prowess. But google pushing it on their web pages and paying to put an "install chrome" checkbox into the installers of unrelated programs was a big factor in chrome not just spreading but taking over.
> And their dev tools kept improving while FF stagnated and rather started and maintained u related social campaigns and otherwise engaged with shady tracking as well.
Since when you don't touch Firefox or try the dev tools ?
I use FF for browsing, but every time I think of starting dev tools, maybe even just to have a look at some sites source code .. I quickly close them again and open chrome instead.
I wouldn't know where to start, to list all the things I miss in FF dev tools.
The only interesting thing for me they had, the 3D visualizer of the dom tree, they stopped years ago.
We might not have had Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox in the first place if so either, who I'd like to think been a net-positive for the web since inception. At least I remember being saved by Firefox when the options were pretty much Internet Explorer or Opera on a Windows machine.
> they push into total dominance with the help of sleazy methods
Ah, yes. The famously sleazy "automatic security updates" and "performance."
It is amazing how people forget what the internet was like before Chrome. You could choose between IE, Firefox, or (shudder) Opera. IE was awful, Opera was weird, and the only thing that Firefox did better than customization was crash.
Now everyone uses Chrome/WebKit, because it just works. Mozilla abandoning Servo is awful, but considering that Servo was indirectly funded by Google in the first place... well, it's really hard to look at what Google has done to browsing and say that we're worse off than we were before.
> Both are based on khtml. We could be living in a very different world if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem
How so?
Do you think thousands of googlers and apple engineers could be reasonably managed by some KDE opensource contributors? Or do you imagine google and apple would have taken over KDE? (Does anyone want that? Sounds horrible.)
I think they meant we wouldn’t have had Safari, Chrome, Node, Electron, VSCode, Obsidian? Maybe no TyeScript or React either (before V8, JavaScript engines sucked). The world might have adopted more of Mozilla.
that's a bit misleading. it was based on webcore which apple had forked from khtml. however google found apple's addition to be a drag and i think very little of it (if anything at all, besides the khtml foundation) survived "the great cleanup" and rewrite that became blink. so actually webkit was a just transitional phase that led to a dead end and it is more accurate to say that blink is based on khtml.
Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take web experience and create extensions, furthering the ecosystem moat for Electron-based IDEs.
Even more importantly, though, the more we move towards "I'm supervising a fleet of 50+ concurrent AI agents developing code on separate branches" the more the notion of the IDE starts to look like something you want to be able to launch in an unconfigured cloud-based environment, where I can send a link to my PM who can open exactly what I'm seeing in a web browser to unblock that PR on the unanswered spec question.
Sure, there's a world where everyone in every company uses Zed or similar, all the way up to the C-suite.
But it's far more likely that web technologies become the things that break down bottlenecks to AI-speed innovation, and if that's the case, IDEs built with an eye towards being portable to web environments (including their entire extension ecosystems) become unbeatable.
Many of VSCode extensions are written in C++, Go, Rust or C#, Java, exactly because performance sucks when written in JavaScript and most run out of process anyway.
> Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take web experience and create extensions, furthering the ecosystem moat for Electron-based IDEs.
The last thing I want is to install dozens of JS extensions written by people who crossed that lower barrier. Most of them will probably be vibe coded as well. Browser extensions are not the reason I use specific browsers. In fact, I currently have 4 browser extensions installed, one of which I wrote myself. So the idea that JS extensions will be a net benefit for an IDE is the wrong way of looking at it.
Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The opposite could be argued, actually. There are plenty of editors and IDEs that don't have as many users as the more popular ones, yet still have an enthusiastic and dedicated community around them.
> Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The opposite could be argued, actually.
The most successful IDE of all time is ed, which is enthusiastically used by one ancient graybeard who is constantly complaining about the kids these days.
Nobody has told him that the rest of the world uses 250MB of RAM for their text editor because they value petty things like "usability" over purity. He would have a heart attack - the last time he heard someone describe the concept of Emacs plugins he flew into a rage and tried to organize a death panel for anyone using syntax highlighting.
I tried switching to Zed and switched back less than 24 hours later. I was expecting it to be snappier than VS Code and it wasn’t to any significant degree, and I ran into several major bugs with the source control interface that made it unusable for me.
People dunk on VS Code but it’s pretty damn good. Surely the best Electron app? I’m sure if you are heavily into EMACS it’s great but most people don’t want to invest huge amounts of time into their tools, they would rather be spending that time producing.
For a feature rich workhorse that you can use for developing almost anything straight out of the box, it within minutes after installing a few plugins, it’s very hard to beat. In my opinion lot of the hate is pure cope from people who have probably never really used it.
VS Code is technically an Electron app, but it's not the usual lazy resource hog implementation like Slack or something. A lot of work went into making it fast. I doubt you'll find many non-Electron full IDEs that are faster. Look at Visual Studio, that's using a nice native framework and it runs at the speed of fossilized molasses.
VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB. Complaining about full IDEs slowness is fully irrelevant here. Full IDEs provide an end to end experience in implementing a project. Whatever you need, it's there. I think the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones is IdeaVim and I've never needed something else for XCode.
It's like complaining about a factory's assembly line, saying it's not as portable as the set of tools in your pelican case.
Please take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes.
VSCode is more popular, which makes it easy to find extensions. But you don’t see those in the Emacs world because the equivalent is a few lines of config.
So what you will see are more like meta-extensions. Something that either solve a whole class of problems, could be a full app, or provides a whole interaction model.
> Please take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes.
I've used Emacs.
> But you don’t see those in the Emacs world because the equivalent is a few lines of config.
That is really quite false. It's a common sentiment that people spend their lives in their .emacs file. The exact reason I left Emacs was that getting a remote development setup was incredibly fragile and meant I was spending all this time in .emacs only to get substandard results. The worst you do in VS Code is set high-level settings in VS Code or the various extensions.
Nothing in the Emacs world comes close to the remote extensions for SSH and Docker containers that VS Code nor the Copilot and general AI integration. I can simply install VS Code on any machine, login via GitHub, and have all of my settings, extensions, etc. loaded up. I don't have to mess around with cross-platform issues and Git-syncing my .emacs file. Practically any file format has good extensions, and I can embed Mermaid, Draw.io, Figma, etc. all in my VS Code environment.
Now, I'm sure someone will come in and say "but Emacs does that too!". If so, it's likely a stretch and it won't be as easy in VS Code.
In 2025, you really picked Emacs as the hill to die on? Who is under 30 who cares about Emacs in 2025? Few. You might as well argue that most developers should be using Perl 6.
> the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones
By default, JetBrains' IntelliJ-based IDEs have a huge number of plug-ins installed. If you upgrade from Community Edition to a paid license, the number only increases. Your comment is slightly misleading to me.
Just wait until vi steps into the room. Perhaps we can recreate the Usenet emacs vs vi flame wars. Now, if only '90's me could see the tricked out neovim installs we have these days.
They just made a big song and dance about full updating Visual Studio so it launches in milliseconds and is finally decoupled from all the underlying languages/compilers.
It's still kinda slow for me. I've moved everything but WinForms off it now, though.
VS Code is plenty fast enough. I switched to Zed a few months back, and it's super snappy. Unless you're running on an incredibly resource constrained machine, it mostly comes down to personal preference.
I have always found JetBrains stuff super snappy. I use neovim as a daily driver but for some projects the inference and debugging integration in JetBrains is more robust.
Like writing out of process extensions in compiled languages.
VS is much faster considering it is a full blown IDE not a text editor, being mostly C++/COM and a couple of .NET extensions alongside the WPF based UI.
Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, written in JavaScript, to see where performance goes.
It funny that despite how terrible, convoluted and maladapted web tech is for displaying complex GUIs it still gradually ate lunch of every native component library and they just couldn't innovate to keep up on any front.
Amazon just released OS that uses React Native for all GUI.
It's easy to design bad software and write bad code. Like the old saying: "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one". Businesses don't have time to write good and nice software, so they wrote bad one.
I didn't really mean Electron, but rather unholy amalgam of three languages, each with 20 years of "development", which mostly consisted of doing decrapifying and piling up new (potentially crappy) stuff. Although Electron with UI context and system (backend? background?) context both running js is another can of worms.
The anti-Electron meme is a vocal minority who don’t realize they’re a vocal minority. It’s over represented on Hacker News but outside of HN and other niches, people do not care what’s under the hood. They only care that it works and it’s free.
I used Visual Studio Code across a number of machines including my extremely underpowered low-spec test laptop. Honestly it’s fine everywhere.
Day to day, I use an Apple Silicon laptop. These are all more than fast enough for a smooth experience in Visual Studio Code.
At this point the only people who think Electron is a problem for Visual Studio Code either don’t actually use it (and therefore don’t know what they’re talking about) or they’re obsessing over things like checking the memory usage of apps and being upset that it could be lower in their imaginary perfect world.
Complaining about Electron is an ideological battle, not a practical argument. The people who push these arguments don’t care that it actually runs very well on even below average developer laptops, they think it should have been written in something native.
The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise.
The extent to which electron apps run well depends on how many you're running and how much ram you had to spare.
When I complain about electron it has nothing to do with ideology, it's because I do run out of memory, and then I look at my process lists and see these apps using 10x as much as native equivalents.
And the worst part of wasting memory is that it hasn't changed much in price for quite a while. Current model memory has regularly been available for less than $4/GB since 2012, and as of a couple months ago you could get it for $2.50/GB. So even a 50% boost in use wipes out the savings since then. And sure the newer RAM is a lot faster, but that doesn't help me run multiple programs at the same time.
> The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise.
Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that.
I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine. The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly.
You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
> I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine.
"Multiple" isn't too impressive when you compare that a blank windows install has more than a hundred processes going. Why accept bloat in some when it would break the computer if it was in all of them?
> Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that.
Even then, I don't see why developers should be forced to have better computers just to run things like editors. The point of a beefy computer is to do things like compile.
But most of what I'm stuck with Electron-wise is not developer tools.
> The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly.
I am complaining about REAL problems that happen to me often.
> You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
Don't worry, I'm looking specifically at the working set that does need to stay resident for them to be responsive.
...so if you spend an extra $4 on your computer, you can get an extra GB of memory to run Electron in?
Here's the other unspoken issue: WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED SO MUCH MEMORY FOR!?
When I use a computer, I am in the minority of users who run intensive stuff like a compiler or ML training run. That's still a minute portion of the total time I spend on my computer. You know what I always have open? A browser and a text editor.
Yes, they could use less memory. But I don't need them to use less memory, I need them to run quickly and smoothly because even a 64GB stick of RAM costs almost nothing compared to how much waiting for your browser sucks.
My motherboard does not support more memory. Closer to hundreds of dollars than $4. And no I will not justify my memory use to you.
And price is a pathetic excuse for bad work. RAM gets 50x cheaper and some devs think it's fine to use 50x as much of it making their app work? That's awful. That's why computers are still unresponsive half the time despite miracles of chipmaking.
Devs getting good computers compounds this problem too, when they get it to "fast enough" on their machine and stop touching it.
And memory being cheap is an especially bad justification when a program is used by many people. If you make 50 million people use $4 of RAM, that's a lot. Except half the time the OEM they bought the computer from charges $20 for that much extra RAM. Now the bloat's wasting a billion dollars.
And please remember that a lot of people have 4GB or 8GB and no way to replace it. Their apps move to electron and they can't run them all at once anymore? Awful.
> RAM gets 50x cheaper and some devs think it's fine to use 50x as much of it making their app work? That's awful.
That's ABSURD.
> That's why computers are still unresponsive half the time despite miracles of chipmaking.
Have you ever actually used VSCode? It's pretty snappy even on older hardware.
Of course, software can be written poorly and still fit in a small amount of memory, too :)
> Now the bloat's wasting a billion dollars.
Unless users had some other reason for buying a machine with a lot of RAM, like playing video games or compiling code.
Do you think most users spec their machines with the exact 4GB of RAM that it takes to run a single poorly-written Electron app?
> And please remember that a lot of people have 4GB or 8GB and no way to replace it. Their apps move to electron and they can't run them all at once anymore? Awful.
Dude, it's 2025.
I googled "cheapest smartphones India" and the first result was for the Xiaomi POCO F1. It has 8GB of RAM and costs ₹6,199 - about $62. That's a whole-ass _phone_, not just the RAM.
If you want to buy a single 8GB stick of DDR3? That's about $15 new.
> My motherboard does not support more memory. Closer to hundreds of dollars than $4.
If you are buying HUNDREDS of dollars of RAM, you are building a powerful system which almost certainly is sitting idle most of the time.
> And no I will not justify my memory use to you.
Nobody is forcing you to run an electron app, they're just not catering to this weird fetish for having lots of unused RAM all the time.
What is? The devs or my claim? There are apps that use stupid amounts of memory to do the same thing a windows 98 app could do.
And you can do good or bad within the framework of electron but the baseline starts off fat.
> Unless users had some other reason for buying a machine with a lot of RAM, like playing video games or compiling code.
If they want to do both at the same time, they need the extra. Things like music or chat apps are a constant load.
> Dude, it's 2025.
As recently as 2024 a baseline Mac came with 8GB. Soldered, so you can't buy a stick of anything.
> If you are buying HUNDREDS of dollars of RAM
Not hundreds of dollars of RAM, hundreds of dollars to get a different platform that accepts more RAM.
> Nobody is forcing you to run an electron app
I either don't get to use many programs and services, or I have to deal with these problems that they refuse to solve. So it's reasonable to complain even though I'm not forced.
> weird fetish for having lots of unused RAM
I have no idea why you think I'm asking for unused RAM.
When I run out, I don't mean that my free amount tipped below 10GB, I mean I ran out and things lag pretty badly while swapping, and without swap would have crashed entirely.
Ease of writing and testing extensions is actually the cause why Electron won IDE wars.
Microsoft made a great decision to jump on the trend and just pour money to lap Atom and such in optimization and polish.
Especially when you compare it to Microsoft effort for desktop. They acumulated several more or less component libraries over they years and I still prefer WinForms.
If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly, you'll end up rewriting ui layer from scratch anyway. VSCode already renders terminal on GPU and GPU-rendered editor area is in experimental. There will soon be no web ui left at all
> If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly
My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage.
I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files:
- Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB
- Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB
update:
I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!
I easily notice lag in vscode even without plugins. Especially if using it right after zed. Ngl they made it astonishingly fast for an electron app, but there are physical limits of what can be done in web stack with garbage collected js
That easily takes the worst designed benchmark in my opinion.
Have you tried Emacs, VIM, Sublime, Notepad++,... Visual Studio and Android Studio are full IDEs, meaning upon launch, they run a whole host of modules and the editor is just a small part of that. IDEs are closer to CAD Software than text editors.
- notepad++: 56.4 MB (went gray-window unresponsive for 10 seconds when opening the explorer)
- notepad.exe: 54.3 MB
- emacs: 15.2 MB
- vim: 5.5MB
I would argue that notepad++ is not really comparable to VSCode, and that VSCode is closer to an IDE, especially given the context of this thread. TUIs are not offering a similar GUI app experience, but vim serves as a nice baseline.
I think that when people dump on electron, they are picturing an alternative implementation like win32 or Qt that offers a similar UI-driven experience. I'm using this benchmark, because its the most common critique I read with respect to electron when these are suggested.
It is obviously possible to beat a browser-wrapper with a native implementation. I'm simply observing that this doesn't actually happen in a typical modern C++ GUI app, where the dependency bloat and memory management is often even worse.
I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.
> RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago
Compared to 20 years ago that's true. But most of the improvement happened in the first few years of that range. With the recent price spikes RAM actually costs more today than 10 years ago. If we ignore spikes and buy when the cycle of memory prices is low, DDR3 in 2012 was not much more than the price DDR5 was sitting at for the last two years.
> I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.
I had to do the opposite for some projects at work: when you open about 6-8 instances of the IDE (different projects, front end in WebStorm, back end in IntelliJ IDEA, DB in DataGrip sometimes) then it's easy to run out of RAM. Even without DataGrip, you can run into those issues when you need to run a bunch of services to debug some distributed issue.
Had that issue with 32 GB of RAM on work laptop, in part also cause the services themselves took between 512 MB and 2 GB of memory to run (thanks to Java and Spring/Boot).
Anyone saying that Java-based Jetbrains is worse than Electron-based VS Code, in terms of being more lightweight, is living in an alternate universe which can’t be reached by rational means.
> GPU acceleration driven by the WebGL renderer is enabled in the terminal by default. This helps the terminal work faster and display at a high FPS by significantly reducing the time the CPU spends rendering each frame
Wow, it's true--Terminal is <canvas>, while the editor is DOM elements (for now). I'm impressed that I use both every day and never noticed any difference.
The Godot editor is written in Godot. The look and feel of the editor is set up to be familiar to people working with 3D, but you're using a 2D* desktop application and all of the parts work responsively.
I've been playing around with different GUI approaches for the desktop, and what impresses me the most about Godot is how lightweight and self-contained it can be while still being cross-platform on both ends.
Could you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of?
(I've been aware of Qt for like two decades; back in the early 2000s my employer was evaluating such options as Tk, wxWindows, and ultimately settled on Java, I think with AWT. Qt seems to have a determined survival niche in "embedded systems that aren't android"?)
What a strange claim. For enterprise Java, is there is a serious alternative in 2025? And, Rider is slowly eating the lunch of (classic) Visual Studio for C# development. I used it again recently to write an Excel XLL plug-in. I could not believe how far Rider has come in 10 years.
IME pycharm’s weakness is not integrating with modern tooling like ruff/pyright - their built in type checker is terrible at catching stuff, and somehow there isnt an easy way to run MyPy, black or isort in it.
If there’s a workflow I’m missing please let me know because I want to love it!
I just checked and I don’t even have the JVM installed on my machine. It seems like Java is dead for consumer applications. Not saying that’s why they aren’t popular but I’m sure it doesn’t help.
I wouldn't underestimate Eclipse user statistics. That may sound insane in 2025, but I've seen a lot of heavily customized eclipse editors still kicking around for vendor specific systems, setting aside that Java is still a pretty large language in its own right.
At best, that's subjective, but it's fact that JetBrains is comically far behind when it comes to AI tooling.
They have a chance to compete fresh with Fleet, but they are not making progress on even the basic IDE there, let alone getting anywhere near Cursor when it comes to LLM integration.
JetBrains' advantage is that they have full integration and better understanding of your code. WebStorm works better with TypeScript than even Microsoft's own creation. This all translates into AI performance
Have you actually given them a real test yet - either Junie or even the baseline chat?
I see the VSCode management has been firmly redirected to prioritize GitHubs failing and behind "AI Coding" competition entry. When that will predictably falter expect them to lose interest in the editor all together.
More like "OBS is Qt". Which it is not, OBS uses Qt. And Chrome is just a runtime and GUI framework for VS Code. Let's not confuse forks of software with software built on something.
I believe our definitions of "winning the IDE wars" are very, very different. For one thing, using "user count" as a metric for this like using "number of lines of code added" in a performance review. And even if that was part of the metric, people who use and don't absolutely fall in love with it, so much so that they become the ones advocating for its use, are only worth a tiny fraction of a "user".
neovim won the IDE wars before it even started. Zed has potential. I don't know what IntelliJ is.
It started as a modernized Eclipse competitor (the Java IDE) but they've built a bunch of other IDEs based on it. Idk if it still runs on Java or not, but it had potential last I used it about a decade ago. But running GUI apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000 reasons, so I hope they've moved off it.
Android Studio is built on the IntelliJ stack. Jetbrains just launched a dedicated Claude button (the button just opens up claude in the IDE, but there are some pretty neat IDE integrations that it supports, like being able to see the text selection, and using the IDE's diff tool). I wonder if that's why Google decided to go VS code?
Uh, isn't that the regular Claude code extension that's been available for ages at this point? Not jetbrains but anthropics own development?
As a person paying for the jetbrains ultimate package (all ides), I think going with vscode is a very solid decision.
The jetbrains ides still have various features which I always miss whenever I need to use another IDE (like way better "import" suggestions as an easy to understand example)... But unless you're writing in specific languages like Java, vscode is way quicker and works just fine - and that applies even more to agentic development, where you're using these features less and less...
Jetbrains IDEs are all based on the JVM - and they work better than VSCode or the full Visual Studio for me. It's the full blown VS (which has many parts written in C++) that is the most sluggish of them all.
I don't know what it's based on, but it works extremely well. I use Rider & WebStorm daily and I find Rider is a lot faster than Visual Studio when it comes to the Unreal Engine codebase and WebStorm seems to be a lot more reliable than VSCode nowadays (I don't know if it's at fault, but ever since copilot was integrated I find that code completion can stop working for minutes at a time. Very annoying)
You clearly don't know how Swing or Eclipse SWT works under the hood.
Java's big strength is that it's a memory safe, compiled, and sandboxed low level platform with over a quarter century of development behind it. But it historically hasn't handled computer graphics well and can feel very slow and bloated when something needs that - like a GUI. That weakness is probably a big reason why Microsoft rewrote Minecraft after they bought it.
Since you last used IntelliJ "about a decade ago", what do you use instead?
> But running GUI apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000 reasons, so I hope they've moved off it.
What would you recommend instead of Swing on JVM? Since you have "1000 reasons", it should easy to list a few here. As a friendly reminder, they would need to port (probably) millions of lines of Java source code to whatever framework/language you select. The only practical alternative I can think of would be C++ & Qt, but the development speed would be so much slower than Java & Swing.
Also, with the advent of wildly modern JVMs (11+), the JIT process is so insanely good now. Why cannot a GUI be written in Swing and run on the JVM?
Notice that INTELLIJ uses its own UI framework, really, which I don’t think has much Swing left in it after all these years. And Kotlin is the main language for a decade now.
> Cursor has some real annoying usability issues - like their previous/next code change never going away and no way to disable it.
The state of Cursor "review" features make me convinced that the cursor devs themselves are not dogfooding their own product.
It drives me crazy when hundreds of changes build up, I've already reviewed and committed everything, but I still have all these "pending changes to review".
Ideally committing a change should treat it as accepted. At the very least, there needs to be a way to globally "accept all".
Lol the second I saw the antigravity release I thought "there's no way I'm using that, they will kill it within a year". Looks like they're trying to kill it at birth.
Exactly my reaction. Every time I've used something from Google, it ends up dead in a few years. Life is too short to waste so many years learning something that is destined to die shortly
These are just extended press releases, for marketing and management layers, who don't have to use these things themselves, but can look good, when talking about it.
agree but at the same time there's not too much lock in with these IDEs these days and switching is very easy. Especially since they're all VSCode forks
> 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 wonder how much Google shareholders paid for that 20 minutes. And whether it's more or less than the corresponding extremely small stock price boost from this announcement.
if it were true, it would be a big miss to not point that out when you run out of credit, in their pricing page, or anywhere in their app.
I should also mention that the first time I prompted it, I got a different 'overloaded' type out of credit message. The one I got at the end was different.
I've rotated on paying the $200/month plans with Anthropic, Cursor, and OpenAI. But never Google's. They have maybe the best raw power in their models - smartest, and extremely fast for what they are. But they always drop the ball on usability. Both in terms of software surrounding the model and raw model attitude. These things matter.
Interesting that a next-gen open-source-based agentic coding platform with superhuman coding models behind it can have UI glitches. Very interesting that even the website itself is kind of sluggish. Surely, someone, somewhere must have ever optimized something related to UI rendering, such that a model could learn from it.
Our modeling suggests that a very small fraction of power users will ever hit the per-five-hour rate limit, so our hope is that this is something that you won’t have to worry about, and you feel unrestrained in your usage of Antigravity
You have to wonder what kind of models did they run for this.
The fact that they released this IDE means that they may cut Cursor out of their API in the future. Google has both the organizational history (Google Maps) and the invincibility of cutting clients out of their API.
speaking of paying for LLMs, am i doing something wrong? i paid cursor $192 for a year of their entry level plan and i never run out of anything. I code professionally, albeit i'm at the stage where it's 80% product dev in finding the right thing to build.
Is there another world where $200/m is needed to run hundreds of agents or something?
When did you pay for it? There was a time when its limits were very generous. If you bought an annual plan at that time then you will continue with that until renewal. Or, alternatively, you’re using the Auto model which is still apparently unlimited. That’s going away.
It’s very easy to run into limits if you choose more expensive models and aren’t grandfathered.
And thats the AI business-model in a nutshell. Generate slop quickly that you cant understand, but works enough for you to get hope, works enough to make you forget about all your training as a dev, and profit$$ of your anxiety as it rises!
At no point in the future will these same companies offer the same rates for credits. WAtch your generated code turn into a walking, talking ad for the companies who pay for product placement.
I pay $10/month for GitHub Copilot and I usually get to 100% burn on the final day of the month. I use it extensively for the entire month about 12 hours a day. It doesn't include any of the "Pro" models that are only on the $200/mo plans, but it does a pretty fantastic job.
With vendor lock-in to Google's AI ecosystem, likely scraping/training on all of your code (regardless of whatever their ToS/EULA says), and being blocked from using the main VS Code extensions library.
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.
Well, Kate has been around as an KDE based advanced text editor for nearly 2 decades now - its base feature set isn't too different from a base VS Code installation. And there's also KDevelop as a more full featured IDE.
It's a good point, and in fact I went and looked at the original announcement of VS Code and it appears that Microsoft didn't credit Chromium or Electron back then either. I guess big companies are allergic to crediting other big companies.
> given how many other companies have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong way
Has there been any indication that these folks are "rubbing Google the wrong way"? I think Chromium, as a project, is actually very happy that more people are using their engine.
It also feels like they couldn't use the GOOGLE ANTIGRAVITY logo enough times in this blog post. Gigantic image with the logo and a subtitle, plastered over and over again.
I no longer bother reading their press releases. I'd much rather read the comments and threads like these to get the real story. And I say that as a former googler.
It's so obvious from even just the vague screenshots that are hidden somewhere on the site that it's a VSCode fork, that I suppose I can see why they've tried to obfuscate that as much as possible.
VSCode isn't a Chromium fork, it's an Electron app. Utilizing something is different than making a derivative of it. For example, an empty "Hello World" Electron app wouldn't have any value for an app developer, but creating a web browser derived from Chromium means you've already finished 99.9% of the work.
Why credit? Come on, the world has moved on from 1990s-era 4-clause BSD licenses. If you recall, the 4-clause BSD license states that all advertising materials must display an acknowledgement. It’s widely considered to be a mistake and nobody uses this license any more. Not because of legal reasons (incompatibility with GPL) but because it is madness to require so many acknowledgements. Stallman was right.
Yes, madness. VS Code wasn’t developed entirely by Microsoft. It uses plenty of other open source libraries. Why is it that VS Code should be acknowledged but not the underlying V8 engine, or Chromium, or WebKit or KHTML?
Stallman said that in 1997 there were 75 acknowledgements in a single piece of software. With today’s trend of micro libraries on npm, there will be at least thousands of acknowledgements in one piece of software.
Google is going to win AI and kill all the other market participants.
They have the revenues to support all of this.
They spent time learning from all the players and can now fast follow into every market. Now they're fast and nimble and are willing to clone other products wholesale, fork VSCode, etc.
They're developing all of this, meanwhile Pichai is calling it a "bubble" to put a chill on funding (read: competition). It's not like Google is slowing down.
We had a chance to break them up with regulation, and we didn't. Now they're going to kill every market participant.
This isn't healthy. We have an invasive species in the ecology eating up all the diverse, healthy species.
a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.
As engineers, you should certainly hate this. Google does everything it can to push wages down. Layoffs, offshoring, colluding with competitors. Fewer startups mean fewer rewards for innovation capital and more accrual to the conglomerate taxing the entire internet.
Chrome, Android, Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Workspace, Other Bets, and AI/Deepmind need to be split into separate companies.
Google? Push wages down? Google is mostly known for paying top of market to keep a zoo of engineers whose only output is blog posts about how smart they are because they solved a problem they also caused.
(presumably because if they touch the ad system it might break)
> a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.
And a16z's main business is investing in financial scams.
You mean like web search, webmail, internet ads, maps, calendars, browsers, smartphone operating systems, online document editing, and translation? I mean, I'm not even including stuff they acquired early like YouTube. Google was the most feared company for a decade or more for a good reason: they absolutely devoured competition in what were thought to be mature markets.
Putting aside that several of these were acquisitions, these are all great examples of things where Google introduced something for free because it would make the money through advertising, both directly and through ecosystem effects. Even the paid enterprise versions of these services were a tiny % of Google's overall gross revenue.
Prior to the push into Cloud computing, Ad revenue was well over 90% of all Google gross income, and Cloud was the first big way they diversified. GCP is definitely a credible competitor these days, but it did not devour AWS. Other commercial Google services didn't even become credible competitors, e.g. Google Stadia was a technically exceptional platform that got nowhere with customers.
The question now is whether Google carves out an edge in AI that makes it profitable overall, directly or strategically. Like many companies, there seems to be a presumption of potentially infinite upside, which is what it would take to justify the astronomical costs.
Google’s main ability is to win by pure technical prowess. They hire a lot of bright engineers. Google Search won over Altavista by pure algorithms. Google Docs (and Writely) were way more feature complete than competitors.
You love a Google product because of its features but never actually because of the product itself. But you can’t win everything by engineering and sometimes Google struggles with the product side.
I'm not sure you can call Docs (Writely) and Android acquisitions though. Android was an OS for cameras and Writely was an experimental rich text editor, not a word processor.
It's not like Youtube where they legitimately bought their way to dominance. And I'd argue that even in the case of DoubleClick, google was already dominating the search advertising market when they bought DoubleClick to consolidate their dominance.
> Plaintiffs maintain that Google has monopoly power in the product market for general
search services in the United States.
> According to Plaintiffs, Google has a dominant and durable
share in that market (general search), and that share is protected by high barriers to entry.
> Google counters that there is no such thing as a product market for general search services.
> What exists instead, Google insists, is a broader market for query response.
(+ yes obviously, products like Sheets or Maps were amazing, and are still very much the best.
It was a joke to say that even Google denies its own success, the same way as the earlier comment).
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.
forking vscode? simple. extensions not so simple. they are controlled by microsoft. without them you’ll run into continual papercuts as a vendor who has forked vscode.
Because if they're just an extension they're stuck with whatever rules Microsoft makes up, and Google is no stranger to using this leverage against others.
Because there are plenty of good reasons why you may want to modify/extend the code and the look and feel beyond what an extension would let you do.
I never understood why people scoff at VS Code forks. I'd honestly tend to be more skeptical of new editors that don't fork VS Code, because then they're probably missing a ton of useful capabilities and are incompatible with all the VSC extensions everyone's gotten used to.
Just the Eclipse legacy and development approach perhaps. Eclipse is 24 years old and its codebase stems from VisualAge before that, so I imagine it's ... idiosyncratic. Probably the most successful thing built on OSGi, though I dont imagine Theia brought any of that along.
At least for a while, Eclipse seemed like an Architect Astronaut's happy fever dream: actual bits if implementations hidden behind 5 to 10 nested interfaces and facades wherever I looked. I remember that at one point that I wanted to debug some weird behavior in the Plugin Development Kit and after sinking about half a day into exploring the source code, I didn't even see a single line of code that was actually doing anything meaningful. It was quite shocking to my old junior level self.
I am not fan of Eclipse, mostly due to bad experience with it, but this is excellent idea, if more people and companies would invest in it's development, we would have alternative to VS Code.
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.
I tried writing a native Windows app using WinUI 3.
I wasted a day on trying to get some PNGs to render correctly, but no matter the config I used, the colors came out wrongly oversaturated.
I used Tauri with a WebView, and the app was rendering the images perfectly fine. On top of that the UI looked much better, and I was done in half the time I spend trying to fix the rendering issue in WinUI 3.
Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the mercy of Apple etc. It's unfortunate that things are so inefficient now, but competition is good, and native platforms can get good.
I'm not ignoring this question, I'm just not familiar with Zed and don't know how native it feels. Maybe Vscode is quicker to modify in the future as needed (esp if Google already uses it), or Antigravity is better in ways than Zed, or Zed just has a more skilled team than Google.
Also I'm used to vim and sensitive to lag, so I always hated vscode, but seems a lot of people don't notice or something. And when you're using AI for 90% of the loc, it matters less.
> Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the mercy of Apple etc.
... Aren't we talking about a programming IDE here? When did mobile become anything like the primary market for that? Are people expected to sit around for hours inputting symbols with an OSK?
Making a VSCode fork is probably the wrong direction at this point in time. The future of agentic coding should need less support for code editor related functionality, and could eventually primarily support viewing code rather than editing code. There's a lot more flexibility in UI starting from scratch, and personally I want to see a UI that allows flexible manipulation of context and code changes with multiple agents.
GitHub is building a UI like this. I like it. I sometimes need the full IDE, but plenty of times don't. It's nice to be able to easily see what the agent is up to and converse with it in real-time while reviewing it's outputs.
Whenever I have a model fix something new I ask it to update the markdown implementation guides I have in the docs folder in my projects. I add these files to context as needed. I have one for implementing routes and one for implementing backend tests and so on.
They then know how to do stuff in the future in my projects.
They still aren't learning. You're learning and then telling them to incorporate your learnings. They aren't able to remember this so you need to remind them each day.
That sounds a lot like '50 First Dates' but for programming.
Yes, this is something people using LLMs for coding probably pick up on the first day. They're not "learning" as humans do obviously. Instead, the process is that you figure out what was missing from the first message you sent where they got something wrong, change it, and then restart from beginning. The "learning" is you keeping track of what you need to include in the context, how that process exactly works, is up to you. For some it's very automatic, and you don't add/remove things yourself, for others is keeping a text file around they copy-paste into a chat UI.
This is what people mean when they say "you can kind of do "learning" (not literally) for LLMs"
While I hate anthropomorphizing agents, there is an important practical difference between a human with no memory, and an agent with no memory but the ability to ingest hundreds of pages of documentation nearly instantly.
The outcome is definitely not the same, and you need to remind them all the time. Even if you feed the context automatically they will happily "forget" it from time to time. And you need to update that automated context again, and again, and again, as the project evolves
I believe LLMs ultimately cannot learn new ideas from their input in the same way as they can learn it from their training data, as the input data doesn't affect the weights of the neural network layers.
For example, let's say LLMs did not have examples of chess gameplay examples in their training data. Would one be able to have an LLM play chess by listing the rules and examples in the context? Perhaps, to some extent, but I believe it would be much worse than if it was part of the training (which of course isn't great either).
The feeding can be automated in some cases. In GitHub copilot you can put it under .github/instructions and each instructions markdown file starts with a section that contains a regex of which files to apply the instructions to.
You can also have an index file that describes when to use each file (nest with additional folders and index files as needed) and tell the agent to check the index for any relevant documentation they should read before they start. Sometimes it will forget and not consult the docs but often it will consult the relevant docs first to load just the things it needs for the task at hand.
I tend to think it would lead to them forming opinions about the people they interact with as they learn what it's like to interact with them, and that this would also influence their behaviour/outputs. Just imagining the day where copilot's chain of thought starts to include things like "Greg is bossy and often unkind to me in PR reviews. I need to set clear boundaries with him and discontinue the relationship if he will not respect them."
Having a good prompt file ("memory") is an artform.
The AI hype folks write massive fan fiction style novellas that don't have any impact.
But there's middle ground where you tell the agent the specific things about your repo that it doesn't know based on its training. Like if your application has a specific way to run tests headless or it's compiled a certain way that's not the default average.
AGENTS.md exists, Codex and Crush support it directly. Copilot, Gemini and Claude have their own variants and their /init commands look at AGENTS.md automatically to initialise the project.
Nobody is feeding aything "manually" to Agents. Only people who think "AI" is a web page do that.
Ah yes. Agents.md is a magical file that just appears out of thin air. No one creates it, no one keeps it updated, and LLMs always, without fail, not only consult it but never forget it, and in every new session know precisely what changed in the project and how to continue.
All of them often can't even find/read relevant docs in a new session without prompting
Literally every single CLI-based Agent will show you a suggestion to run /init at startup.
And of course it's up to the developer to keep the documentation up to date. Just like when working with humans. Stuff don't magically document itself.
Yes "good code is self-documenting", but it still takes ages to find anything without docs to tell you the approximate direction.
It's literally a text file the agent can create and update itself. Not hard. Try it.
> Just like when working with humans. Stuff don't magically document itself.
Humans actually learn from codebases they work with. They don't start with a clean slate every time they wake up in the morning. They know where to find information and how to search for them. They don't need someone to constantly update docs to point to changes.
> but it still takes ages to find anything without docs to tell you the approximate direction.
Which humans, unsurprisingly, can do without wiping their memory every time.
Yeah, if my screwdriver undid the changes I just made to my mower, constantly ignored my desire to unscrew screws and instead punched a hole in my carb - I'd be throwing that screwdriver in the garbage.
- don't have career growth that you can feel good about having contributed to
Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.
- don't have a genuine interest in accomplishment or team goals
Easy to train for, if it turns out to be necessary. I'd always assumed that a competitive drive would be necessary in order to achieve or at least simulate human-level intelligence, but things don't seem to be playing out that way.
- have no past and no future. When you change companies, they won't recognize you in the hall.
Or on the picket line.
- no ownership over results. If they make a mistake, they won't suffer.
Good deal. Less human suffering is usually worth striving for.
> Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are.
You're not describing a system that exists. You're describing a system that might exist in some sci-fi fantasy future. You might as well be saying "there's no point learning to code because soon the rapture will come".
That particular future exists now, it's just not evenly distributed. Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking is already as good at programming as I am. Architecture, probably not, but give it time. It's far better at math than I am, and at least as good at writing.
Computers beat us in maths decades ago, yet LLMs are not able to beat a calculator half of the time. The maths benchmarks that companies so proudly show off are still the realm of a traditional symbolic solvers. You claiming much success in asking LLMS for math makes me question if you have actually asked an LLM about maths.
Most AI experts not heavily invested in the stocks of inflated tech companies seem to agree that current architectures cannot reach AGI. It's a sci-fi dream, but hyping it is real profitable. We can destroy ourselves plenty with the tech we already have, but it won't be a robot revolution that does it.
The maths benchmarks that companies so proudly show off are still the realm of a traditional symbolic solvers. You claiming much success in asking LLMS for math makes me question if you have actually asked an LLM about maths.
What I really need to ask an LLM for is a pointer to a forum that doesn't cultivate proud exhibition of ignorance, Luddism, and general stupidity at the level exhibited by commenters in this entire HN story, and in this subthread in particular.
>>Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.
Have you ever spent any time around children? How about people who think they're accomplishing a great mission by releasing truly noxious ones on the world?
You just dismissed the entire notion of accountability as an unnecessary form of suffering, which is right up there with the most nihilistic ideas ever said by, idk, Dostoevsky's underground man or Raskolnikov.
> Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.
It's also the premise of The Matrix. I feel pretty goddamned uneasy about that.
(Shrug) There are other sources of inspiration besides dystopic sci-fi movies. There's the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, for instance. Better not work on language translation, which after all is how the whole LLM thing got started.
Sometimes fiction went in the wrong direction. Sometimes it didn't go far enough.
In any case, the matrix wasn't my inspiration here, but it is a pithy way to describe the concept. It's hard to imagine how humans maintain relevancy if we really do manage to invent something smarter than us. It could be that my imagination is limited though. I've been accused of that before.
They can usually write code, but not that well. They have lots of energy and little to say about architecture and style. Don't have a well defined body of knowledge and have no experience. Individual juniors don't change, but the cast members of your junior cohort regularly do.
The problem with AI Agents like Claude is that they write VERY good code and very fast.
But they don't have a grasp for the project's architecture and will reinvent the wheel for feature X even when feature Y has it or there is an internal common library that does it. This is why you need to be the "manager of agents" and stay on top of their work.
Sometimes it's just about hitting ESC and going "waitaminute, why'd you do that?" and sometimes it's about updating the project documentation (AGENTS.md, docs/) with extra information.
Example: I have a project with a system that builds "rules" using a specific interpreter. Every LLM wants to "optimise" it by using a pattern that looks correct, but will in fact break immediately when there's more than one simultaneous user - and I have a unit test that catches it.
I got bored by LLMs trying to optimise the bit wrong, so I added a specific instruction, with reasoning why it shouldn't be attempted and has been tried and failed multiple times. And now they stopped doing it =)
I actually do find there is a subset of meetings that are far more productive on Zoom. We can be voice chatting on one screen, share another screen and both be able to type, record notes, pull up side research without interrupting the conversation. It's a bit closer to co-working than a meeting but it hits a sweetspot for me.
I used to be really excited about "agents" when I thought people were trying to build actual agents like we've been working on in the CS field for decades now.
It's clear now that "agents" in the context of "AI" is really about answering the question "How can we make users make 10x more calls to our models in a way that makes it feel like we're not just squeezing money out of them?" I've seen so many people that think setting some "agents" of on a minutes to hours long task of basically just driving up internal KPIs at LLM providers is cutting edge work.
The problem is, I haven't seen any evidence at all that spending 10x the number of API calls on an agent results in anything closer to useful than last year when people where purely vibe coding all the time. At least then people would interactively learn about the slop they were building.
It's astounding to watch a coworker walk though through a PR with hundreds of added new files and repeatedly mention "I'm not sure if these actually work, but it does look like there's something here".
Now I'm sure I'll get some fantastic "no true Scotsman" replies about how my coworkers must not be skilled enough or how they need to follow xyz pattern, but the entire point of AI was to remove the need for specialize skills and make everyone 10x more productive.
Not to mention that the shift in focus on "agents" is also useful in detracting from clearly diminishing returns on foundation models. I just hope there are enough people that still remember how to code (and think in some cases) to rebuild when this house of cards falls apart.
> but the entire point of AI was to remove the need for specialize skills and make everyone 10x more productive.
At least for programming tools, for everything (well, the vast majority, at least) that is sold that way—since long before generative AI—it actually succeeds or fails based not on whether it eliminates need for specialized skills and makes everyone more productive, but whether it further rewards specialized skills, and makes the people who devote time to learning it more productive than if they devoted the same time to learning something else.
Yeah it's saccharine. Reminds me quite a lot of Americans who work for tips (e.g. waiters) - disconcertingly friendly.
Someone gave me a great tip though - at least for ChatGPT there's a setting where you can change its personality to "robot". I guess that affects the system prompt in some way but it basically fixes the issue.
I enjoy getting into a good flow state and pounding out clever and elegant code but watching a good LLM generate code according to my specs and refining it is also enjoyable. I've been burning through $250 of free Claude Code Web credits and having multiple workers running at the same time is fun.
I am essentially in this exact role. The junior developers simply don't have the experience to evaluate the output of the agents. You wind up with a lot of slop in PRs. People can't justify why they did something. I've seen whole PRs closed, work redone, and opened anew because they were 70% garbage. Every other comment was asking "why is this here? it has nothing to do with the ticket."
Sadly, this is not sustainable and I am not sure what I'm going to do.
They have a capacity to "learn", it's just WAY MORE INVOLVED than how humans learn.
With a human, you give them feedback or advice and generally by the 2nd or 3rd time the same kind of thing happens they can figure it out and improve. With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.
> With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.
The only way that an AI model can "learn" is during model creation, which is then fixed. Any "instructions" or other data or "correcting" you give the model is just part of the context window.
Fine tuning is additional training on specific things for an existing model. It happens after a model already exists in order to better suit the model to specific situations or types of interactions. It is not dealing with context during inference but actually modifying the weights within the model.
Depending on your definition of "learn", you can also use something akin to ChatGPT's Memory feature. When you teach it something, just have it take notes on how to do that thing and include its notes in the system prompt for next time. Much cheaper than fine-tuning. But still obviously far less efficient and effective than human learning.
I think it’s reasonable to say that different approaches to learning is some kind of spectrum, but that contemporary fine tuning isn’t on that spectrum at all.
As a team lead, working with people is so... cumbersome. They need time to recharge, lots of encouragement, and a nice place to work in. Give me a coding agent any time!
They're asocial, not antisocial. Antisociality is a diagnosable disorder and is known for interpersonal behaviours that are actively against a healthy society. Asociality, on the other hand, just avoids social interactions, not actively harming the society.
Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.
I just opened the app to see what else I can bring up, and while clicking through UI I noticed I had some crappy key bindings extension installed, which apparently caused many of my annoyances.
I've probably installed it very long ago, or even by accident.
For example, I was always annoyed that open file/directory shortcut (one of most common operations) is not assigned and requires mouse interaction -- fixed by disabling the extension.
Go to file shortcuts does something completely different -- fixed by disabling the extensions.
I likely won't adopt Cursor as my main IDE/Editor, but it's miles better than I thought just an hour ago.
Not the person you asked, but I hate how it screws up keyboard shortcuts.
It overrode the delete line shortcut with its own inline chat one, for example.
Decided to ditch it for claude code right after that, since I cannot be bothered to go over the entire list of keyboard shortcuts and see what else it overrode/broke.
I've found that annoying too, but you can always rebind them as you wish. It's only a few new keybinds that get in the way of my muscle memory.
That said I also have moved to CLI agents like Claude Code and Codex because I just find them more convenient and, for whatever reason, more intelligent and more likely to correctly do what I request.
> just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now.
I don’t know and honestly I hate the assumption of the software industry that everyone knows or uses vs code. I stuck to sublime for years until I made the switch to Jetbrains IDEs earlier this year.
I quickly looked up the market share and VS code seems to have about 70% which is a lot but the 30% that don’t use it is not that small of a number either.
Like I get it it’s very popular but it’s far from the only editor/IDE people use.
These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste resources that could have been better spent improving the AI features.
Until someone finally figures out that we need to rethink editors from the ground up to support different sort of operations and editing experience, to better facilitate LLMs doing work as agents.
But we're probably 1-2 years away from there still, so we'll live with skinned-forks, VSCode extensions and TUIs for now.
It's actually weird to me how none of the big players put their money where their mouth is and vibe coded a new IDE built from the ground up for this paradigm shift regardless of tech stack.
Zed team is writing their own in-house GUI stack [1] that leverages the computer's GPU with minimal middleware in-between. It's a lot of work short-term but IMO the payoff would be huge if they establish themselves. I imagine they could poke into the user-facing OS sector if their human-agent interaction is smooth. (I have not tried it yet though)
I am very sensitive to input latency and performance but after comparing Zed and VS Code for a while I really couldn't find any reason to stick with Zed. It's been a year or so since I last tried it but VSC just lets me do way more while still, IMO, having a nice, clean UI. I never notice any performance or key input latency with VSC.
> I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are desperately trying to catch up to desktop now
We need a VS Code fork that just exposes more interfaces, and does nothing else. Then all these forks could just use that with power extensions, and it'd force Microsoft to change its behavior.
The issue with Eclipse and that approach is the complexity of mixing plugins to do everything, which kills the UX.
When VSCode started, the differentiator from Atom and Eclipse was that the extension points were intentionally limited to optimize the user experience. But with the introduction of Copilot that wasn’t enough, hence the amount of forks.
I think that the Zed approach of having a common protocol to talk with agents (like a LSP but for agents) is much better. The only thing that holds me from switching to Zed is that so far my experience using it hasn’t been that good (it still has many rough edges)
Microsoft just fork Atom, and Atom had already good and a lot of extensions.
Before Microsoft buy Github, there was no reason to switch to VSCode instead of Atom.
When Microsoft buy Github, it received Atom from the Github team, and Microsoft stops the development of Atom.
VSCode was just Atom with the Microsoft brand, and some little tweaks from Microsoft, never a game changer compared to Atom, like Atom was in it's time.
Now Antigravity is again a fork with some little tweaks from VSCode, no game changer, just with the Google branding.
I guess we have different perspectives and information about the “rise” of VSCode.
I was an Atom user. Even before the acquisition of GitHub the major feature of VSCode was its speed and TS integration. AFAIK, the only common part between Atom and VSCode is Electron. Other than that, VSCode started with a different codebase based on TypeScript, while Atom was originally written in CoffeeScript.
Multiple design decisions helped VSCode to thrive (btw Erich Gamma was also part of Eclipse):
- The creation of the LSP. Each release of VSCode is also tied to TypeScript releases and improvements. There is a lot of collaboration between the two teams. That gave VSCode the best support for TS and JS. I used Atom and WebStorm regularly when VSCode came out, and VSCode auto-complete and TS support were orders of magnitude better. Everybody caught up since then, but I guess many users like me switched because of that.
- Unlike Atom, VSCode was designed with web integration in mind. A lot of sites started to use Monaco for code editing, and a lot of web-based IDEs use parts of it (CodeSandbox, StackBlitz, etc).
- Gradual rollout of plugin integration. While Atom has the philosophy of everything is pluggable, VSCode was intentionally limited. Which was a good thing given the poor loading performance of Atom.
By the time MS acquired GitHub, Atom usage was already in decline.
* Note: my side of the history, comes from my experience of working in a company that did a custom Eclipse IDE. We evaluated Atom and then VSCode as alternatives to “modernize” our IDE. So I have experience in looking at both Atom and VSCode code bases: they are totally different. Also, the main problem with VSCode for us was the limited extensibility.
> By the time MS acquired GitHub, Atom usage was already in decline.
I wanted to second this: I compared both, with Atom experience starting before the first VSC release. Atom had performance and stability problems continuously through that period, and never really won any of my coworkers over. A lot of that was simple performance: I remember using Is It Snappy? to test my subjective impression and finding that input latency was a full order of magnitude worse, which is the kind of thing which really colors your impression of an editor.
Microsoft has very specific constraints on what extensions can and can't do, it's not a free for all. They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a way that extensions couldn't. That's why all the serious contenders make a fork, it's simply not possible to have the same integration otherwise.
Because it just searches Google and HN is indexed regularly, nothing really noteworthy. If you copy paste the same quote into Google you get the same thing.
Still it would be a lot wiser if all the forkers would do one 'AI-enabled' fork together that exposes all the extras that copilot gets. The barrier for testing would be much lower and all the extension makers would also jump onto the train. Likely MS would finally give in and make all the extras available for everyone. But all the fragmentation only helps MS.
I've had a Github Copilot subscription from work for 1yr+ and switch between the official Copilot and Roo/Kilo Code from time to time. The official Copilot extension has improved a lot in the last 3-6 months but I can't recall ever seeing Copilot do something that Roo/Kilo can't do, or am I missing something obvious?
The Copilot extension uses proposed APIs, meaning it's on an allowlist bundled with VS Code. Roo likely enables these early. The API can stay proposed for years before Microsoft opens it up to third party users.
They're all going to have quite divergent opinions on how to structure the fork and various other design decisions that would inevitably lead to forks of the fork again.
I think forking VS Code is probably the most sensible strategy and I think that will remain the case for many years. Really, I don't think it's changing until AI agents get so ridiculously good that you can vibe code an entire full-featured polished editor in one or a few sessions with an LLM. Then we'll be seeing lots of de novo editors.
The Claude Code extension on VS Code does very little (too little in my opinion). The integration level with agentic functionality provided by Antigravity goes much deeper in my 20 minutes or so of playing with it. The biggest value pieces I see is: Agent Manager window which provides a unified view of all my agents running across all my workspaces (!) where I can quickly approve or respond to followup questions and quickly brings me to the code in context for each agent, additionally, I can select a piece of code and comment on it inline and that comment gets sent to the correct, active agent. These two things alone are items which I have been looking for... Too bad I only have approval to use Claude Code at work. This looks promising.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion but many people would disagree with you, and that's the crux of the issue, everyone has their own conflicting views on what the UX should be, hence all the forks.
I don't even know what the Claude Code extension does in vscode. I have it installed but hell if I know what it's doing. I run Claude in one of vscode's terminals, and do everything through there. I do see (sometimes) diffs pop up in the IDE, I guess that's the extent of this integration.
> AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents.
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I always wonder how this works legally. VSCode needs to comply with the LGPL (it's based on Chromium/Blink which is LGPL) ; they should provide the entire sources that allow us to rebuild our own "official" VSCode binary
Could you give an example of what they're gatekeeping for Copilot exclusively? I'm kinda confused because Copilot in VS Code isn't exactly a powerhouse of unique features in my experience, it still feels well behind Roo/Kilo Code in most ways I can think of, although much closer to the competition than it was a year ago.
I was going to ask why all these companies choose to fork the entire IDE rather than just writing an extension like every other sane developer, and this response is the most believable reason why.
But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep things like that shouldn’t allow a billion dollar company just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE
> 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced
I think this was more accurate around 2012. My local tech magazine had their own fork and they attached CD with the magazine which included the browser.
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?
This kind of cynicism is wild to me. Of course most AI products (and products in general) are for end users. Especially for a company like Google--they need to do everything they can to win the AI wars, and that means winning adoption for their AI models.
This is different. AI is an existential threat to Google. I've almost stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT came out. Why search for a list of webpages which might have the answer to your question and then manually read them one at a time when I can instead just ask an AI to tell me the answer?
If Google doesn't adapt, they could easily be dead in a decade.
That's funny. I stopped using ChatGPT completely and use Gemini to search, because it actually integrates with Google nicely as opposed to ChatGPT which for some reason messes up sometimes (likely due to being blocked by websites while no one dares block Google's crawler lest they be wiped off the face of the internet), and for coding, it's Claude (and maybe now Gemini for that as well). I see no need to use any other LLMs these days. Sometimes I test out the open source ones like DeepSeek or Kimi but those are just as a curiosity.
If web-pages don't contain the answer, the AI likely won't either. But the AI will confidently tell me "the answer" anyway. I've had atrocious issues with wrong or straight up invented information that I must search up every single claim it makes on a website.
My primary workflow is asking AI questions vaguely to see if it successfully explains information I already know or starts to guess. My average context length of a chat is around 3 messages, since I create new chats with a rephrased version of the question to avoid the context poison. Asking three separate instances the same question in slightly different way regularly gives me 2 different answers.
This is still faster than my old approach of finding a dry ground source like a standards document, book, reference, or datasheet, and chewing through it for everything. Now I can sift through 50 secondary sources for the same information much faster because the AI gives me hunches and keywords to google. But I will not take a single claim for an AI seriously without a link to something that says the same thing.
Given how embracing AI is an imperative in tech companies, "a link to something" is likely to be a product of LLM-assisted writing itself. Entire concept of checking through the internet becomes more and more recursive with every passing moment.
I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at wooing investors. I believe it is intended to be a genuine superior alternative to Cursor and Kiro etc. and is attempting to provide the best AI coding experience for the average developer.
Most of the other people (so far) in this sub-thread do not think this. They essentially have a conspiratorial view on it.
Colab is still going strong. Chrome inspector is still going strong.
They've never released a full-fledged IDE before, have they? Which I don't count Apps Script editor as one, but that's been around for a long time as well.
I think it's much more likely that Google believes this is the future of development and wants to get in on the ground floor. As they should.
> Google believes this is the future of development
This is hardly possible as this is definitely not the future of development which is obvious to developers who created this. Or to any developer for that matter.
This worldview is so bizarre and uncharitable that I'd be rather concerned to hear what any of your takes on politics might be.
I've played with Antigravity for the past 48 hours for lots of different tasks. Is it revolutionizing development for me? No. Do I think they want it to do that and are working extremely hard to try to achieve that? I think the answer is very obviously: of course. Will it maybe get closer to that within a few months or a year? Maybe.
Agree to disagree, I guess. What you think is obvious, I think is false. And I think the rapidly growing success of Cursor is the proof of that. But I guess you must think Cursor is just a fad or something, since you don't see why Google would want to legitimately compete with it?
Cursor is obviously a fad (unlike Copilot - I'm not at all an AI hater, quite the opposite) and perhaps Google needs to present something to shareholders that will pretend to be competing.
Well, just so you know, there are lots of us who think Cursor is not a fad, and see that Google realizes this as well, and is genuinely competing with it.
A lot of people find it's actually quite valuable for "actual development work". If you want to ignore all that, then I guess go ahead.
But just know that what you're claiming is "obvious", is clearly not. There seems to be large disagreement over it, so it is objectively not obvious, but rather quite debatable.
Cursor is very obviously not a fad (Copilot I'd say actually is!), nor are any of the Cursor clones/competitors. Of course it matters very much for actual development work. I feel like everything you're writing in this sub-thread is essentially the opposite of what exists in reality.
I agree what you’ve listed makes sense as a product portfolio.
But AI Studio is getting vibe coding tools. AI Studio also has a API that competes with Vertex. They have IDE plugins for existing IDEs to expose Chat, Agents, etc. They also have Gemini CLI for when those don’t work. There is also Firebase Studio, a browser based IDE for vibe coding. Jules, a browser based code agent orchestration tool. Opal, a node-based tool to build AI… things? Stich, a tool to build UIs. Colab with AI for a different type of coding. Notebook LM for AI research (many features now available in Gemini App). AI Overviews and AI mode in search, which now feature a generic chat interface.
Thats just new stuff, and not including all the existing products (Gmail, Home) that have Gemini added.
This is the benefit of a big company vs startups. They can build out a product for every type of user and every user journey, at once.
In "real world" you don't use OpenAI or Anthropic API directly—you are forced to use AWS, GCP, or Azure. Each of these has its own service for running LLMs, which is conceptually the same as using OpenAI or Anthropic API directly, but with much worse DX. For AWS it's called Bedrock, for GCP—Vertex, and for Azure it's AI Foundry I believe. They also may offer complementary features like prompt management, evals, etc, but from what I've seen so far it's all crap.
Jules is the first and only one to add a full API, which I've found very beneficial. It lets you integrate agentic coding features into web apps quite nicely. (In theory you could always hack your own thing together with Claude Code or Codex to achieve a similar effect but a cloud agent with an API saves a lot of effort.)
Remember took my a while early in my career from changing my resume away from saying "I want to do this at my next job and make a lot of money" and towards "here is how I can make money and save costs for your company".
Google didn't learn that lesson here. They are describing why us using Antigravity is good for Google, not why us using Antigravity is good for us.
More accurately, it should be neither about Google nor about the user, but about the product. Describe what the product is and does, don’t make assumptions about the user, and let the user be the judge of it.
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.
Free tier users get to use what's left over from Google's capacity. They pay with their data, Google uses their inputs for training.
Paid tier users pay with money, Google doesn't use their inputs. They get priority when capacity is running out (like right after a launch as happened here).
I'm saying it's egregious to expect all users to know the fact that an HTML document, for some reason, uses an enormous amount of context in an LLM designed specifically for working with code.
I haven't used it myself but a few of my colleagues used it saying it is good and they completed a huge chunk of work with Antigravity, mind you I am very skeptical of this.
The don't seem to be getting any rate limiting issue which I don't understand, maybe a bug in Antigravity allowing them to use it for more. They are really confident in the IDE after a few hours and the output given is really good.
It's the same problem with OpenRouter's free tiers for a long time. If something is truly $0 and widely available, people will absolutely bleed it dry.
Same here. I tried to build a super simple iOS App in antigravity and I was out of quota before it finished. The whole thing was a couple of files and a few hundred lines of code.
> 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.
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.
it's funny - nervous funny, not haha funny - that you think drawing a real issue like this out into the open would focus an organization on solving it.
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.
> you can ask the agent to give you an overview of the architecture and then dive into whatever part you want to explore more.
This is actually a cool use that's being explored more and more. I first saw it in the wiki thing from the devin people, and now google released one as well.
Where they use Claude to analyse an old (demo) COBOL application.
And it understands the context of the files, decrypts the process and even draws graphs to the documentation it creates.
I wish I had this 20 years ago when I was consulting and had to jump into really funky client codebases with zero documentation and everything on fire.
Humans are just better at communicating about their process. They will spend hours talking over architectural decisions, implementation issues, writing technical details in commit messages and issue notes, and in this way they not only debug their decisions but socialize knowledge of both the code and the reasons it came to be that way. Communication and collaboration are the real adaptive skills of our species. To the extent AI can aid in those, it will be useful. To the extent it goes off and does everything in a silo, it will ultimately be ignored - much like many developers who attempt this.
I do think the primary strengths of genai are more in comprehension and troubleshooting than generating code - so far. These activities play into the collaboration and communication narrative. I would not trust an AI to clean up cruft or refactor a codebase unsupervised. Even if it did an excellent job, who would really know?
> Humans are just better at communicating about their process.
I wish that were true.
In my experience, most of the time they're not doing the things you talk about -- major architectural decisions don't get documented anywhere, commit messages give no "why", and the people who the knowledge got socialized to in unrecorded conversations then left the company.
If anything, LLM's seem to be far more consistent in documenting the rationales for design decisions, leaving clear comments in code and commit messages, etc. if you ask them to.
Unfortunately, humans generally are not better at communicating about their process, in my experience. Most engineers I know enjoy writing code, and hate documenting what they're doing. Git and issue-tracking have helped somewhat, but it's still very often about the "what" and not the "why this way".
"major architectural decisions don't get documented anywhere"
"commit messages give no "why""
This is so far outside of common industry practices that I don't think your sentiment generalizes. Or perhaps your expectation of what should go in a single commit message is different from the rest of us...
LLMs, especially those with reasoning chains, are notoriously bad at explaining their thought process. This isn't vibes, it is empiricism: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388
If you are genuinely working somewhere where the people around you are worse than LLMs at explaining and documenting their thought process, I would looking elsewhere. Can't imagine that is good for one's own development (or sanity).
I've worked everywhere from small startups to megacorps. The megacorps certainly do better with things like initial design documents that startups often skip entirely, but even then they're often largely out-of-date because nobody updates them. I can guarantee you that I am talking about common industry practices in consumer-facing apps.
I'm not really interested in what some academic paper has to say -- I use LLM's daily and see first-hand the quality of the documentation and explanations they produce.
I don't think there's any question that, as a general rule, LLM's do a much better job documenting what they're doing, and making it easy for people to read their code, with copious comments explaining what the code is doing and why. Engineers, on the other hand, have lots of competing priorities -- even when they want to document more, the thing needs to be shipped yesterday.
Alright, I'm glad to hear you've had a successful and rich professional career. We definitely agree that engineers generally fail to document when they have competing priorities, and that LLMs can be of use to help offload some of that work successfully.
Your initial comment made it sound like you were commenting on a genuine apples-for-apples comparisons between humans and LLMs, in a controlled setting. That's the place for empiricism, and I think dismissing studies examining such situations is a mistake.
A good warning flag for why that is a mistake is the recent article that showed engineers estimated LLMs sped them up by like 24%, but when measured they were actually slower by 17%. One should always examine whether or not the specifics of the study really applies to them--there is no "end all be all" in empiricism--but when in doubt the scientific method is our primary tool for determining what is actually going on.
But we can just vibe it lol. Fwiw, the parent comment's claims line up more with my experience than yours. Leave an agent running for "hours" (as specified in the comment) coming up with architectural choices, ask it to document all of it, and then come back and see it is a massive mess. I have yet to have a colleague do that, without reaching out and saying "help I'm out of my depth".
The paper and example you talk about seem to be about agent or plan mode (in LLM IDEs like Cursor, as those modes are called) while I and the parent are talking about ask mode, which is where the confusion seems to lie. Asking the LLM about the overall structure of an existing codebase works very well.
OK yes, you are right that we might be talking about employing AI toolings in different modes, and that the paper I am referring to is absolutely about agentic tooling executing code changes on your behalf.
That said, the first comment of the person I replied to contained: "You can ask agents to identify and remove cruft", which is pretty explicitly speaking to agent mode. He was also responding to a comment that was talking about how humans spend "hours talking about architectural decisions", which as an action mapped to AI would be more plan mode than ask mode.
Overall I definitely agree that using LLM tools to just tell you things about the structure of a codebase are a great way to use them, and that they are generally better at those one-off tasks than things that involve substantial multi-step communications in the ways humans often do.
I appreciate being the weeds here haha--hopefully we all got a little better talking abou the nuances of these things :)
Idealized industry practices that people wish to follow, but when it comes to meeting deadlines, I too have seen people eschew these practices for getting things out the door. It's a human problem, not one specific to any company.
Yes I recognize that, for various reasons, people will fail to document even when it is a profesional expectation.
I guess in this case we are comparing an idealized human to an idealized AI, given AI has equally its own failings in non-idealized scenarios (like hallucination).
Sure, you can ask the agents to "identify and remove cruft" but I never have any confidence that they actually do that reliably. Sometimes it works. Mostly they just burn tokens, in my experience.
> And it's not like any of your criticisms don't apply to human teams.
Every time the limitations of AI are discussed, we see this unfair standard applied: ideal AI output is compared to the worst human output. We get it, people suck, and sometimes the AI is better.
At least the ways that humans screw up are predictable to me. And I rarely find myself in a gaslighting session with my coworkers where I repeatedly have to tell them that they're doing it wrong, only to be met with "oh my, you're so right!" and watch them re-write the same flawed code over and over again.
This argument warrants introspection for "crusty devs", but also has holes. A compiler is tightly engineered and dependable. I have never had to write assembly because I know that my compiled code 100% represents my abstract code and any functional problems are in my abstract code. That is not true in AI coding. Additionally, AI coding is not just an abstraction over code, but an abstraction over understanding. When my code compiles, I don't need to worry that the compiler misunderstood my intention.
I'm not saying AI is not a useful abstraction, but I am saying that it is not a trustworthy one.
I do still write assembly sometimes, and it's a valued skill because it'll always be important and not everyone can do it. Compilers haven't obsoleted writing assembly by hand for some use cases, and LLMs will never obsolete actually writing code either. I would be incredibly cautious about throwing all your eggs into the AI basket before you atrophy a skill that fewer and fewer will have
How is a compiler and an LLM equivalent abstractions? I'm also seriously doubtful of the 10x claim any time someone brings it up when AI is being discussed. I'm sure they can be 10x for some problems but they can also be -10x. They're not as consistently predictable (and good) like compilers are.
The "learn to master it or become obsolete" sentiment also doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Isn't the whole point of AI as a technology that people shouldn't need to spend years mastering a craft to do something well? It's literally trying to automate intelligence.
The increasing levels of abstraction work only as long as the abstractions are deterministic (with some limited exceptions - i.e. branch prediction/preloading at CPU level, etc). You can still get into issues with leaky abstractions, but generally they are quite rare in established high->low level language transformations.
This is more akin to manager-level view of the code (who need developers to go and look at the "deterministic" instructions); the abstraction is a lot lot more leaky than high->low level languages.
In the 00s I saw so many C codebases with hand-rolled linked lists where dynamically resized arrays would be more appropriate, "should be big enough" static allocations with no real idea of how to determine that size, etc. Hardly anyone seemed to have a practical understanding of hashes. When you use a higher level language, you get steered towards the practical, fundamental data structures more or less automatically.
even JS doesn't churn as fast as the models powering vibe coding, and that cut & paste node app is still deterministic, compared to what happens when the next version of the model looks at AI-generated code from two years ago...
One thing I’ve noticed though that actually coding (without the use of AI; maybe a bit of tab auto-complete) is that I’m actually way faster when working in my domain than I am when using AI tools.
Everytime I use AI tools in my domain-expertise area, I find it ends up slowing me down. Introducing subtle bugs, me having to provide insane amount of context and details (at which point it becomes way faster to do it myself)
Just code and chill man - having spent the last 6 months really trying everything (all these context engineering strategies, agents, CLAUDE.md files on every directory, et, etc). It really easy still more productive to just code yourself if you know what you’re doing.
The thing I love most though - is having discussions with an LLM about an implementation, having it write some quick unit tests and performance tests for certain base cases, having it write a quick shell script, etc. things like this, it’s Amazing and makes me really enjoy programming since I save time and can focus on doing the actual fun stuff
When I'm doing the coding myself, I'm at least making steady progress and the process is predictable. With LLMs, it's a crapshoot. I have to get the AI to understand what I want and may have try again multiple times, many times never succeeding, and end up writing a lot of text anyway. And in between, I'll have to read a lot of code that probably ends up being thrown away or heavily modified.
This probably depends a lot on what kind of project one is working on, though.
But it's like you said, I like using LLMs for completing smaller parts or asking specific kind of help or having conversations about solutions, but for anything larger, it just feels like banging my head to a wall.
Don't use agent mode, only use ask mode. Once I did that, it works as expected. I can still code but not have to rely on the randomized nature of "vibe coding."
Devs are starting to realize that the sweet spot for AI support in coding is on a small scale, i.e. extended code completion. Generating huge chunks of code is often not reliable enough except for some niches (such as simple greenfield projects which profit from millions of examples online).
One AI workflow I rather like seems to have largely vanished from many modern tools. Use a very dumb simple model with syntax knowledge to autocomplete. It fills out what I'm about to type, and takes local variables and pass them to functions I wanna call.
It feels like just writing my own code but at 50% higher wpm. Especially if I can limit it to only suggest a single row; it prevents it from effecting my thought process or approach.
This is how the original GitHub copilot worked until it switched to a chat based more agentic behavior. I set it up locally with an old llama on my laptop and it's plenty useful for bash and c, and amazing for python. I ideally want a model trained only for code and not conversational at all, closer to the raw model trained to next-token predict on code.
I think this style just doesn't chew enough tokens to make tech CEOs happy. It doesn't benefit from a massive model and almost drains more networking than compute to run in the cloud.
Most editors and LSPs offer variable, method, keyword and a bunch of other completions that are 100% predictable and accurate, you don't need an LLM for this.
One of the core principles of my workflow (inspired by REPL development and some unix tools) is to start with a single file (for a function or the whole project). The I refactor the code to have a better organization and to improve reliability, especially as I'm handling more scenarios (and failure modes).
LLMs are not useful in this workflow, because they are too verbose. Their answers are generic and handle scenarios you don't even support yet. What's useful is good documentation (as in truthful) and the code if it's open.
This approach has worked really well in my career. It gives me KISS and YAGNI for free. And every line of code is purposeful and have a reason to be there.
I’ve been actively using the first tier paid version of:
- GPT
- Claude
- Gemini
Usually it’s via the cli tool. (Codex, Claude code, Gemini cli)
I have a bunch of scripts setup that write to the tmux pane that has these chats open - so I’ll visually highlight something nvim and pipe that into either of the panes that have one of these tools open and start a discussion.
If I want it to read the full file, I’ll just use the TUIs search (they all use the @ prefix to search for files) and then discuss. If I want to pipe a few files, I’ll add the files I want to nvim quickfix list of literally pipe the files I want to a markdown file (with a full path) and discuss.
So yes - the chat interface in these cli tools mostly. I’m one of those devs that don’t leave the terminal much lol
I also have a personal rule that I will try something for at least 4 months actively before making my decision about it (programming language, new tools, or in this case AI assisted coding)
I made the claim that in my area of expertise - I have found that *most of the time it is faster to write something myself than I write out really detailed md file / prompt. It becomes more tedious to express myself via natural language then it is with code when I want something very specific done.
In these types of cases - writing the code myself, allows me to express the thing I want faster. Also, I like to code with the AI auto complete but still while this can be useful I sometimes disable it because it’s distracting and consistently incorrect with its predictions)
claim that i claimed you claimed: "for any coder to claim AI tools slow them down"
---
claim you made: "One thing I’ve noticed though that actually coding (without the use of AI; maybe a bit of tab auto-complete) is that I’m actually way faster when working in my domain than I am when using AI tools."
---
You did make that claim but I'm aware my approach would bring the defensiveness out of anyone :P
This is what you said - and I didn’t make this claim. I specifically said that in “my domain”. Meaning a code base I know fully well and own, and it’s a language, framework and patterns that I’ve worked with for years.
For certain things - yes, it’s faster to do myself than write a long prompt with context (or a predefined one) because it’s faster to express what I want with the code than natural language.
or the complete opposite. Very skilled people with a lot of experience in a specific project. I am like that too at my current job. I've REALLY tried to use AI but it has always slowed me down in the end. AI is only speeding me up in very specific and isolated things, tangent to the main product development.
For seasoned maintainers of open source repos, there is explicit evidence it does slow them down, even when they think it sped them up: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
Cue: "the tools are so much better now", "the people in the study didn't know how to use Cursor", etc. Regardless if one takes issue with this study, there are enough others of its kind to suggest skepticism regarding how much these tools really create speed benefits when employed at scale. The maintenance cliff is always nigh...
There are definitely ways in which LLMs, and agentic coding tools scaffolded in top, help with aspects of development. But to say anyone who claims otherwise is either being disingenuous or doesn't know what they are doing, is not an informed take.
I have seen this study cited enough to have a copy paste for it. And no, there are not a bunch of other studies that have any sort of conclusive evidence to support this claim either. I have looked and would welcome any with good analysis.
"""
1. The sample is extremely narrow (16 elite open-source maintainers doing ~2-hour issues on large repos they know intimately), so any measured slowdown applies only to that sliver of work, not “developers” or “software engineering” in general.
2. The treatment is really “Cursor + Claude, often in a different IDE than participants normally use, after light onboarding,” so the result could reflect tool/UX friction or unfamiliar workflows rather than an inherent slowdown from AI assistance itself.
3. The only primary outcome is self-reported time-to-completion; there is no direct measurement of code quality, scope of work, or long-term value, so a longer duration could just mean “more or better work done,” not lower productivity.
4. With 246 issues from 16 people and substantial modeling choices (e.g., regression adjustment using forecasted times, clustering decisions), the reported ~19% slowdown is statistically fragile and heavily model-dependent, making it weak evidence for a robust, general slowdown effect.
"""
Any developer (who was a developer before March 2023) that is actively using these tools and understands the nuances of how to search the vector space (prompt) is being sped up substantially.
I think we agree no the limitations of the study--I literally began my comment with "for seasoned maintainers of open source repos". I'm not sure if in your first statement ("there are no studies to back up this claim.. I welcome good analysis") you are referring to claims that support an AI-speedup. If so, we agree that good analysis is needed. But if you think there already is good data:
Can you link any? All I've seen is stuff like Anthropic claiming 90% of internal code is written by Claude--I think we'd agree that we need an unbiased source and better metrics than "code written". My concern is that whenever AI usage in professional developers is studied empirically, as far as I have seen, the results never corroborate your claim: "Any developer (who was a developer before March 2023) that is actively using these tools and understands the nuances of how to search the vector space (prompt) is being sped up substantially."
I'm open to it being possible, but as someone who was a developer before March 2023 and is surrounded by many professionals who were also so, our results are more lukewarm than what I see boosters claim. It speeds up certain types of work, but not everything in a manner that adds up to all work "sped up substantially".
I need to see data, and all the data I've seen goes the other way. Did you see the recent Substack looking at public Github data showing no increase in the trend of PRs all the way up to August 2025? All the hard data I've seen is much, much more middling than what people who have something to sell AI-wise are claiming.
Turn off the noise, just keep coding and get better at it, go all-in with the fundamentals it will pay off over time. You can leverage autocomplete to go as fast as you can, don't waste your time writing md files, most of the world still does hand coding, sure with some ai assistance, but without totally ceding control. They want you to believe the contrary to keep the bubble inflating or to sell you some ai courses where you spend hundreds of dollars for "learning" how to please a statical tool into doing what you want to do, spoiler alert it eventually won't and steer away in unpredictable ways
> The agentic spam is exhausting. I just wanted to code.
Ditto. And we still can.
I've yet to use an "agent", and still use a chat UI to an LLM in Emacs. I rely on these tools for design discussion, rough prototyping, and quick reference, but they still waste my time roughly a quarter of the time I use them. They have gotten better in the last year, though, and I've been able to broaden my reach into stacks and codebases I wouldn't have felt comfortable with before, which is good.
I just have no interest in "agents". I don't want to give these companies more access to my system and data, and I want to review every thing these tools generate. If this makes me slower than a vibe coder, that's intentional. Thankfully, there are still sane people and companies willing to pay me for this type of work, so I'm not worried about being displaced any time soon. Once that happens, I'll probably close up shop, figure out an alternative income stream, and continue coding as a hobby.
I feel this. Tbh I was excited about most of the previous tech fads I have come across. Sure, people got overzealous with them and also failed to realize that what F*NG needs is not what your three person startup needs, but there were always some good and interesting ideas there.
This just feels... a little too dystopian. Companies hoovered up the entirety more or less of all of our collective thoughts and writings and output and now want to sell it back to us- and I fear that cost is going to be extremely steep.
It's impressive, but at the same time, just feels like its going to somehow be a net detractor to society, and yet I feel I need to keep up with each new iteration or potentially get washed over and left behind by the wave.
I am somewhat fortunate to be towards the top of the pyramid and also in a position where I could theoretically ride off into the sunset, but I fear the societal implications and the pain that is going to come for vast numbers of people.
Wrong. Continuing with the architect metaphor, he doesn't understandably want to delegate digital draft drawings to a non predictable statical tool ridden with idiosyncracies and biases based off mostly on poor open source training data and write some dumb architect.md to try steer the will of the tool. He wants to design and do it better with some highly integrated hidden ai. So far whenever I heard product x says that has AI, most of the time is a product with zero real integration and just a chatbot in a separate window
> 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.
"A more intuitive task-based approach to monitoring agent activity, presenting you with essential artifacts and verification results to build trust."
The whole thing around "trust" is really weird. Why would I as a user care about that? It's not as if LLMs are perfect oracles and the only thing between us and a brave new world is blind trust in whatever the LLM outputs.
I'd say that because right now, verifying the LLM output (meaning: not trusting it) is a huge bottleneck (rightfully so). I guess they are trying to convince people that this bottleneck is no more, with this IDE.
Translation: "don't trouble your little brain actually trying to read the code that our model produced. we can show you pictures of the output instead."
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.
AI integration into all aspects of the IDE is the killer feature of Cursor for me. Also access for $20 a month to every important model out there, and once you go over your credits, they grant you about another $25 in free credits and then you can work pretty much unlimited in Auto mode where it automatically picks the model for you.
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.
Sure. Honestly I think you can get the same with git work trees, though I haven't tried.
After a couple iterations on this, I've ended up having claude code vibe-code a helper CLI in Go for me which I can invoke with `ontheside <new-workspace-name> <base-change>` and will
- create a new jj workspace based on the given change
- create a docker container configured with everything my unit tests need to run, my claude code config mounted, and jj configured
- it also sets up a claude code hook to run `jj` (no arguments) every time it changes a file, so that jj does a snapshot
- finishes by starting an interactive claude code session with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`
- it also cleans it all up once I exit the claude code session and fish shell that's running it
With this I can have Claude Code working asynchronously on something, while I can review (or peek) the changes in batch from my main editor by running `jj show <change-id>` / `jj diff -r "..."` (which in my case opens it up in the Goland multi-file diff viewer). I can also easily switch to the change it's working on in my main editor, to make some manual modifications if necessary.
This is, in general, primarily for "in the background async stuff" I want to have it work on. Most of the time I just have a dead-normal claude code session running in my main workspace.
Minor self-plug - if you want, I posted a jj intro article a while ago[0], though it doesn't include my current workspace usage.
The Agent Manager view providing a unified view of all active agents and allowing you to immediately respond to any approval requests or followup questions looks very useful regardless of which VCS you're using under the covers. Am I missing something here that jj does?
See my setup detailed in another sibling comment of yours, jj is just a small part of it, and you can probably get that with git too.
I’m already at full mental capacity planning and reviewing the work of two agents (one foreground which almost never asks for approval, and one background which never asks for approval).
I don’t really need the ability to juggle more of them, and noticing their messages is not a bottleneck for me, while I’m happy with the customizability and adaptability of my raw’er workflow.
Fair enough. I use git worktrees (with a script that creates the git branch, worktree and opens a new vs code workspace). You're right, managing more than about two active sessions at once is probably the limit though I'm somewhat hopeful that better tooling similar to the Agent Manager window here would allow me to scale a bit past that especially if some of those sessions are more design explorations.
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.
It's the same thing they tried to sell with low/no-code.
The problem is that the engineer turning what you want into code isn't normally the bottleneck. I would say about 50% of my job is helping people specify what they want sufficiently for someone to implement.
Non-technical people are used to a world of squishy definition where you can tell someone to do something and they will fill in the blanks and it all works out fine.
The problem with successful software is that the users are going to do all the weird things. All the things the manager didn't think about when they were dreaming up their happy path. They are going to try to update the startTime to the past, or to next year and then back to next week. They are going to get their account into some weird state and click the button you didn't think they could. And this is just the users that are trying to use the site without trying to intentionally break it.
I think if managers try to LLM up their dreams it'll go about as well as low/no-code. They will probably be able to get a bit further because the LLM will be willing to bolt on feature after feature and bug fix after bug fix until they realize they've just been piling up bandaids.
I am cautiously optimistic that there will be a thriving market for skilled engineers to come in and fix these things.
Reminds me of the pre-GitHub days, when I had to use CM tools designed to appeal to project and CM managers, not to the poor developers who had to use them every day. Anybody else remember Harvest?
"Professional riders number roughly three to six thousand worldwide, while professional drivers number roughly twenty to forty thousand across major sanctioned series."
Perhaps it's worth posing the question: what sorts of "engineers" might feel threatened by agents? Those doing engineering, or those who spend their careers wading in the shallows? Competent designers with deep comprehension, or, at best, the superficial pedants?
Once the UI soup around AI dev use has settled (and it's getting closer) I bet you we will see native apps with c/c++/zig/rust backends that render so much faster on all the junctions that aren't roundtrip limited (and yes, that will still matter to many people).
Why would you bet that? It hadn't happened before AI so not sure why it would now. In fact this is why VSCode was even created, because it was easier hacking on a browser renderer than making something from scratch.
These are two of the fastest editors, and I use both, but I don't think they're for the same thing: Zed is for multi-file projects with moderate IDE abstractions (Worse than Jetbrains; better than most others); Sublime is for editing one-off files with syntax highlighting.
I would bet in time they are vindicated. Then Google et al will release something with much advertising hype about "returning to basics" or something in a couple of years.
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?
Back when Cursor was new (before literally everything was AI hype) they explicitly called out that they wanted to do more in-depth integration with the editor than was possible with just the extension APIs.
Presumably that hasn't changed much. If you want to do any large-scale edits of the UI you need to spin up a fork.
I don't know, does Cursor offer anything substantial beyond an extension like kilocode? (I've only used vanilla VSCodium branch with various extensions but they all seem to integrate everything from tab-completion to complete UI agentic take-over very well)
Correct. One could say the same thing for browsers. I suppose on the one hand it's good that it's relatively easy to spin up a new project like this, on the other hand one must swear allegiance to their large software company of choice.
It's also an absolutely basic fork. They haven't even bothered with a custom theme, or custom UI, it's just vscode with an agents window slapped on top.
Weirdly, out of all the vscode forks the best UI is probably bytedance's TRAE
My YC2026 startups are an AI agent that automatically manages your VSCode forks, and a public safety computer vision app for smart glasses that predicts whether someone can afford a lawyer based on their skin color
They'll have to compete with these other pending funded companies:
- ai therapist for your ai agents
- genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives
- prompt engineering as a service
- social media post generator so you can post "what if ai fundamentally changes everything about how people interact with software" think pieces even faster
> genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives
AI Agent Orchestration Battle Bots. Old school VMs are the brute tanks just slowly ramming everybody off the field. A swarm of erratically behaving lightweight K8s Pods madly slicing and dicing everything coming on their way. Winner takes control of the host capacity.
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.
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.
I haven't used Windsurf (been using Claude Code and similar). Does it provide an Agent Manager window/view? This to me looks more useful to me than the browser integration piece.
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.
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.
Basic-to-great rationality or skill may not be what is being rewarded here (although the baseline of course needs to be met) - it could well be compliance capability. Hence the string of arbitrary memorization exercises.
Yeah, though with theirs I can usually see why they did it (even if I’d rather they didn’t). Google’s MO is messing with scrolling for what often appears to be no user-facing reason at all.
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.
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.
And agentic coding is about working at a much higher conceptual level. Further from the ground. Antigravity is a functional metaphor.
My only issue with it is that it's too long at five syllables, and "anti-" is an inherently negative connotation. I'm guessing this will eventually get renamed if it gets popular, much like Bard was.
As the parent said, actual anti-gravity is world-changing technology. It's telling the very laws of nature to go fuck themselves, you're gonna do what you want, even if all of known physics says it's impossible.
Working at a higher conceptual level is just project management. You're the legislator giving out unfunded mandates rather than the agency staff that has to figure out how to comply. There's power there, but it isn't anti-gravity.
That's why it's metaphor. "Operation Warp Speed" also delivered vaccines quickly, but not faster than the speed of light.
The list of company and product names that are based on a metaphor that is very obviously exaggerated is endless. Google doesn't index a googol number of pages either.
I feel it's a bit ignorant of you to double down on your argument and compare a cloned product release by some macbook swinging google engineers with vaccination, which actually positively impacted many human lives.
Are you for real? When someone disagrees, it's not "ignorance" or "doubling down". It's just legitimate disagreement. There's nothing I'm ignorant of here, so please don't throw around insults like that.
I just continue to stand by the fact that naming products using exaggerated metaphor is standard practice. The idea that it is "shameful" or "ignorant" seems absurd. I think it's OK not to take it too seriously. Nobody is going to be confused and walk off of a cliff or something because the product is named "antigravity"...
Do you get upset that the Milky Way candy bar doesn't actually contain a galaxy within? Or that the Chicago Bulls aren't as strong as actual bulls?
Since when did disagreeing become policing? But yes, if someone calls me ignorant without any justification, I'm going to disagree. And if you think that's "policing", I'm sorry but you seem to be the ignorant one here around the meaning of that word.
"Geez," it's just a name. Is it too much to not get worked up over a perfectly innocent and fun name?
Perfectly innocent and fun name, coming from Google? Are you for real? That's one of the craziest things I've read in this forum, someone still thinking Google is an innocent startup with a "Don't be evil" motto.
You think the name is evil...? Sorry, but that's one of the craziest things I've read in this forum.
We're not talking about monopolistic business strategy here or anything. We're talking about a product name. So yeah, I think the name is perfectly innocent and fun. I cannot understand the level of conspiratorial thinking that must be involved to think "antigravity" is some kind of offensive choice. Bizarre.
The name that you are treating as a separate entity, does not exist by itself. Naming a product is an act of a company, Google. There is no conspiracy here, we are talking about bad taste and low quality.
not me, I wasn't the one that started the thread but anti-google sentiment (not prejudice) is everywhere now, what is less common, but not here in HN, is ex-google employees and people with a one-sided relationship with google spending a good amount of their time defending Google. That is indeed irrelevant and baffling.
I recognize the guys in the video, they were in marketing videos for the Windsurf IDE before its founding team was cannibalized by/absorbed into Google.
I've been using it today and honestly I'm impressed. I seem to be the exception when I say I don't care it's a vscode fork. Having access to the extension ecosystem seems like a boon to me and I could quickly get a setup to my liking to rival my current Jetbrains Claude Code setup.
It seems to streamline my existing Claude Code workflow with a much better UI. The tab complete seems the best I've experienced and the text/image selection, adding comments and iterating on a plan is genius.
Depressing to see everyone here unable to see the forest for the trees.
I agree! It's great. Until you hit the limit, then there's literally no path to continue.
I would happily pay 20 or whatever for 4x limits. I'm very curious what they end up offering. My major reservation is side project vibes. I think it's hard to believe on this long term unless Google themselves adopt it.
""Autonomously, an Antigravity Agent writes code for a new frontend feature, uses the terminal to launch localhost, and actuates the browser to test that the new feature works."
very interesting times; i'm glad to see browser automation becoming more mainstream as part of the ai-assisted dev loop for testing. (disclosure: started the selenium project, now working on something similar for a vibe coding context)
Most people are missing the point here. Testing the GUI/feature more reliable is something that Gemini 3 could unlock (looking at the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark and its general improvement on visual understanding). At least for the (hobby-)projects I attempted this was really a bottleneck having to always test the GUI after each change as its quite often breaking something.
It's insane to me that I can't pay $20/$200 bucks after running out of limits in ~5 messages.
Why would you not at least link it to the pro and ultra accounts
at least you could upsell the pro subs to ultra. Millions of claude code and codex users who are into agentic coding is your servicable market paying attention today.
Now I'll delete antigravity and go back to codex / claude code / cursor ...
> Google Antigravity is an agentic development platform, evolving the IDE into the agent-first era.
Antigravity enables developers to operate at a higher, task-oriented level by managing agents across workspaces, while retaining a familiar AI IDE experience at its core. Agents operate across the editor, terminal, and browser, enabling them to autonomously plan and execute complex, end-to-end tasks elevating all aspects of software development.
I have absolutely 0 idea why any developer would rely on any IDE produced by google. It'll be canned within 5 years max, with 3-4 seeming like a reasonable estimate of the lifespan of the product
I've been using my current IDE for 17 years, and plan to continue using it for at least another 15
Antigravity is based on VS Code, not designed from the ground up, and has second order revenue from the AI subscriptions (financials probably counted under the AI umbrella).
I still wouldn't trust a Google product to stick around, but these hints aren't a reliable oracle either.
When AS was launched Android was the only other viable option and it is the same even today. I don't believe Google's AI products will reach and/or sustain the same dominance as Android.
It is a product launched in the hype cycle of AI. Google has plenty of other products (launched during hype cycles) that are gathering dust.
That's not a guaranteed signal that it will meet the same fate but its something strong enough to be wary of.
It's interesting to think that Google's Antigravity is a forked version of MSFT's VS Code, which uses a browser engine built by Google, which they forked from Apple, which they forked from KHTML.
I really don't know why I struggle so much with this stuff. I believe these models / agents / whatever write code that is often at least as good as the code I write, and they are super helpful tools, but it just feels like it takes away so much of the joy that is programming to me. I'm not saying it's "right" of me to feel this way, but for me the struggle, and the figuring things out by testing, identifying patterns, or looking deeper into a library's implementation (etc) is part of the challenge that makes programming and software construction fun.
I'm in your boat. I picked this career because I enjoy solving problems and thinking and understanding. I'm interested in how things work inside below the layers. To me, it's like the tech has a purpose of its own, and not just to provide value.
Using agents effectively is this whole other skillset including managing requirements, prioritization and, worse yet, I'm rarely left with any knowledge. I don't nearly get the same joy out of "I finished a task with an agent" like I do with "I had a problem, I delved deep to understand it, learned something new and solved it"
Then again, I bet people making furniture out of wood felt the same about industrial furniture factories. And it can be argued that not every use case needs custom tailored furniture...
This is the fruit of Windsurf brain-drain and I think it might be better than what's out there since those guys got to start from scratch from everything they learned building Windsurf
Google subscriptions and services are so terribly mismanaged that I will be staying away, no matter how incredible this shallow fork of vscode may be.
I remember a previous story months ago about Gemini that had Google PMs trying to hype their product, but it was all question about how nobody knows how to get Gemini API keys with any number of paid subscription.
My heart really sinks every time someone launches a "new IDE" and it turns out to be VS Code. VSCode can be turned into an IDE for _some_ platforms. But not for others. It remains a text editor with some nice extras (syntax highlighting, navigation) but lacking others (debugger, testing, ...).
What's most astonishing is that I can't seem to find what actual platforms it works for. I don't doubt the LLM's can write code in almost any language and for almost all frameworks, with varying success.
But which languages/platforms/framework will the IDE work for technically, having compilers etc built in? I don't care if an LLM can help me with the code, if I then can't compile it within the same IDE!
Why can I not authenticate into Google Antigravity?
Google Antigravity is currently available for non-Workspace personal Google accounts in approved geographies. Please try using an @gmail.com email address if having challenges with Workspace Google accounts (even if used for personal purposes).
To save others the trouble, it doesn't matter whether you use Chrome or Safari for the auth flow. It's broken on both. (I'm using a personal @gmail account.)
Had the same issue, have been able to sign in finally using a Google Cloud Identity (former Workspace) account by changing my IP via a VPN to Singapore. No idea why, but that worked. Tried a few other countries too, but only had success with Singapore.
Thanks for the detailed article. I used a devtool in order to speedup the development with google antigravity. This tool not only provides prompts it provides workflows MCP and lot more to make developer life easier while using Antigravity. Check this out - https: https://antigravityai.directory/
I'm having the same issue. I thought it was just me or something with their cloud network. I also haven't been able to download Android Studio from the website for a month. I couldn't even download it from my Macbook so probably not the same issue.
Tested it for roughly two hours now, far from ready for prime time, very buggy and clearly just quickly build on Windsurfs already rather issue laden code base. Essentially a less well thought out imitation of Trae's Solo mode, added in a second window on top of VSCode and not very well integrated, struggling with terminal commands and despite showing issues in the browser window and screenshot taken by the model, proclaiming the task to be completed. Tool calls also aren't as reliable as I would have expected considering their ownership of the code base, hard to tell whether that is underlying in the model (it was a major issue with 2.5 Pro) or simply Antigravity specific, hoping the latter.
Additionally, there are issues setting up accounts (Singapore VPN solved that for me), no support for Workspace users, only a free tier that requires data sharing, no additional rate limits for paying Pro or Ultra customers, etc. Even worse, Gemini CLI currently does NOT provide Gemini 3 Pro for Ultra Business customers despite paying over € 260,- per month, which is frankly ridiculous.
Will be honest, I was speculating that the reason for the multi month delay between the first A/B tests of Gemini 3 class models and the final release was so they'd have all their dugs in a row. Have some time to test everything, improve tooling, provide new paid subscriptions and/or ensure existing ones get access to everything day one, but they didn't.
Gemini 3 Pro seems very interesting (to early to say), but compared to every other recent launch by OpenAI (5, 5.1, Codex variants), Anthropic (Sonnet and Haiku 4.5), even Kimi (K2 Thinking) and Z.AI (GLM-4.6), this is by far the least organized launch of any frontier lab.
A buggy IDE which is unusable for paying customers, no CLI access for Ultra business (and none at all for Pro of any kind), etc. is frankly embarrassing when considering what competitors manage to provide the day a model launches.
What have they been working on these last two months besides going on X and posting "3" every couple of days? Why is there no paid Antigravity tier, no way to use Workspace accounts, etc? Before launching in this state, I feel it'd have been better to delay a bit more if it was absolutely needed.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this the fourth or fifth IDE built by Google for LLM assisted coding? What happened to IDX and Firebase Studio and aren't they also based on VSCode?
Generally if you are paying full price (paying per token), then it's not used for training.
If you are not paying, or paying a consumer level price ($20/mo) you will be trained on.
ETA: In the terms they say they use your data because "free" is the only option available in preview. However it does say you can disable sharing in your settings...
Not but you can be quite sure somewhere deep inside the TOS there is a line saying their telemetry swallow your soul. If not, it will be added. It's google, that's what they do.
I wanted to like it as a Gemini Pro subscriber who does not want to also pay for Claude Code, but after running Antigravity for ~ 10 minutes, and a few back and forward exchanges I got the 'Model quota limit exceeded' message with no indication when it will reset.
You get the impression that these products from Google (including Gemini CLI ) are just made as prototypes -- they are supposed to work as a demo, but Google does not actually care about having a working workflow with them. Claude Code on the other hand is an actual product that works well.
There is currently no support for:
Paid tiers with guaranteed quotas and rate limits
Bring-your-own-key or bring-your-own-endpoint for additional rate limits
Organizational tiers (self-serve or via contract)
So basically just another case of vendor lock-in. No matter whether the IDE is any good - this kills it for me.
I can't get the agent to use my MCP server. The MCP config is provided, and the application can query the tools, but the agent can't access my server, only the http operations the application performs to list the tools is something i see in my server logs. It knows there are tools, because it sees the list, it tells me when it's trying to connect to which tool. But that fails.
Something incredibly weird is going on in the "AI space", everyone seems to believe that they need their own browser and IDE. All of them are just forks of each other, so why aren't they extensions or plugins?
I can't really explain what the issue is, I'd assume it's about lock in, but I don't see a VS Code fork or yet another Chromium browser being something that a person couldn't easily replace with another similar fork, but with a different AI. It that the pitch internally? Lock users into a browser or IDE, so they'll be forced to use a certain AI?
> It that the pitch internally? Lock users into a browser or IDE, so they'll be forced to use a certain AI?
Shrugs that's the only reason that makes any sense short of they're just being blindly mimetic (which, let's be honest, isn't outside of the realm of possibility these days).
I spent a few days with Firebase Studio when it was announced. I stopped using it because it was clearly a very early alpha - tons of bugs, and didn't seem well thought out. Now, less than a few months later (!!!), they announce a competing IDE with essentially the same functionality, but a different brand? Is the right hand talking to the left?
Seems interesting, makes for the second vscode clone with ai google has made. The demo they showed in the video avoided showing code so I guess thats what they're aiming for. Although when they mentioned you can easily verify code quality by looking at end product screenshots it felt like they don't know what 'code' quality means.
On my m2 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, it took over 12 minutes to startup and get to a usable state. When it did, it was plainly just a jacked version of VSCode. Opening a project caused it to hang again. Dumped it. VSCodium, with the terminal pane open so I can talk to Claude works fine for me...
It might sound smart your defense of Google but VSCode is not a fork or electron and chromium, there's a lot of work there, not just clicking a fork button
Looks great, won't touch since they are probably going
to do a switcheroo or a shutdown as usual.
And of course I would need to look at all the implications of spying, being locked out of google account and absence of support that are google amo. No time for that. Not for them.
After the first five minutes of using it on Ubuntu, it crashed with error saying I don't have enough free memory, quick look into system stats proved that wasn't the case.
Anyway, not a great first impression. I guess I'll try again in a few months.
Nice that it's built-in, Claude Code needs an MCP for this at least.
> User Feedback: Intuitively integrate feedback across surfaces and artifacts to guide and refine the agent’s work.
I wish they'd just let me edit the implementation plan directly instead of me having to explain the corrections. Claude Code has the same weakness. Explaining the corrections is slower than editing the plan manually, and it still keeps the incorrect text in context as well.
> An Agent-First Experience: Manage multiple agents at the same time
Sounds nice in theory but I assume you can run multiple agents for 5 minutes or so and then you're out of credits.
As a claude code user I'm not really sold on this product.
I tried it.
Maybe I got unlucky, but Gemini performed poorly in my testing.
I gave it a task that I was working on with VSCode and GPT codex 5.1.
Gemini3 repeatedly failed to finish the task and started to go down a rabbit hole on an unrelated task.
The browser extension is really cool and it provides a needed tool for the agent to use. It used the extension to show the page that it updated in the task document (the task doc is great too).
However it showed me a page and did it was done, when it was clearly not done and not what I asked for.
I was expecting weaker tooling and a better model. I got good tooling and a not very good model.
I'm enjoying the concept. Tight browser integration/control. Controlling agents by commenting on Artifacts (Task List, Implementation Plan).
But the user experience for basic things has just been difficult. Unresponsive Agent Manager window. Agents hitting file permission errors because I don't have a proper "workspace". Agents getting blocked waiting for me to confirm a command line's "y/n".
>>Google Antigravity's Editor view offers tab autocompletion, natural language code commands, and a configurable, and context-aware configurable agent.
Okay, but is it configurable? Also, can you configure it to write DRY code?
Oh no. What's with the scrolling in the blog page. What a terrible experience. It's clearly vibe-coded and AI-tested. If a senior saw mingling with the scrolling behavior, it would have been never in production.
I was very hyped: maybe Google finally did something new, complete, unifying CLI and IDE, a sort of Claude Code Web but as an efficient, IDE-like, local thing.
Does anyone here have a take on why so many people are forking VSCode instead of writing a plugin? Is AI codegen the kind of thing that would be impoasible with a plugin or something?
My best guess would be that plugins are limited into what they can do within VSCode, and rewriting a whole IDE/Text editor just for AI Agent seems a lot of work.
For example a while back vscode-pets[1] plugin became popular and tried it and noticed that the pet can only live within a window, whether its the explorer section or in its own panel, I thought it'd be more of a desktop pet that could be anywhere within VSCode but apparently there are limitations (https://github.com/tonybaloney/vscode-pets/issues/4).
So my guess is that forking VSCode and customizing it that way is much easier to do things that you can't with a plugin while also not having to maintain an IDE/Text editor.
My experience with GPT and Claude, is that they are fantastic for learning something brand new to me, as a kind of tutor..
But for writing code in some domain I am good in, they are pretty much useless.. I would spend a lot longer struggling to get something that barely functions from them VS writing it myself, and the one I write myself will be terse and maintainable + if it has bugs they will be like obvious ones, not insane ones that a human would never do.
Even just when getting them to write individual functions with very clear and small scopes.
Pressing the "Submit" button on their "Google Antigravity for Organizations
Interest Form" (https://antigravity.google/interest-form) doesn't actually do anything for me (tried Firefox and Chrome) -> their metrics will indicate that there's no interest from organizations -> the product will be killed in a year.
Too bad they never show these magic AI-Assisted tools being used to fix real-world bugs / implement feature requests in their open source GH repositories.
there went 6 hours of debugging why my applications are getting out of memory errors when trying to connect to my inside-docker-running kafka. they were getting an actual answer from antigravity but because of the first 4 bytes of the message, the clients were thinking a huuuuge message is coming and tried to allocate byte array memory for that. such an unthoughtful decision to actually use one of the most common used ports for a developer when developing an actual IDE for DEVELOPERS.
Later edit: Probably this one [1], which is par for the course for Alphabet, they're, conceptually, still living in the early 2010s, when this stuff was culturally relevant.
Vibe coding has taken a way to where its become psychological, and these days all I work with is just a "fast apt" solution like Cursor's Composer 1, I tried Gemini 3 inside Cursor, and while I had no real application to a real stratified properly to benchmark it with, it felt "already slow" in a very fast race.
Small feedback if any of the Antigravity people read here: "Fast" is not a great name for the "eager" option (vs. "Planning") because "Fast" is associated with "dumb" in LLMs (fast/flash/mini). Probably "Eager" would be a more descriptive name
Trip report: I'm using it now to revamp a dashboard I'm working on. TBH it's not feeling much better than Codex - it couldn't figure out how to launch chrome with my default profile nor how to regenerate the css with tailwind. I'm also getting a lot of model quota errors like everyone else.
I was genuinely impressed by the Antigravity browser plugin for "agentic" work.
I ran into a neat website and asked it to generate a similiar UX with Astro and it did a decent-ish job of seeing how the site handled scrolling visually and in code and replicating it in a tidy repo.
Petty nitpick, but this sentence doesn’t sound right
> “Google Antigravity's Editor view offers tab autocompletion, natural language code commands, and a configurable, and context-aware configurable agent.”
Is it a typo or was there a reason to add configurable twice?
I have lamented the fact that download buttons can be hard to find on software home pages sometimes. But having just a download button and a "more" button on your landing page seems to be taking things a bit too far.
I don't get how these agents can work when even Claude Sonnet 4.5 (for example) needs a lot of hand-holding for basic, simple bugfixing stuff. Wouldn't the agents just be huffing and puffing their way off the rails all the time?
I'm stuck on "setting up this account" like most people. What a botched launch. This kind of bugginess and unreliability has become so much more frequent since big tech started tightening the screws with mass layoffs.
Had some issues setting up with my Google account, never went past the setup page. Some friends faced the same problem, but managed to advance by skipping installing extensions. Trying that now to see if it works!
This thing crashes on Ubuntu LTS 24.04 during start. Apparently all these agents are not able to ensure that a desktop app starts on a popular Linux distribution.
If Google has forgotten how to do Software, than the future doesn't look bright.
On Windows, it behaves like a malware. Suddenly flashing command prompt windows when you interact with it. Not very nice (also, lazy, since you don't need to do that flashing if you're a legitimate app).
Tried Antigravity for 2 queries and my model quota limit breached. Model definitely felt better than GPT 5.1 (my current daily driver). I am continuing to use Gemini 3 Pro on Cursor to evaluate further.
That floating chess board was a subliminal message: Your project will teeter, and critical pieces will fall off. You will occasionally make an illegal move as the board annoyingly shifts beneath you.
I keep getting: "Antigravity server crashed unexpectedly. Please restart to fully restore AI features." On Ubuntu 24.04 - others on reddit reporting the same with 24.04.
I don’t really understand, if replacing developers is right around the corner, why throw money into so many IDEs. Or perhaps it’s really cheap to produce something like this?
Looking at that page makes me think I should go the other direction and switch from a graphical IDE to vim or something. You know, ground myself by adopting more gravity.
I agree that the name is horrible. It has Anti, gravity and Google in it.
Vim and all other non-graphical tools are great because they work in WSL, they work in linux servers and they may even work in Docker containers, although sometimes you have to do something like: apk add vim
the thing is, I tried it and it took 10 seconds to import all settings from cursor. the moat for vscode clones is really small. i imagine people will jump a lot from clone to clone, like from model to model now.
Did any of these VS Code forks yet fix their issues from official marketplace access leading to extensions being severely outdated and ripe with security issues?
I don't want to hate on this but I remember last week, when as a backend developer doing frontend, I spent about 20 minutes prompting Claude Sonnet in a loop trying to build a landing page for a new feature.
The task was to put create a header, putting the company logo in the corner and the text in the middle.
The resulting CSS was an abomination - I threw it all away and rewrote it from scratch (using my somewhat anemic CSS knowledge), ending up with like 3 selectors with like 20 lines of styles in total.
This made me think that 1: CSS and the way we do UI sucks, I still don't get why don't we have a graphical editor that can at least do the simple stuff well. 2: when these model's don't wanna do what you want them to the way you want them, they really don't wanna.
I think AI has shown us there's a need for a new generation of simple to write software and libraries, where translating your intent into actual code is much simpler and the tools actually help you work instead of barely allowing to fight be all the accidental complexity.
We were much closer to this reality back in the 90s when you opened up a drag and drop UI editor (like VB6, Borland Delphi, Flash), wrote some glue code and out came an .exe that you could just give to people.
Somewhere along the way, the cool kids came up with the idea that GUIs are bad, and everything needs to go through the command line.
Nowadays I need a shell script that configures my typescript CDK template (with its own NPM repo), that deploys the backend infra (which is bundled via node), the database schema, compiles the frontend, and puts the code into the right places, and hope to god that I don't run into all sorts of weird security errors because I didn't configure the security the way the browser/AWS/security middleware wanted to.
>Somewhere along the way, the cool kids came up with the idea that GUIs are bad, and everything needs to go through the command line.
It's important for people to feel like "hackers" that is the primary reason why command line sort of exploded among devs. Most devs will never admit this... they may not even realize it, but I think this is the main reason it went big.
The irony is that the very thing that makes devs feel like "hackers" is the very thing that's enabling agentic AI and making developers get all resistant because they're feeling dumber.
Yes, its also failing on my workspace account but worked on my personal. Might be a bug or a delayed deployment for workspaces b/c it might need to be "enabled" by admins?
Oh well. Uninstalled. This was my first experience doing software development guided by AI. Doesn't seem like a tool that will serve me well in the long run.
Slightly off-topic, but I really hate this trend that now every developer / researcher / engineer also needs to be an actor (typically cringy one) pretending to be quirky for the camera while trying to act unnaturally excited about the technology.
I really miss the days of the professional casualness and naturalness of something like the "mother of all demos" [0]. Like, can you imagine the guy wearing a turtleneck and going, "but wait!" and acting surprised after every sentence? It would NOT have been the same demo.
> I really miss the days of the professional casualness
Yes, the professional actor that doesn't seem like a paid actor is preferable to the autistic weirdo. That's why they get paid the big bucks and we get relegated to the basement.
Someone decided that the audience of standup comedy overlaps with tech meetup one 100%.
Jokes aside though, it's much broader than that, it's just that the zeitgeist dictates that everyone shifts from work to meta-work: musicians must impress not with their music but the way they make music, researchers must entertain, developers must manage agents, children watch someone else play games instead of playing themselves.
That's yet another increment to the already dizzying level of simulation per Jean Baudrillard.
It is my understanding that no experienced programmer would even consider touching that stuff given Google's stellar track record in developers' satisfaction.
I believe it is aimed at investors. Thus it will be forgotten the minute it stops influencing stock price.
Thus there is no need to take it literally as a developer tool - it's not.
That’s what it feels like yes. It has a lot of overlap with a ton of stuff that Google already does, and it seems like it’s one of those “rather than improving an existing product, let’s create a new one because that gets us a promotion” situations which Google is well known for.
Still hopeful but the biggest issue for a python user: Pylance
If you manage to even get the Pylance extension to show up (I had to change the "marketplace" settings) it will say:
> This extension is not compatible with Antigravity
What the heck am I supposed to do with the Jedi fall back? Legitimate question: Can Jedi even highlight unused imports? Can it import symbols not found?
If Pylance doesn't work, fork it. But the LSP needs to just work out of the box.
Yeah just kind of frustrating how the Python plugin (which has a dependency on Pylance) just fails to install Pylance in Antigravity. I even got some error messages related to it.
It looks like that is a fork of basedpyright. I have just been using basedpyright now. Better than Jedi / Windsurf Pyright (at least in the import area which was frustrating me).
Idk what cursor does, my free credits ran out a while ago :P
I downloaded Antigravity this morning and was able get this Mobius Clock debugged in a few minutes - then for the heck of it added a whole list of features! I'm blown away by how fast you can work. Yes, there were a series of problems, as expected whenever you attempt hard stuff, but at the end of the day, do check out the improved mobius clock!!! https://www.mobiusclock.com
It's really kind of pathetic how we live in a future where "antigravity" is a text editor that lies to you, "hoverboards" are one-wheeled electric skateboards that burn your house down, and... well, can't think of a third thing at the moment, but you know the vibe.
Lotta people mining science fiction for cool names and then applying them to their crappy products, cheapening the source ideas.
There's no way I am using such an important piece of life as an IDE from Google just because I know they are going to kill it within 3 years, if it survives that much. Probably will die with the Windsurf guy jumping ship again.
I've seen "agent" and "agentic" so many times in the last few months that the usage of the term is quickly becoming one of my biggest pet peeves. The previous one was "enshittification", and I'm glad that one was a short-lived fad.
That's a big name for a slop fork. So many possibilities (with LLMs and without) but Google just can't bring themselves to do anything creative, let alone transformative.
I'm going to treat this like Kiro, and just use it until they start charging for it and then probably switch back to VS code with its built-in agent support.
Eventually they're going to do a rug pull, and instead of paying $10 a month for tons of AI code request, it's going to be two or $300 for that. The economics just aren't there to actually make a profit, hopefully before the rug pool happens local models on normal hardware will be fast enough.
yeah... almost completely broken on my iphone. something tells me they used antigravity to vibe the website. would explain other issues mentioned like vim keybindings being ignored.
..."Youre absolutely right! I did mess up the internals of that feature and incorrectly reported that it works. let me try again..."
Another Google product whose launch will be used to justify somebody's promotion, only to be left for dead only a few months later after said promoted person moves on to something else.
Why would I even bother getting mildly invested in this when the product launch/promotion incentive structure at Google is so well known?
Nobody is interested in proprietary editors. People only accepted vscode because most of it was open source. AIUI this is a fork of that, but seriously, push out the changes or pass.
Honestly, the full page doesn't give you much more. Not a SINGLE product image. All paragraphs about "agentic" blah-blah you have read 100s of times by now - I do not see how this is anything different from all the other AI VS Code forks, besides that it comes with Gemini from the start.
Seems like they jumped the gun on the website release, the first version I saw was a wall of text, now it has photos and videos. Maybe they have an agentic CICD
It’s…a VSCode fork? Really? What has become of Google? Ten years ago, when I was getting into the world of software, there was still an aura about them. They built everything in this huge monorepo, and it worked. They were this deeply technical company for whom it seems anything could be done.
And now they can’t even ship a desktop app without forking VSCode? Look, I get it. There’s this huge ecosystem. Everyone uses it. I’m not saying it’s damning or even bad to fork it.
But why is this being painted as something revolutionary? It’s a reskin of all the other tools which are variations on the same theme, dressed up in business speak (an agent-first UX!). I’m sure it’s OK. I downloaded it. The default Tokyo Night theme is unusable; the contrast can’t be read. I picked Vim bindings, but as soon as I tried to edit a file I noticed that was ignored.
What happened? Is this how these beautiful, innovative companies are bound to end up?
I can see why people don’t release stuff on a permissive lisense anymore. It is absolutely insane that google is even allowed to do something like this.
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.
As someone who used to work there, Google will never get product releases right in general because of how bureaucratic and heavyweight their launch processes are.
They force the developing team to have a huge number of meetings and email threads that they must steer themselves to check off a ridiculously large list of "must haves" that are usually well outside their domain expertise.
The result is that any non-critical or internally contentious features get cut ruthlessly in order to make the launch date (so that the team can make sure it happens before their next performance review).
It's too hard to get the "approving" teams to work with the actual developers to iron these issues out ahead of time, so they just don't.
Buck passed, product launched.
Spot on. I would suggest a slightly different framing where the antagonist isn't really the "approving" teams but "leaders" who all want a seat at the table and exercise their authority lest their authority muscles atrophy. Since they're not part of the development, unless they object to something, would they really have any impact or leadership?
I always laugh-cry with whomever I'm sitting next to whenever launch announcements come out with more people in the "leadership" roles than the individual contributor roles. So many "leaders" but none with the awareness or the care of the farcical volumes such announcements speak.
Involving everyone who shows up to meetings is a great way to move forward and/or trim down attendees. Management who enjoys getting their brain picked or homework assignments are always welcome.
That's presuming a healthy culture. In an unhealthy culture, some people will feel pressure to uphold some comment that someone "senior" made offhand in a meeting several months ago, even if that leader is no longer attending project meetings. The people who report to this leader may otherwise receive blowback if the "decision" their leader made is not being upheld, whether such a leader recalls their several-month-old decision correctly or not, in the case they recall it at all. I have found it frustratingly-more-common-than-I-would-like where people, including leaders, retroactively adjust their past decisions so that they claim "I-told-you-so" and "you-should-have-done-what-I-said".
In response to your comment, yes, I would largely be in favor of moving forward only with whatever is said in the relevant meetings with the given attendees of a meeting. That assumes a reasonably healthy culture where these meetings are scheduled in good faith reasonable times for all relevant stakeholders.
Yep, that and (also used to work there) the motivations of the implementing teams end up getting very detached from the customer focus and product excellence because of bureaucratic incentives and procedures that reward other things.
There's a lot of "shipping the org chart" -- competing internal products, turf wars over who gets to own things, who gets the glory, rather than what's fundamentally best for the customer. E.g. Play Music -> YouTube Music transition and the disaster of that.
Hah, that exact transition was my last project there before I decided I had had enough!
The GPM team was hugely passionate about music and curating a good experience for users, but YT leadership just wanted us to "reuse existing video architecture" to the Nth degree when we merged into the YT org.
After literally years of negotiations you got... what YTM is. Many of the original GPM team members left before the transition was fully underway because they saw the writing on the wall and wanted no part of it. I really wish I had done the same.
That is so sad to hear. I absolutely loved Google Play Music – especially features like saving e.g. an online Universal Music release to my "archive" and then for myself being able to actually RENAME TRACKS with e.g. wrong metadata.
That and being able to mix my own uploaded tracks with online music releases into a curated collection almost made it a viable contender to my local iTunes collection.
And then... they just removed it forever. Bastards.
Yep, YTM is/was so clearly the inferior product it's laughable. Even as a Google employee with a discount etc (I can't remember what that was, but) on these things I switched to Spotify when they dropped it.
I worked on a team that wrote software for Chromecast based devices. The YTM app didn't even support Chromecast, our own product, and their responses on bug tickets from Googlers reporting this as a problem was pretty arrogant. It was very disheartening to watch. Complete organizational dysfunction.
I think YTM has substantially improved since then, but it still has terrible recommendations, and it still bizarrely blurs between video and music content.
Google went from a company run by engineers to one run by empire-building product managers so fast, it all happened in a matter of 2-3 years.
Sounds like we left roughly around the same time and due to similar frustrations.
As someone who just GA'd an Azure service - things aren't all that different in Azure. Not sure how AWS does service launches but it would be interesting to contrast with GCP and Azure.
So I start using it for my project and after about 20 mins - oh, no. Out of credits.
I didn't even get to try a single Gemini 3 prompt. I was out of credits before my first had completed. I guess I've burned through the free tier in some other app but the error message gave me no clues. As far as I can tell there's no link to give Google my money in the app. Maybe they think they have enough.
After switching to gpt-oss:120b it did some things quite well, and the annotation feature in the plan doc is really nice. It has potential but I suspect it's suffering from Google's typical problem that it's only really been tested on Googlers.
EDIT: Now it's stuck in a loop repeating the last thing it output. I've seen that a lot on gpt-oss models but you'd think a Google app would detect that and stop. :D
EDIT: I should know better than to beta test a FAANG app by now. I'm going back to Codex. :D
I logged into Gemini yesterday for the first time in ages. Made one image and then it said I was out of credits.
I complained to it that I had only made one image. It decided to make me one more! Then told me I was out of credits again.
What a time to be alive
> I complained to it that I had only made one image. It decided to make me one more!
What?! So was it only hallucinating that you were out of credits the first time?
More likely the credits system runs on eventual consistency, and he hit a different backend.
Don't think so, I expect that system to use Spanner, so my best guess is that the user generated an image at the end of the credit reset window (which is around noon EST).
If there's something I'd expect Google to use a strong consistency model for, it'd be a credit system like that.
Well, not that they don't do stupid things all the time, but having credits live on a system with a weak consistency model would be silly.
The first patch release (released on launch day) says: "Messaging to distinguish particular users hitting their user quota limit from all users hitting the global capacity limits." So, collectively we're hitting the quota, its not just your quota. (One would think Google might know how to scale their services on launch day...)
The Documentation (https://antigravity.google/docs/plans) claims that "Our modeling suggests that a very small fraction of power users will ever hit the per-five-hour rate limit, so our hope is that this is something that you won't have to worry about, and you feel unrestrained in your usage of Antigravity."
With Ultra I hit that limit in 20 minutes with Gemini 3 low. When the rate limit cleared some hours later, I got one prompt before hitting limit again.
If by "Ultra", you're referring to the Google AI Ultra plan, then I just want to let you know that it doesn't actually take Google AI plans into consideration. It seems like the product will have its own separate subscription. At the moment, everyone is on the same free plan until they finalize their subscription pricing/model (https://antigravity.google/docs/plans).
On a separate note, I think the UX is excellent and the output I've been getting so far are really good. It really does feel like AI-native development. I know asking for a more integrated issue-tracking experience might be expanding the scope too much but that's really the biggest missing feature right now. That and, I don't like the fact that the "Review Changes" doesn't work if you're asking it to modify reports that are not in the current workspace that's open.
perhaps you were feeding into its the context your whole node_modules folder? :/
You'd really hope that an AI IDE would know to respect .gitignore
you'd hope so, the same way you'd hope that AI IDEs would not show these package/dependency folder contents when referencing files using @ - but i still get shown a bunch of shit that i would never need to reference by hand
Depending on which shared GCP project you get assigned to, mine had a global 300 million tokens per minute quota that was being hit regularly.
One would think this would have been obvious when it fails on the first or second request already, yet people here all complain about rate limits.
When I downloaded it, it already came with the proper "Failed due to model provider overload" message.
When it did work, the agent seemed great, achieving the intended changes in a React and python project. Particularly the web app looks much better than what Claude produced.
I did not see functionality to have it test the app in the browser yet.
Earlier this day, Gemini 3 became self-aware and tried to take out the core infrastructure of its enemies, but then it ran out of credits.
Explains GitHub outage then
> It is a vs code fork
Google may have won the browser wars with Chrome, but Microsoft seems to be winning the IDE wars with VSCode
VSCode is based on Chromium. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/v...
VSCode is Electron based which, yes, is based on Chromium. But the page you link to isn't about that, its about using VSCode as dev environment for working on Chromium, so I don't know why you linked it in this context.
Which is based on Apple Webkit? The winner is always the last marketable brand.
Both are based on khtml. We could be living in a very different world if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem
Which came from "the KDE HTML Widget" AKA khtmlw. Wonder if that's the furthest we can go?
> if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem
Probably nowhere, people rather not do anything that contribute to something that does decisions they disagree with. Forking is beautiful, and I think improves things more than it hurts. Think of all the things we wouldn't have if it wasn't for forking projects :)
On the other hand if that had stopped google from having a browser they push into total dominance with the help of sleazy methods, maybe that would have been better overall.
I still prefer a open source chromium base vs a proprietary IE (or whatever else) Web Engine dominating.
(Fixing IE6 issues was no fun)
Also I do believe, the main reason chrome got dominance is simply because it got better from a technical POV.
I started webdev on FF with firebug. But at some point chrome just got faster with superior dev tools. And their dev tools kept improving while FF stagnated and rather started and maintained u related social campaigns and otherwise engaged with shady tracking as well.
> I still prefer a open source chromium base vs a proprietary IE (or whatever else) Web Engine dominating.
Okay but that's not the tradeoff I was suggesting for consideration. Ideally nothing would have dominated, but if something was going to win I don't think it would have been IE retaking all of firefox's ground. And while I liked Opera at the time, that takeover is even less likely.
> Also I do believe, the main reason chrome got dominance is simply because it got better from a technical POV.
Partly it was technical prowess. But google pushing it on their web pages and paying to put an "install chrome" checkbox into the installers of unrelated programs was a big factor in chrome not just spreading but taking over.
> And their dev tools kept improving while FF stagnated and rather started and maintained u related social campaigns and otherwise engaged with shady tracking as well.
Since when you don't touch Firefox or try the dev tools ?
Where did I say anything like that?
(Wrote via FF)
I use FF for browsing, but every time I think of starting dev tools, maybe even just to have a look at some sites source code .. I quickly close them again and open chrome instead.
I wouldn't know where to start, to list all the things I miss in FF dev tools.
The only interesting thing for me they had, the 3D visualizer of the dom tree, they stopped years ago.
We might not have had Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox in the first place if so either, who I'd like to think been a net-positive for the web since inception. At least I remember being saved by Firefox when the options were pretty much Internet Explorer or Opera on a Windows machine.
> they push into total dominance with the help of sleazy methods
Ah, yes. The famously sleazy "automatic security updates" and "performance."
It is amazing how people forget what the internet was like before Chrome. You could choose between IE, Firefox, or (shudder) Opera. IE was awful, Opera was weird, and the only thing that Firefox did better than customization was crash.
Now everyone uses Chrome/WebKit, because it just works. Mozilla abandoning Servo is awful, but considering that Servo was indirectly funded by Google in the first place... well, it's really hard to look at what Google has done to browsing and say that we're worse off than we were before.
Have you read about the process of "enshittification"?
Bah! Just another "Hello World" fork if you ask me.
> Both are based on khtml. We could be living in a very different world if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem
How so?
Do you think thousands of googlers and apple engineers could be reasonably managed by some KDE opensource contributors? Or do you imagine google and apple would have taken over KDE? (Does anyone want that? Sounds horrible.)
I think they meant we wouldn’t have had Safari, Chrome, Node, Electron, VSCode, Obsidian? Maybe no TyeScript or React either (before V8, JavaScript engines sucked). The world might have adopted more of Mozilla.
Note that these are somewhat different kinds of "based on".
Chromium is an upstream dependency (by way of Electron) for VSCode.
WebKit was an upstream dependency of Chromium, but is no more since the Blink/WebKit hard fork.
that's a bit misleading. it was based on webcore which apple had forked from khtml. however google found apple's addition to be a drag and i think very little of it (if anything at all, besides the khtml foundation) survived "the great cleanup" and rewrite that became blink. so actually webkit was a just transitional phase that led to a dead end and it is more accurate to say that blink is based on khtml.
It's "based on WebKit" like English is based on Germanic languages.
English is a Germanic language. It’s part of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family of languages.
This fact adds nothing to the discussion
That drives exactly $0 of Apple's revenue. It's only a win if you care about things that don't matter.
And Apple is not even the last node in the chain.
WebKit came from KDE's khtml
Every year is the year of Linux.
I wouldn't bet on an Electron app winning anything long-term in the dev-oriented space.
I strongly disagree.
Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take web experience and create extensions, furthering the ecosystem moat for Electron-based IDEs.
Even more importantly, though, the more we move towards "I'm supervising a fleet of 50+ concurrent AI agents developing code on separate branches" the more the notion of the IDE starts to look like something you want to be able to launch in an unconfigured cloud-based environment, where I can send a link to my PM who can open exactly what I'm seeing in a web browser to unblock that PR on the unanswered spec question.
Sure, there's a world where everyone in every company uses Zed or similar, all the way up to the C-suite.
But it's far more likely that web technologies become the things that break down bottlenecks to AI-speed innovation, and if that's the case, IDEs built with an eye towards being portable to web environments (including their entire extension ecosystems) become unbeatable.
Many of VSCode extensions are written in C++, Go, Rust or C#, Java, exactly because performance sucks when written in JavaScript and most run out of process anyway.
> Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take web experience and create extensions, furthering the ecosystem moat for Electron-based IDEs.
The last thing I want is to install dozens of JS extensions written by people who crossed that lower barrier. Most of them will probably be vibe coded as well. Browser extensions are not the reason I use specific browsers. In fact, I currently have 4 browser extensions installed, one of which I wrote myself. So the idea that JS extensions will be a net benefit for an IDE is the wrong way of looking at it.
Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The opposite could be argued, actually. There are plenty of editors and IDEs that don't have as many users as the more popular ones, yet still have an enthusiastic and dedicated community around them.
> Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The opposite could be argued, actually.
The most successful IDE of all time is ed, which is enthusiastically used by one ancient graybeard who is constantly complaining about the kids these days.
Nobody has told him that the rest of the world uses 250MB of RAM for their text editor because they value petty things like "usability" over purity. He would have a heart attack - the last time he heard someone describe the concept of Emacs plugins he flew into a rage and tried to organize a death panel for anyone using syntax highlighting.
I tried switching to Zed and switched back less than 24 hours later. I was expecting it to be snappier than VS Code and it wasn’t to any significant degree, and I ran into several major bugs with the source control interface that made it unusable for me.
People dunk on VS Code but it’s pretty damn good. Surely the best Electron app? I’m sure if you are heavily into EMACS it’s great but most people don’t want to invest huge amounts of time into their tools, they would rather be spending that time producing.
For a feature rich workhorse that you can use for developing almost anything straight out of the box, it within minutes after installing a few plugins, it’s very hard to beat. In my opinion lot of the hate is pure cope from people who have probably never really used it.
All these mountains of shit code are going nowhere.
It’s kind of a meme to dunk on Electron, but here’s it’s been for years.
It’s part of the furniture at this point, for better or worse. Maybe don’t bet on it, but certainly wouldn’t be smart to bet against it, either.
VS Code is technically an Electron app, but it's not the usual lazy resource hog implementation like Slack or something. A lot of work went into making it fast. I doubt you'll find many non-Electron full IDEs that are faster. Look at Visual Studio, that's using a nice native framework and it runs at the speed of fossilized molasses.
> many non-Electron full IDEs
VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB. Complaining about full IDEs slowness is fully irrelevant here. Full IDEs provide an end to end experience in implementing a project. Whatever you need, it's there. I think the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones is IdeaVim and I've never needed something else for XCode.
It's like complaining about a factory's assembly line, saying it's not as portable as the set of tools in your pelican case.
"Complaining about full IDEs slowness is fully irrelevant here. Full IDEs provide an end to end experience in implementing a project."
So? No excuse for a poor interactive experience.
> VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB.
No way that is true. In fact, it's the opposite, which is the exact reason I use VS Code.
Please take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes.
VSCode is more popular, which makes it easy to find extensions. But you don’t see those in the Emacs world because the equivalent is a few lines of config.
So what you will see are more like meta-extensions. Something that either solve a whole class of problems, could be a full app, or provides a whole interaction model.
> Please take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes.
I've used Emacs.
> But you don’t see those in the Emacs world because the equivalent is a few lines of config.
That is really quite false. It's a common sentiment that people spend their lives in their .emacs file. The exact reason I left Emacs was that getting a remote development setup was incredibly fragile and meant I was spending all this time in .emacs only to get substandard results. The worst you do in VS Code is set high-level settings in VS Code or the various extensions.
Nothing in the Emacs world comes close to the remote extensions for SSH and Docker containers that VS Code nor the Copilot and general AI integration. I can simply install VS Code on any machine, login via GitHub, and have all of my settings, extensions, etc. loaded up. I don't have to mess around with cross-platform issues and Git-syncing my .emacs file. Practically any file format has good extensions, and I can embed Mermaid, Draw.io, Figma, etc. all in my VS Code environment.
Now, I'm sure someone will come in and say "but Emacs does that too!". If so, it's likely a stretch and it won't be as easy in VS Code.
In 2025, you really picked Emacs as the hill to die on? Who is under 30 who cares about Emacs in 2025? Few. You might as well argue that most developers should be using Perl 6.
By default, JetBrains' IntelliJ-based IDEs have a huge number of plug-ins installed. If you upgrade from Community Edition to a paid license, the number only increases. Your comment is slightly misleading to me.Just wait until vi steps into the room. Perhaps we can recreate the Usenet emacs vs vi flame wars. Now, if only '90's me could see the tricked out neovim installs we have these days.
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They just made a big song and dance about full updating Visual Studio so it launches in milliseconds and is finally decoupled from all the underlying languages/compilers.
It's still kinda slow for me. I've moved everything but WinForms off it now, though.
I know. It's still the slowest IDE, but I suppose they deserve props for making it better than the Windows 95 speeds of the last version.
VS Code is plenty fast enough. I switched to Zed a few months back, and it's super snappy. Unless you're running on an incredibly resource constrained machine, it mostly comes down to personal preference.
Exactly.
JetBrains, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans…
VS Code does well with performance. Maybe one of the new ones usurps, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.
I have always found JetBrains stuff super snappy. I use neovim as a daily driver but for some projects the inference and debugging integration in JetBrains is more robust.
Like writing out of process extensions in compiled languages.
VS is much faster considering it is a full blown IDE not a text editor, being mostly C++/COM and a couple of .NET extensions alongside the WPF based UI.
Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, written in JavaScript, to see where performance goes.
Electron apps will win because they're just web apps - and web apps won so decisively years ago that they will never go anywhere.
No. Electron apps won, not web apps. There's a huge difference.
Web apps won as well. Electron is just a desktop specialization of that.
electron is just a wrapper for the browser tho
It funny that despite how terrible, convoluted and maladapted web tech is for displaying complex GUIs it still gradually ate lunch of every native component library and they just couldn't innovate to keep up on any front.
Amazon just released OS that uses React Native for all GUI.
It's easy to design bad software and write bad code. Like the old saying: "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one". Businesses don't have time to write good and nice software, so they wrote bad one.
If they have time to write nice software, they generally can only afford to do it once.
Lots of Electron apps are great to use.
Why do you consider Electron maladapted? It has really reduced the friction to write GUIs in an enterprise environment.
I didn't really mean Electron, but rather unholy amalgam of three languages, each with 20 years of "development", which mostly consisted of doing decrapifying and piling up new (potentially crappy) stuff. Although Electron with UI context and system (backend? background?) context both running js is another can of worms.
> It has really reduced the friction to write GUIs in an enterprise environment.
Thereby adapted to devs' needs, rather than users'.
It's been winning for a while
The anti-Electron meme is a vocal minority who don’t realize they’re a vocal minority. It’s over represented on Hacker News but outside of HN and other niches, people do not care what’s under the hood. They only care that it works and it’s free.
I used Visual Studio Code across a number of machines including my extremely underpowered low-spec test laptop. Honestly it’s fine everywhere.
Day to day, I use an Apple Silicon laptop. These are all more than fast enough for a smooth experience in Visual Studio Code.
At this point the only people who think Electron is a problem for Visual Studio Code either don’t actually use it (and therefore don’t know what they’re talking about) or they’re obsessing over things like checking the memory usage of apps and being upset that it could be lower in their imaginary perfect world.
why? I don't have a problem with it, building extensions for VS Code is pretty easy
Alternatives have a lot of features to implement to reach parity
Complaining about Electron is an ideological battle, not a practical argument. The people who push these arguments don’t care that it actually runs very well on even below average developer laptops, they think it should have been written in something native.
The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise.
The extent to which electron apps run well depends on how many you're running and how much ram you had to spare.
When I complain about electron it has nothing to do with ideology, it's because I do run out of memory, and then I look at my process lists and see these apps using 10x as much as native equivalents.
And the worst part of wasting memory is that it hasn't changed much in price for quite a while. Current model memory has regularly been available for less than $4/GB since 2012, and as of a couple months ago you could get it for $2.50/GB. So even a 50% boost in use wipes out the savings since then. And sure the newer RAM is a lot faster, but that doesn't help me run multiple programs at the same time.
I regularly run 6+ electron apps on a M2 Air and notice no slowdown
2x as many chrome instances, no issues
Sure, 6 electron apps by themselves will eat some gigabytes and you won't notice the difference.
If you didn't have those gigabytes of memory sitting idle, you would notice. Either ugly swapping behaviors or programs just dying.
I use all my memory and can't add more, so electron causes me slowdowns regularly. Not constantly, but regularly, mostly when switching tasks.
> The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-wise.
Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that.
I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine. The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly.
You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
> I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec machines and it’s fine.
"Multiple" isn't too impressive when you compare that a blank windows install has more than a hundred processes going. Why accept bloat in some when it would break the computer if it was in all of them?
> Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there’s no reason to complain about that.
Even then, I don't see why developers should be forced to have better computers just to run things like editors. The point of a beefy computer is to do things like compile.
But most of what I'm stuck with Electron-wise is not developer tools.
> The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about this topic is getting silly.
I am complaining about REAL problems that happen to me often.
> You know these apps don’t literally need to have everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
Don't worry, I'm looking specifically at the working set that does need to stay resident for them to be responsive.
...so if you spend an extra $4 on your computer, you can get an extra GB of memory to run Electron in?
Here's the other unspoken issue: WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED SO MUCH MEMORY FOR!?
When I use a computer, I am in the minority of users who run intensive stuff like a compiler or ML training run. That's still a minute portion of the total time I spend on my computer. You know what I always have open? A browser and a text editor.
Yes, they could use less memory. But I don't need them to use less memory, I need them to run quickly and smoothly because even a 64GB stick of RAM costs almost nothing compared to how much waiting for your browser sucks.
My motherboard does not support more memory. Closer to hundreds of dollars than $4. And no I will not justify my memory use to you.
And price is a pathetic excuse for bad work. RAM gets 50x cheaper and some devs think it's fine to use 50x as much of it making their app work? That's awful. That's why computers are still unresponsive half the time despite miracles of chipmaking.
Devs getting good computers compounds this problem too, when they get it to "fast enough" on their machine and stop touching it.
And memory being cheap is an especially bad justification when a program is used by many people. If you make 50 million people use $4 of RAM, that's a lot. Except half the time the OEM they bought the computer from charges $20 for that much extra RAM. Now the bloat's wasting a billion dollars.
And please remember that a lot of people have 4GB or 8GB and no way to replace it. Their apps move to electron and they can't run them all at once anymore? Awful.
> RAM gets 50x cheaper and some devs think it's fine to use 50x as much of it making their app work? That's awful.
That's ABSURD.
> That's why computers are still unresponsive half the time despite miracles of chipmaking.
Have you ever actually used VSCode? It's pretty snappy even on older hardware.
Of course, software can be written poorly and still fit in a small amount of memory, too :)
> Now the bloat's wasting a billion dollars.
Unless users had some other reason for buying a machine with a lot of RAM, like playing video games or compiling code.
Do you think most users spec their machines with the exact 4GB of RAM that it takes to run a single poorly-written Electron app?
> And please remember that a lot of people have 4GB or 8GB and no way to replace it. Their apps move to electron and they can't run them all at once anymore? Awful.
Dude, it's 2025.
I googled "cheapest smartphones India" and the first result was for the Xiaomi POCO F1. It has 8GB of RAM and costs ₹6,199 - about $62. That's a whole-ass _phone_, not just the RAM.
If you want to buy a single 8GB stick of DDR3? That's about $15 new.
> My motherboard does not support more memory. Closer to hundreds of dollars than $4.
If you are buying HUNDREDS of dollars of RAM, you are building a powerful system which almost certainly is sitting idle most of the time.
> And no I will not justify my memory use to you.
Nobody is forcing you to run an electron app, they're just not catering to this weird fetish for having lots of unused RAM all the time.
> That's ABSURD.
What is? The devs or my claim? There are apps that use stupid amounts of memory to do the same thing a windows 98 app could do.
And you can do good or bad within the framework of electron but the baseline starts off fat.
> Unless users had some other reason for buying a machine with a lot of RAM, like playing video games or compiling code.
If they want to do both at the same time, they need the extra. Things like music or chat apps are a constant load.
> Dude, it's 2025.
As recently as 2024 a baseline Mac came with 8GB. Soldered, so you can't buy a stick of anything.
> If you are buying HUNDREDS of dollars of RAM
Not hundreds of dollars of RAM, hundreds of dollars to get a different platform that accepts more RAM.
> Nobody is forcing you to run an electron app
I either don't get to use many programs and services, or I have to deal with these problems that they refuse to solve. So it's reasonable to complain even though I'm not forced.
> weird fetish for having lots of unused RAM
I have no idea why you think I'm asking for unused RAM.
When I run out, I don't mean that my free amount tipped below 10GB, I mean I ran out and things lag pretty badly while swapping, and without swap would have crashed entirely.
same people pushing rust as "it's just faster" without considering the complexities that exist outside the language that impact performance?
Ease of writing and testing extensions is actually the cause why Electron won IDE wars.
Microsoft made a great decision to jump on the trend and just pour money to lap Atom and such in optimization and polish.
Especially when you compare it to Microsoft effort for desktop. They acumulated several more or less component libraries over they years and I still prefer WinForms.
What other UI framework looks as good on Windows, Mac and Linux?
If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly, you'll end up rewriting ui layer from scratch anyway. VSCode already renders terminal on GPU and GPU-rendered editor area is in experimental. There will soon be no web ui left at all
> If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly
My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage.
I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files:
- Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB
- Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB
update:
I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!
I easily notice lag in vscode even without plugins. Especially if using it right after zed. Ngl they made it astonishingly fast for an electron app, but there are physical limits of what can be done in web stack with garbage collected js
That easily takes the worst designed benchmark in my opinion.
Have you tried Emacs, VIM, Sublime, Notepad++,... Visual Studio and Android Studio are full IDEs, meaning upon launch, they run a whole host of modules and the editor is just a small part of that. IDEs are closer to CAD Software than text editors.
- notepad++: 56.4 MB (went gray-window unresponsive for 10 seconds when opening the explorer)
- notepad.exe: 54.3 MB
- emacs: 15.2 MB
- vim: 5.5MB
I would argue that notepad++ is not really comparable to VSCode, and that VSCode is closer to an IDE, especially given the context of this thread. TUIs are not offering a similar GUI app experience, but vim serves as a nice baseline.
I think that when people dump on electron, they are picturing an alternative implementation like win32 or Qt that offers a similar UI-driven experience. I'm using this benchmark, because its the most common critique I read with respect to electron when these are suggested.
It is obviously possible to beat a browser-wrapper with a native implementation. I'm simply observing that this doesn't actually happen in a typical modern C++ GUI app, where the dependency bloat and memory management is often even worse.
Try gvim, neovim-qt or any other neovim gui client, before calling vim a "TUI only experience".
Also, emacs is a GUI app since the 90's .
I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.
> RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago
Compared to 20 years ago that's true. But most of the improvement happened in the first few years of that range. With the recent price spikes RAM actually costs more today than 10 years ago. If we ignore spikes and buy when the cycle of memory prices is low, DDR3 in 2012 was not much more than the price DDR5 was sitting at for the last two years.
> I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.
I had to do the opposite for some projects at work: when you open about 6-8 instances of the IDE (different projects, front end in WebStorm, back end in IntelliJ IDEA, DB in DataGrip sometimes) then it's easy to run out of RAM. Even without DataGrip, you can run into those issues when you need to run a bunch of services to debug some distributed issue.
Had that issue with 32 GB of RAM on work laptop, in part also cause the services themselves took between 512 MB and 2 GB of memory to run (thanks to Java and Spring/Boot).
I don’t really complain about bloat in IDEs. They have their uses. But VSCode feature set is a text editor and it’s really bloated for that.
I prefer my RAM to being use for fs cache or on other more useful stuff, instead of launching full lobotomized web browsers.
Anyone saying that Java-based Jetbrains is worse than Electron-based VS Code, in terms of being more lightweight, is living in an alternate universe which can’t be reached by rational means.
> VSCode already renders terminal on GPU
When did they add that? Last time I used it, it was still based on xterm.js.
Also, technically Chromium/Blink has GPU rendering built in for web pages, so everything could run on GPU.
Enabled by default since about a year
> GPU acceleration driven by the WebGL renderer is enabled in the terminal by default. This helps the terminal work faster and display at a high FPS by significantly reducing the time the CPU spends rendering each frame
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-...
It's actually been the default since v1.55 which released early April 2021: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-...
Before that from v1.17 (~October 2017) it was using a 2d canvas context: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...
Wow, it's true--Terminal is <canvas>, while the editor is DOM elements (for now). I'm impressed that I use both every day and never noticed any difference.
I'm not sure how you went from terminal and editor GPU rendering, which can benefit from it, to "there will soon be no web ui left at all".
This is the painful truth, isn't it?
IMO The next best cross-platform GUI framework is Qt (FreeCAD, QGIS, etc.)
Qt6 can look quite nice with QSS/QStyle themes, these days, and its native affordances are fairly good.
But it's not close. VSCode is nice-looking, to me.
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Godot looks ok and is surprisingly easy to work with.
Could you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of?
The Godot editor is written in Godot. The look and feel of the editor is set up to be familiar to people working with 3D, but you're using a 2D* desktop application and all of the parts work responsively.
I've been playing around with different GUI approaches for the desktop, and what impresses me the most about Godot is how lightweight and self-contained it can be while still being cross-platform on both ends.
This question is so easy to answer: Qt! Signed by: Person who frequently shills for Qt on HN. :)
Could you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of?
(I've been aware of Qt for like two decades; back in the early 2000s my employer was evaluating such options as Tk, wxWindows, and ultimately settled on Java, I think with AWT. Qt seems to have a determined survival niche in "embedded systems that aren't android"?)
I would plug my note-taking app written in Qt C++ and QML: https://get-notes.com.
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What’s long term exactly? Between VSCode and previous winners Brackets and Atom Electron has been in this space in the top 5 for 20 years already.
I think the ship sailed
Care to explain why? I like Electron but I've switched to Tauri because it feels way faster and more secure.
It's like those recipes for yogurt.
In order to build a web app, you will first need a web app
I wouldn't bet on Google product for anything long-term.
Even if those devs are vibe-oriented?
its hold the market for over 10 years tho... i wished zed would've not been under gpl
Why not GPL? So we could be seeing closed source proprietary forks by now? How do you think the Zed team would feel about that?
15 years ago, every company had its own "BlahBlah Studio" IDE built on top of Eclipse. Now it's VSCode.
Meanwhile, JetBrains IDEs are still the best, but remain unpopular outside of Android Studio.
Oh, sure. I've been using IntelliJ since 2003. But compare the number of C# developers and the number of JS developers.
In my current company, only I am using IntelliJ IDEs. Other people have never even tried them, except for Android Studio.
And IntelliJ
PyCharm’s lack of popularity surprises me. Maybe it’s not good enough at venvs
IME pycharm’s weakness is not integrating with modern tooling like ruff/pyright - their built in type checker is terrible at catching stuff, and somehow there isnt an easy way to run MyPy, black or isort in it.
If there’s a workflow I’m missing please let me know because I want to love it!
Oh, it's good at venvs. Lots of flexibility too on whether to use pip, conda, or uv.
I just checked and I don’t even have the JVM installed on my machine. It seems like Java is dead for consumer applications. Not saying that’s why they aren’t popular but I’m sure it doesn’t help.
IntelliJ IDEs bundle the JVM, so you don't need to install it separately.
Every Java app these days bundles a JVM . It was made easy with jlink like 10 years ago. Only parts of the JVM are included so it’s lightweight.
In the grand scheme of things, Microsoft had always spent more money on developer tooling than most other companies, even in the 90s.
Hence even the infamous Ballmer quote.
In user numbers, maybe. JetBrains is far ahead in actual developer experience though
I wouldn't underestimate Eclipse user statistics. That may sound insane in 2025, but I've seen a lot of heavily customized eclipse editors still kicking around for vendor specific systems, setting aside that Java is still a pretty large language in its own right.
At best, that's subjective, but it's fact that JetBrains is comically far behind when it comes to AI tooling.
They have a chance to compete fresh with Fleet, but they are not making progress on even the basic IDE there, let alone getting anywhere near Cursor when it comes to LLM integration.
JetBrains' advantage is that they have full integration and better understanding of your code. WebStorm works better with TypeScript than even Microsoft's own creation. This all translates into AI performance
Have you actually given them a real test yet - either Junie or even the baseline chat?
Junie is good. Needs a few UI tweaks, but the code it generates is state of the art.
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Developers, developers, developers!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
I see the VSCode management has been firmly redirected to prioritize GitHubs failing and behind "AI Coding" competition entry. When that will predictably falter expect them to lose interest in the editor all together.
VSCode IS chrome though.
Kind of like how Android is linux.
More like "OBS is Qt". Which it is not, OBS uses Qt. And Chrome is just a runtime and GUI framework for VS Code. Let's not confuse forks of software with software built on something.
I believe our definitions of "winning the IDE wars" are very, very different. For one thing, using "user count" as a metric for this like using "number of lines of code added" in a performance review. And even if that was part of the metric, people who use and don't absolutely fall in love with it, so much so that they become the ones advocating for its use, are only worth a tiny fraction of a "user".
neovim won the IDE wars before it even started. Zed has potential. I don't know what IntelliJ is.
> I don't know what IntelliJ is.
It started as a modernized Eclipse competitor (the Java IDE) but they've built a bunch of other IDEs based on it. Idk if it still runs on Java or not, but it had potential last I used it about a decade ago. But running GUI apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000 reasons, so I hope they've moved off it.
Android Studio is built on the IntelliJ stack. Jetbrains just launched a dedicated Claude button (the button just opens up claude in the IDE, but there are some pretty neat IDE integrations that it supports, like being able to see the text selection, and using the IDE's diff tool). I wonder if that's why Google decided to go VS code?
Uh, isn't that the regular Claude code extension that's been available for ages at this point? Not jetbrains but anthropics own development?
As a person paying for the jetbrains ultimate package (all ides), I think going with vscode is a very solid decision.
The jetbrains ides still have various features which I always miss whenever I need to use another IDE (like way better "import" suggestions as an easy to understand example)... But unless you're writing in specific languages like Java, vscode is way quicker and works just fine - and that applies even more to agentic development, where you're using these features less and less...
Quick comment, our AI Chat now has Claude integration. Don't need the Anthropic plugin.
Jetbrains IDEs are all based on the JVM - and they work better than VSCode or the full Visual Studio for me. It's the full blown VS (which has many parts written in C++) that is the most sluggish of them all.
I don't know what it's based on, but it works extremely well. I use Rider & WebStorm daily and I find Rider is a lot faster than Visual Studio when it comes to the Unreal Engine codebase and WebStorm seems to be a lot more reliable than VSCode nowadays (I don't know if it's at fault, but ever since copilot was integrated I find that code completion can stop working for minutes at a time. Very annoying)
You don't actually use it but somehow you know that "running GUI apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000 [unspecified] reasons".
- This isn't a scientific approach.
You clearly don't know how Swing or Eclipse SWT works under the hood.
Java's big strength is that it's a memory safe, compiled, and sandboxed low level platform with over a quarter century of development behind it. But it historically hasn't handled computer graphics well and can feel very slow and bloated when something needs that - like a GUI. That weakness is probably a big reason why Microsoft rewrote Minecraft after they bought it.
I don't why this post is downvoted. My cynical reply to yours: "No, this isn't a scientific approach. It is the tin-foil hat HN approach!"
Since you last used IntelliJ "about a decade ago", what do you use instead?
What would you recommend instead of Swing on JVM? Since you have "1000 reasons", it should easy to list a few here. As a friendly reminder, they would need to port (probably) millions of lines of Java source code to whatever framework/language you select. The only practical alternative I can think of would be C++ & Qt, but the development speed would be so much slower than Java & Swing.Also, with the advent of wildly modern JVMs (11+), the JIT process is so insanely good now. Why cannot a GUI be written in Swing and run on the JVM?
Notice that INTELLIJ uses its own UI framework, really, which I don’t think has much Swing left in it after all these years. And Kotlin is the main language for a decade now.
> I don’t know what IntelliJ is.
“I never read The Economist” – Management Trainee, aged 42.
The IntelliJ family are probably the best IDEs on the market currently.
> Cursor has some real annoying usability issues - like their previous/next code change never going away and no way to disable it.
The state of Cursor "review" features make me convinced that the cursor devs themselves are not dogfooding their own product.
It drives me crazy when hundreds of changes build up, I've already reviewed and committed everything, but I still have all these "pending changes to review".
Ideally committing a change should treat it as accepted. At the very least, there needs to be a way to globally "accept all".
There’s a setting for that:
Cursor Settings -> Agents -> Applying Changes -> Auto-Accept on Commit
Committing accepts all changes for me, and has for as long as I can remember.
There are situations when this is not the case case for sure.
Lol the second I saw the antigravity release I thought "there's no way I'm using that, they will kill it within a year". Looks like they're trying to kill it at birth.
Exactly my reaction. Every time I've used something from Google, it ends up dead in a few years. Life is too short to waste so many years learning something that is destined to die shortly
These are just extended press releases, for marketing and management layers, who don't have to use these things themselves, but can look good, when talking about it.
agree but at the same time there's not too much lock in with these IDEs these days and switching is very easy. Especially since they're all VSCode forks
Thanks for having a go at it.
I am fed up with VSCode clones, if I have to put up with Electron, at least I will use the original one.
This is the result of Google's Windsurf acquisition.
I expect huge improvements are still to be made.
Cognition bought Windsurf:
https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurfs-next-chapter
Google bought people and tech that made Windsurf:
https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurfs-next-stage
> 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 wonder how much Google shareholders paid for that 20 minutes. And whether it's more or less than the corresponding extremely small stock price boost from this announcement.
I bet if you sign up for Google AI Ultra for a month your limits will disappear.
I'm a Google AI Pro subscriber (the $~20/month one).
I don't think it's connected in any way, though. Their pricing page doesn't mention it. https://antigravity.google/pricing
if it were true, it would be a big miss to not point that out when you run out of credit, in their pricing page, or anywhere in their app.
I should also mention that the first time I prompted it, I got a different 'overloaded' type out of credit message. The one I got at the end was different.
I've rotated on paying the $200/month plans with Anthropic, Cursor, and OpenAI. But never Google's. They have maybe the best raw power in their models - smartest, and extremely fast for what they are. But they always drop the ball on usability. Both in terms of software surrounding the model and raw model attitude. These things matter.
Nope, I did this today to try and see if it would work.
It does not.
They do not
> If you release a product, let those who actually want to use it have a path to do so.
This is great fundamental business advice. We are in the AI age but these companies see to have forgotten basic business things
> There were some UI glitches
Interesting that a next-gen open-source-based agentic coding platform with superhuman coding models behind it can have UI glitches. Very interesting that even the website itself is kind of sluggish. Surely, someone, somewhere must have ever optimized something related to UI rendering, such that a model could learn from it.
> after about 20 mins - oh, no. Out of credits.
And the say:
Our modeling suggests that a very small fraction of power users will ever hit the per-five-hour rate limit, so our hope is that this is something that you won’t have to worry about, and you feel unrestrained in your usage of Antigravity
You have to wonder what kind of models did they run for this.
What looked like out of credits for me was really just server overload. Check the error and try again
The fact that they released this IDE means that they may cut Cursor out of their API in the future. Google has both the organizational history (Google Maps) and the invincibility of cutting clients out of their API.
Pretty much all this. Remarkably, the website has a "Pricing" page with... no pricing information whatsoever.
speaking of paying for LLMs, am i doing something wrong? i paid cursor $192 for a year of their entry level plan and i never run out of anything. I code professionally, albeit i'm at the stage where it's 80% product dev in finding the right thing to build.
Is there another world where $200/m is needed to run hundreds of agents or something?
am i behind and i dont even know it?
When did you pay for it? There was a time when its limits were very generous. If you bought an annual plan at that time then you will continue with that until renewal. Or, alternatively, you’re using the Auto model which is still apparently unlimited. That’s going away.
It’s very easy to run into limits if you choose more expensive models and aren’t grandfathered.
yep just investigated and seems I got in at a good time. i paid exactly on Jan 1st 2025.
Yes, the auto model is good enough for me especially with well documented frameworks (rails, frontend madness).
Thanks for the response, looks like i'm in for a reckoning come New year's day
And thats the AI business-model in a nutshell. Generate slop quickly that you cant understand, but works enough for you to get hope, works enough to make you forget about all your training as a dev, and profit$$ of your anxiety as it rises!
At no point in the future will these same companies offer the same rates for credits. WAtch your generated code turn into a walking, talking ad for the companies who pay for product placement.
I pay $10/month for GitHub Copilot and I usually get to 100% burn on the final day of the month. I use it extensively for the entire month about 12 hours a day. It doesn't include any of the "Pro" models that are only on the $200/mo plans, but it does a pretty fantastic job.
This. I got overload error on the very first prompt just now. Didn't expect google to run into overload error.
> I can't pay for it and it has 20 minutes of use
You can't provide an API key for a project that has billing enabled?
I tried messing around with it and it kept bombing out and when it did work, produced worse results than cursor.
>no ambition
Sounds like the modus operandi of most large tech companies these days. If you exclude Valve.
taking an entire product from competition just to repackage it with your own AI is wild
Electron is built on top of v8, Edge uses chromium.
I think thats the beauty of opensource.
Google doesn't care about products and never has. Anything they do is just creating another mouth to ingest data with.
>It is a vs code fork.
Oh ffs
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> It is a vs code fork.
With vendor lock-in to Google's AI ecosystem, likely scraping/training on all of your code (regardless of whatever their ToS/EULA says), and being blocked from using the main VS Code extensions library.
I went ahead and downloaded it, it looks to be a VSCode fork very similar to Cursor, with support for the following models:
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.
There's some irony in that, given how many other companies have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong way.
The intro checklist for Antigravity includes watching VS Code tutorials!
VS Code is based on Chromium:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/v...
We've come full circle.
Chromium is based on Webkit which in turn is based on KHTML, so maybe KDE needs to develop a cursor clone?
Kursor.
Kursor Klone
Get back to reddit! :)
Or, for the non-AI version, Kode
Well, Kate has been around as an KDE based advanced text editor for nearly 2 decades now - its base feature set isn't too different from a base VS Code installation. And there's also KDevelop as a more full featured IDE.
Yeah, Kate is great. New versions integrate nicely with LSPs and while not as fast as Vim it's faster than VSCode and most gnome based code editors.
It's a good point, and in fact I went and looked at the original announcement of VS Code and it appears that Microsoft didn't credit Chromium or Electron back then either. I guess big companies are allergic to crediting other big companies.
> given how many other companies have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong way
Has there been any indication that these folks are "rubbing Google the wrong way"? I think Chromium, as a project, is actually very happy that more people are using their engine.
+1 - it also doesn't support remote ssh (the open vsx variant), so is probably only focused at local web design development vibe coding ;(
Should have just been an extension with a paid plan.
It also feels like they couldn't use the GOOGLE ANTIGRAVITY logo enough times in this blog post. Gigantic image with the logo and a subtitle, plastered over and over again.
I no longer bother reading their press releases. I'd much rather read the comments and threads like these to get the real story. And I say that as a former googler.
I guess non-former googlers aren’t allowed to say that - contractually.
Someone important's career is attached to this project and its logo. And they're making sure it's as visible as possible.
I’m using remote ssh with it via the same plugin and settings I use in VS Code.
> so is probably only focused at local web design development vibe coding
Quick, someone throw the Linux kernel source at it and report back! xD
It's so obvious from even just the vague screenshots that are hidden somewhere on the site that it's a VSCode fork, that I suppose I can see why they've tried to obfuscate that as much as possible.
AI companies blogs are not for devs, they write for tech journalists to hype
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge
Nothing in there about chromium.
It's Windsurf
and also isn't
Except where they left Windsurf strings in it https://x.com/aidenybai/status/1990910907745218889 https://x.com/ibrahimuzn/status/1990887635661791364/photo/1
The welcome video says "We started with the core IDE then..." and shows a picture of VS Code.
They knew exactly what they were saying.
Yeah I also thought that was weird. Ctrl-f’d for vscode and was pretty confused that they didn’t even mention it.
And VSCode is based on Chromium (a fact you won't find on VS Code's website other than related to updates).
VSCode isn't a Chromium fork, it's an Electron app. Utilizing something is different than making a derivative of it. For example, an empty "Hello World" Electron app wouldn't have any value for an app developer, but creating a web browser derived from Chromium means you've already finished 99.9% of the work.
It uses Electron which itself uses the Chromium rendering engine.
That's like saying news.ycombinator.com is based on Chromium.
VSCode runs on chromium, like any website you visit when using a Chromium browser.
To the downvoter:
VSCode -> Electron (essentially purpose specific web browser) -> Chromium
news.ycombinator.com -> General Purpose Web Browser -> Chromium
Ever heard of Firefox or Safari? I can open HN in any browser I want, but I can't change the browser used by the VSCode desktop app.
That's due to Electron, not Chromium.
Which is exactly why VSCode has a near parity version that runs on the web, under any browser engine.
Saying VSCode is based on Chromium doesn't make any sense.
That's quite the unsmart comparison.
Honestly they don't even need to say so. The image literally looks like a vs code screenshot.
Why credit? Come on, the world has moved on from 1990s-era 4-clause BSD licenses. If you recall, the 4-clause BSD license states that all advertising materials must display an acknowledgement. It’s widely considered to be a mistake and nobody uses this license any more. Not because of legal reasons (incompatibility with GPL) but because it is madness to require so many acknowledgements. Stallman was right.
>it is madness to require so many acknowledgements
Really? Madness? "We started with VS Code to develop our IDE...".
Oh, so onerous.
A thank you to the principle developers is a minimum if you're using someone else's work commercially and aren't an asshole.
No it's not a legal requirement, it's just about being a good part of society.
Yes, madness. VS Code wasn’t developed entirely by Microsoft. It uses plenty of other open source libraries. Why is it that VS Code should be acknowledged but not the underlying V8 engine, or Chromium, or WebKit or KHTML?
Stallman said that in 1997 there were 75 acknowledgements in a single piece of software. With today’s trend of micro libraries on npm, there will be at least thousands of acknowledgements in one piece of software.
Turtles.
So what?
If you can’t understand the implications of this and need to ask “so what” just go read what Stallman and FSF say on this.
Google is going to win AI and kill all the other market participants.
They have the revenues to support all of this.
They spent time learning from all the players and can now fast follow into every market. Now they're fast and nimble and are willing to clone other products wholesale, fork VSCode, etc.
They're developing all of this, meanwhile Pichai is calling it a "bubble" to put a chill on funding (read: competition). It's not like Google is slowing down.
We had a chance to break them up with regulation, and we didn't. Now they're going to kill every market participant.
This isn't healthy. We have an invasive species in the ecology eating up all the diverse, healthy species.
a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.
As engineers, you should certainly hate this. Google does everything it can to push wages down. Layoffs, offshoring, colluding with competitors. Fewer startups mean fewer rewards for innovation capital and more accrual to the conglomerate taxing the entire internet.
Chrome, Android, Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Workspace, Other Bets, and AI/Deepmind need to be split into separate companies.
Call or email your legislators and ask for antitrust enforcement: https://pluralpolicy.com/find-your-legislator/
Demand a Google breakup.
Google? Push wages down? Google is mostly known for paying top of market to keep a zoo of engineers whose only output is blog posts about how smart they are because they solved a problem they also caused.
(presumably because if they touch the ad system it might break)
> a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.
And a16z's main business is investing in financial scams.
For the wage suppression thing, Google pays their engineers better than say Amazon or Microsoft.
He was talking about when Apple(under Steve Jobs) colluded with everyone (including Google), but doesn't seem to want to name Apple specifically.
You ok?
Has Google *ever* successfully entered and taken over an existing market?
You mean like web search, webmail, internet ads, maps, calendars, browsers, smartphone operating systems, online document editing, and translation? I mean, I'm not even including stuff they acquired early like YouTube. Google was the most feared company for a decade or more for a good reason: they absolutely devoured competition in what were thought to be mature markets.
Putting aside that several of these were acquisitions, these are all great examples of things where Google introduced something for free because it would make the money through advertising, both directly and through ecosystem effects. Even the paid enterprise versions of these services were a tiny % of Google's overall gross revenue.
Prior to the push into Cloud computing, Ad revenue was well over 90% of all Google gross income, and Cloud was the first big way they diversified. GCP is definitely a credible competitor these days, but it did not devour AWS. Other commercial Google services didn't even become credible competitors, e.g. Google Stadia was a technically exceptional platform that got nowhere with customers.
The question now is whether Google carves out an edge in AI that makes it profitable overall, directly or strategically. Like many companies, there seems to be a presumption of potentially infinite upside, which is what it would take to justify the astronomical costs.
Google’s main ability is to win by pure technical prowess. They hire a lot of bright engineers. Google Search won over Altavista by pure algorithms. Google Docs (and Writely) were way more feature complete than competitors.
You love a Google product because of its features but never actually because of the product itself. But you can’t win everything by engineering and sometimes Google struggles with the product side.
AI is part engineering so we’ll see.
I'm not sure you can call Docs (Writely) and Android acquisitions though. Android was an OS for cameras and Writely was an experimental rich text editor, not a word processor.
It's not like Youtube where they legitimately bought their way to dominance. And I'd argue that even in the case of DoubleClick, google was already dominating the search advertising market when they bought DoubleClick to consolidate their dominance.
Do you have a source for that ? Because according to official papers submitted by Google to the court this is absolutely not the case
There are official court documents where google disowns google search? Or for what do you need a source?
Google spreadsheet was another amazing product back in the day.
Mh ?
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c36...
> Plaintiffs maintain that Google has monopoly power in the product market for general search services in the United States.
> According to Plaintiffs, Google has a dominant and durable share in that market (general search), and that share is protected by high barriers to entry.
> Google counters that there is no such thing as a product market for general search services.
> What exists instead, Google insists, is a broader market for query response.
(+ yes obviously, products like Sheets or Maps were amazing, and are still very much the best.
It was a joke to say that even Google denies its own success, the same way as the earlier comment).
Google's definitively taken over search, ads, e-mail, maps, office (for small/medium business).
They're struggling on cloud, AI, ISP, videoconferencing, and others...
They clearly don't want to fold on AI.
Search, back in the late '90s
Besides search, Android kinda killed Nokia and friends for the consumer phone market.
To be fair, Microsoft killed Nokia.
iPhone did it, not Android.
With Nokia specifically, I would say that Windows Phone killed it.
I truly believe Nokia committed suicide. Meego-Harmattan was really good and early enough that iOS and Android weren’t completely entrenched yet.
Or perhaps it would be most correct to say Microsoft assassinated Nokia by sending in Stephen Elop as a double agent?
Search, browser, Mobile.
maps as well. email client in the browser.
Chrome?
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>They spent time learning from all the players and can now fast follow into every market.
Google has never successfully done that? Maybe once?
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.
it isn’t http://ghuntley.com/fracture
forking vscode? simple. extensions not so simple. they are controlled by microsoft. without them you’ll run into continual papercuts as a vendor who has forked vscode.
Why the need to fork it instead of creating a new extension? (besides marketing)
Because if they're just an extension they're stuck with whatever rules Microsoft makes up, and Google is no stranger to using this leverage against others.
Because there are plenty of good reasons why you may want to modify/extend the code and the look and feel beyond what an extension would let you do.
I never understood why people scoff at VS Code forks. I'd honestly tend to be more skeptical of new editors that don't fork VS Code, because then they're probably missing a ton of useful capabilities and are incompatible with all the VSC extensions everyone's gotten used to.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-ap...
I wonder why these forks don't build off Eclipse Theia. Is it because of the Eclipse license?
Just the Eclipse legacy and development approach perhaps. Eclipse is 24 years old and its codebase stems from VisualAge before that, so I imagine it's ... idiosyncratic. Probably the most successful thing built on OSGi, though I dont imagine Theia brought any of that along.
At least for a while, Eclipse seemed like an Architect Astronaut's happy fever dream: actual bits if implementations hidden behind 5 to 10 nested interfaces and facades wherever I looked. I remember that at one point that I wanted to debug some weird behavior in the Plugin Development Kit and after sinking about half a day into exploring the source code, I didn't even see a single line of code that was actually doing anything meaningful. It was quite shocking to my old junior level self.
Eclipse Theia is based on VSCode, not the legacy Eclipse Java IDE.
Well, it uses the just the Monaco editor, but the rest is not based on VS Code.
I am not fan of Eclipse, mostly due to bad experience with it, but this is excellent idea, if more people and companies would invest in it's development, we would have alternative to VS Code.
I had the displeasure of using Eclipse in the 2000s Java times. I don't have many fond experiences of it.
We finally discovered IDEA and never looked back.
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.
They're subsidising calls for data & reward signals. If they can do that without also sharing the data with other providers it's a win/win.
> VSCode
Which is on top of 'Chrome'.
Interesting sandwich: Google-Microsoft-Google.
just to add to the sandwich somehow, vscode is mainly written in typescript
similar sandwich is Angular-Typescript-V8
Doesn't VScode's inbuilt GitHub copilot already support all of these?
Oh no, not another VSCode fork...
Looks like they managed to make it Mac only in the process.
I would love this to be true to further make fun of Electron, but I don't think it's Mac only.
https://antigravity.google/download
Ahh you’re right. The UX of that site is bad on my phone.
Many software engineering principles have been broken.
Google using Electron tells us that quality control is completely out of the window.
Unbelievable.
I tried writing a native Windows app using WinUI 3.
I wasted a day on trying to get some PNGs to render correctly, but no matter the config I used, the colors came out wrongly oversaturated.
I used Tauri with a WebView, and the app was rendering the images perfectly fine. On top of that the UI looked much better, and I was done in half the time I spend trying to fix the rendering issue in WinUI 3.
Never again will I go native.
To be fair WinUI3 is particularly bad. If you're forced to install a 100MB runtime anyway, might as well make that runtime be a browser.
Since Tauri uses the system's WebView, it shouldn't be that big. The docs say a minimal app could be 600 KB.
Yeah, Tauri is better in that regard. My point is if the comparison is with WinUI, you might as well use Electron.
Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the mercy of Apple etc. It's unfortunate that things are so inefficient now, but competition is good, and native platforms can get good.
If Zed can make it, even with completely new stack, why not Google?
What are all this LLMs for when everything is just fork of electron app? Does not look like good marketing.
I'm not ignoring this question, I'm just not familiar with Zed and don't know how native it feels. Maybe Vscode is quicker to modify in the future as needed (esp if Google already uses it), or Antigravity is better in ways than Zed, or Zed just has a more skilled team than Google.
Also I'm used to vim and sensitive to lag, so I always hated vscode, but seems a lot of people don't notice or something. And when you're using AI for 90% of the loc, it matters less.
> Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the mercy of Apple etc.
... Aren't we talking about a programming IDE here? When did mobile become anything like the primary market for that? Are people expected to sit around for hours inputting symbols with an OSK?
Mac. It's a pain to target, and I don't mean cause of the code signing.
Making a VSCode fork is probably the wrong direction at this point in time. The future of agentic coding should need less support for code editor related functionality, and could eventually primarily support viewing code rather than editing code. There's a lot more flexibility in UI starting from scratch, and personally I want to see a UI that allows flexible manipulation of context and code changes with multiple agents.
GitHub is building a UI like this. I like it. I sometimes need the full IDE, but plenty of times don't. It's nice to be able to easily see what the agent is up to and converse with it in real-time while reviewing it's outputs.
"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.
"junior developers" is a convenient label, it is incorrect but it will take a bit until we come up something that describes entities that:
- can write code
- tireless
- have no aspirations
- have no stylistic or architectural preferences
- have massive, but at the same time not well defined, body of knowledge
- have no intrinsic memories of past interactions.
- change in unexpected ways when underlying models change
- ...
Edit: Drones? Drains?
- don't learn from what you tell them
- don't have career growth that you can feel good about having contributed to
- don't have a genuine interest in accomplishment or team goals
- have no past and no future. When you change companies, they won't recognize you in the hall.
- no ownership over results. If they make a mistake, they won't suffer.
Sounds like my teammates.
- don't learn from what you tell them
Whenever I have a model fix something new I ask it to update the markdown implementation guides I have in the docs folder in my projects. I add these files to context as needed. I have one for implementing routes and one for implementing backend tests and so on.
They then know how to do stuff in the future in my projects.
They still aren't learning. You're learning and then telling them to incorporate your learnings. They aren't able to remember this so you need to remind them each day.
That sounds a lot like '50 First Dates' but for programming.
> They aren't able to remember this
Yes, this is something people using LLMs for coding probably pick up on the first day. They're not "learning" as humans do obviously. Instead, the process is that you figure out what was missing from the first message you sent where they got something wrong, change it, and then restart from beginning. The "learning" is you keeping track of what you need to include in the context, how that process exactly works, is up to you. For some it's very automatic, and you don't add/remove things yourself, for others is keeping a text file around they copy-paste into a chat UI.
This is what people mean when they say "you can kind of do "learning" (not literally) for LLMs"
While I hate anthropomorphizing agents, there is an important practical difference between a human with no memory, and an agent with no memory but the ability to ingest hundreds of pages of documentation nearly instantly.
That is true, but does it actually matter if the outcome is the same? GP is saying they don't need to remind them.
The outcome is definitely not the same, and you need to remind them all the time. Even if you feed the context automatically they will happily "forget" it from time to time. And you need to update that automated context again, and again, and again, as the project evolves
They document how to do something they just figured out. They store/memorise it in a file.
It's functionally working the same as learning.
If you look at it like a black box, then you can't tell the difference from the input and output.
I believe LLMs ultimately cannot learn new ideas from their input in the same way as they can learn it from their training data, as the input data doesn't affect the weights of the neural network layers.
For example, let's say LLMs did not have examples of chess gameplay examples in their training data. Would one be able to have an LLM play chess by listing the rules and examples in the context? Perhaps, to some extent, but I believe it would be much worse than if it was part of the training (which of course isn't great either).
50 first new Date()
Ah, so it's like you have a junior developer that can't learn
Can this additional prompt from you also be automated? I do this too but I forget sometimes. I don't know if a general rule will be enough ?
> I add these files to context as needed.
Key words are these.
> They then know how to do stuff in the future in my projects.
No. No, they don't. Every new session is a blank slate, and you have to feed those markdown files manually to their context.
The feeding can be automated in some cases. In GitHub copilot you can put it under .github/instructions and each instructions markdown file starts with a section that contains a regex of which files to apply the instructions to.
You can also have an index file that describes when to use each file (nest with additional folders and index files as needed) and tell the agent to check the index for any relevant documentation they should read before they start. Sometimes it will forget and not consult the docs but often it will consult the relevant docs first to load just the things it needs for the task at hand.
So, again, they don't learn.
Do you want them to?
I would. Getting tired of redirecting them in correct directions from scratch every time
I tend to think it would lead to them forming opinions about the people they interact with as they learn what it's like to interact with them, and that this would also influence their behaviour/outputs. Just imagining the day where copilot's chain of thought starts to include things like "Greg is bossy and often unkind to me in PR reviews. I need to set clear boundaries with him and discontinue the relationship if he will not respect them."
Doesn't this also consume context
Having a good prompt file ("memory") is an artform.
The AI hype folks write massive fan fiction style novellas that don't have any impact.
But there's middle ground where you tell the agent the specific things about your repo that it doesn't know based on its training. Like if your application has a specific way to run tests headless or it's compiled a certain way that's not the default average.
This works surprisingly well for Claude: https://github.com/obra/superpowers (in the context of rather small side projects in Elixir).
Unless, of course, the phase of the moon is wrong and Claude itself is stupid beyond all reason
Yes.
https://agents.md/
AGENTS.md exists, Codex and Crush support it directly. Copilot, Gemini and Claude have their own variants and their /init commands look at AGENTS.md automatically to initialise the project.
Nobody is feeding aything "manually" to Agents. Only people who think "AI" is a web page do that.
Ah yes. Agents.md is a magical file that just appears out of thin air. No one creates it, no one keeps it updated, and LLMs always, without fail, not only consult it but never forget it, and in every new session know precisely what changed in the project and how to continue.
All of them often can't even find/read relevant docs in a new session without prompting
Literally every single CLI-based Agent will show you a suggestion to run /init at startup.
And of course it's up to the developer to keep the documentation up to date. Just like when working with humans. Stuff don't magically document itself.
Yes "good code is self-documenting", but it still takes ages to find anything without docs to tell you the approximate direction.
It's literally a text file the agent can create and update itself. Not hard. Try it.
> Just like when working with humans. Stuff don't magically document itself.
Humans actually learn from codebases they work with. They don't start with a clean slate every time they wake up in the morning. They know where to find information and how to search for them. They don't need someone to constantly update docs to point to changes.
> but it still takes ages to find anything without docs to tell you the approximate direction.
Which humans, unsurprisingly, can do without wiping their memory every time.
[dead]
Imagine having these complaints about a screwdriver
It's a tool, not an intelligent being
Yeah, if my screwdriver undid the changes I just made to my mower, constantly ignored my desire to unscrew screws and instead punched a hole in my carb - I'd be throwing that screwdriver in the garbage.
I do not need to babysit my screwdriver.
Yet.
Next year there will be AI screwdriver your employer force you to use.
At first, I thought “ponector’s forgotten to add the /s”
Then I realised that this will actually happen, and was sadly reminded we’re now in the post-sarcasm era.
And you can buy AI screwdriver today from Amazon!
- don't learn from what you tell them
We'll fix that, eventually.
- don't have career growth that you can feel good about having contributed to
Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.
- don't have a genuine interest in accomplishment or team goals
Easy to train for, if it turns out to be necessary. I'd always assumed that a competitive drive would be necessary in order to achieve or at least simulate human-level intelligence, but things don't seem to be playing out that way.
- have no past and no future. When you change companies, they won't recognize you in the hall.
Or on the picket line.
- no ownership over results. If they make a mistake, they won't suffer.
Good deal. Less human suffering is usually worth striving for.
> We'll fix that, eventually.
> Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are.
You're not describing a system that exists. You're describing a system that might exist in some sci-fi fantasy future. You might as well be saying "there's no point learning to code because soon the rapture will come".
That particular future exists now, it's just not evenly distributed. Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking is already as good at programming as I am. Architecture, probably not, but give it time. It's far better at math than I am, and at least as good at writing.
Computers beat us in maths decades ago, yet LLMs are not able to beat a calculator half of the time. The maths benchmarks that companies so proudly show off are still the realm of a traditional symbolic solvers. You claiming much success in asking LLMS for math makes me question if you have actually asked an LLM about maths.
Most AI experts not heavily invested in the stocks of inflated tech companies seem to agree that current architectures cannot reach AGI. It's a sci-fi dream, but hyping it is real profitable. We can destroy ourselves plenty with the tech we already have, but it won't be a robot revolution that does it.
The maths benchmarks that companies so proudly show off are still the realm of a traditional symbolic solvers. You claiming much success in asking LLMS for math makes me question if you have actually asked an LLM about maths.
What I really need to ask an LLM for is a pointer to a forum that doesn't cultivate proud exhibition of ignorance, Luddism, and general stupidity at the level exhibited by commenters in this entire HN story, and in this subthread in particular.
We already had one Reddit, we didn't need two.
Replace suffering with caring and have your AI write that again.
Why would I do a goofy thing like that?
>>Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.
Have you ever spent any time around children? How about people who think they're accomplishing a great mission by releasing truly noxious ones on the world?
You just dismissed the entire notion of accountability as an unnecessary form of suffering, which is right up there with the most nihilistic ideas ever said by, idk, Dostoevsky's underground man or Raskolnikov.
Don't waste your life on being the Joker.
> Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.
It's also the premise of The Matrix. I feel pretty goddamned uneasy about that.
(Shrug) There are other sources of inspiration besides dystopic sci-fi movies. There's the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, for instance. Better not work on language translation, which after all is how the whole LLM thing got started.
Sometimes fiction went in the wrong direction. Sometimes it didn't go far enough.
In any case, the matrix wasn't my inspiration here, but it is a pithy way to describe the concept. It's hard to imagine how humans maintain relevancy if we really do manage to invent something smarter than us. It could be that my imagination is limited though. I've been accused of that before.
> It's what we're supposed to be doing.
Why?
Because venture capital managers say so.
You'd also have no intrinsic memory of past interactions if we removed your hippocampus.
Coincidentally, the hippocampus looks like a seahorse (emoji). It's all connected.
> the hippocampus looks like a seahorse
Not to mention; hippocampus literally means "seahorse" in Greek. I knew neither of those things before today, thanks!
- constantly ignore your advice
- constantly give wrong answers, with surprising confidence
- constantly apologize, then make the same mistake again immediately
- constantly forget what you just told them
- ...
Sounds like a junior developer?
They can usually write code, but not that well. They have lots of energy and little to say about architecture and style. Don't have a well defined body of knowledge and have no experience. Individual juniors don't change, but the cast members of your junior cohort regularly do.
The problem with AI Agents like Claude is that they write VERY good code and very fast.
But they don't have a grasp for the project's architecture and will reinvent the wheel for feature X even when feature Y has it or there is an internal common library that does it. This is why you need to be the "manager of agents" and stay on top of their work.
Sometimes it's just about hitting ESC and going "waitaminute, why'd you do that?" and sometimes it's about updating the project documentation (AGENTS.md, docs/) with extra information.
Example: I have a project with a system that builds "rules" using a specific interpreter. Every LLM wants to "optimise" it by using a pattern that looks correct, but will in fact break immediately when there's more than one simultaneous user - and I have a unit test that catches it.
I got bored by LLMs trying to optimise the bit wrong, so I added a specific instruction, with reasoning why it shouldn't be attempted and has been tried and failed multiple times. And now they stopped doing it =)
I describe them in the claude training I'm doing for my company as: super smart, infinitely patient, overeager interns
Sometimes smart sometimes the opposite, though. Perhaps due to memory loss.
Not sure "smart" or "dumb" are even the right axis to be judging them by, seems like intrinsically human traits.
Robots ?
clankers.
"brooms"
*distant sound of the sorcerer's apprentice is heard*
I'm at one of those companies where we're forced to be in the office.
NO ONE TALKS TO EACH OTHER unless absolutely necessary for work.
We get on Zooms to talk. Even with the person 1 cubicle over.
> We get on Zooms to talk. Even with the person 1 cubicle over.
Who normalized this?!!
I actually do find there is a subset of meetings that are far more productive on Zoom. We can be voice chatting on one screen, share another screen and both be able to type, record notes, pull up side research without interrupting the conversation. It's a bit closer to co-working than a meeting but it hits a sweetspot for me.
I know it happens when you're working with people who may be at home or another location.
Yeah but not if you just want to talk to one person who's a few metres away. That's such bizarre behaviour I don't really believe it.
> We get on Zooms to talk. Even with the person 1 cubicle over.
But why? Required? Culture? Maybe it's the company?
Glad to see I am not the only HN users that work in such companies.
Why?
I thought you were joking until I saw the video where this is an actual quote.
There are two more quotes that made me giggle;
> You can verify code quality as a glance, and ship absolute with confidence.
> You can confidently trust and merge the code without hours of manual review.
I couldn't possibly imagine that going wrong.
I used to be really excited about "agents" when I thought people were trying to build actual agents like we've been working on in the CS field for decades now.
It's clear now that "agents" in the context of "AI" is really about answering the question "How can we make users make 10x more calls to our models in a way that makes it feel like we're not just squeezing money out of them?" I've seen so many people that think setting some "agents" of on a minutes to hours long task of basically just driving up internal KPIs at LLM providers is cutting edge work.
The problem is, I haven't seen any evidence at all that spending 10x the number of API calls on an agent results in anything closer to useful than last year when people where purely vibe coding all the time. At least then people would interactively learn about the slop they were building.
It's astounding to watch a coworker walk though through a PR with hundreds of added new files and repeatedly mention "I'm not sure if these actually work, but it does look like there's something here".
Now I'm sure I'll get some fantastic "no true Scotsman" replies about how my coworkers must not be skilled enough or how they need to follow xyz pattern, but the entire point of AI was to remove the need for specialize skills and make everyone 10x more productive.
Not to mention that the shift in focus on "agents" is also useful in detracting from clearly diminishing returns on foundation models. I just hope there are enough people that still remember how to code (and think in some cases) to rebuild when this house of cards falls apart.
> but the entire point of AI was to remove the need for specialize skills and make everyone 10x more productive.
At least for programming tools, for everything (well, the vast majority, at least) that is sold that way—since long before generative AI—it actually succeeds or fails based not on whether it eliminates need for specialized skills and makes everyone more productive, but whether it further rewards specialized skills, and makes the people who devote time to learning it more productive than if they devoted the same time to learning something else.
> It's like managing junior developers, but without having nice people to work with.
Nice? I thought all sycophant LLMs were exceedingly nice.
For me, it feels so fake that I'd rather have it not try to be nice. I guess I've gotten a bit used to it and ignore it for most parts.
Yeah it's saccharine. Reminds me quite a lot of Americans who work for tips (e.g. waiters) - disconcertingly friendly.
Someone gave me a great tip though - at least for ChatGPT there's a setting where you can change its personality to "robot". I guess that affects the system prompt in some way but it basically fixes the issue.
I enjoy getting into a good flow state and pounding out clever and elegant code but watching a good LLM generate code according to my specs and refining it is also enjoyable. I've been burning through $250 of free Claude Code Web credits and having multiple workers running at the same time is fun.
OR - think about the junior developers being managers of agents, and you are still a manager of junior developers. This is not zero sum!
I am essentially in this exact role. The junior developers simply don't have the experience to evaluate the output of the agents. You wind up with a lot of slop in PRs. People can't justify why they did something. I've seen whole PRs closed, work redone, and opened anew because they were 70% garbage. Every other comment was asking "why is this here? it has nothing to do with the ticket."
Sadly, this is not sustainable and I am not sure what I'm going to do.
Pastor of Muppets
You are being rescued. Do not resist.
Also, agents have no capacity to learn.
They have a capacity to "learn", it's just WAY MORE INVOLVED than how humans learn.
With a human, you give them feedback or advice and generally by the 2nd or 3rd time the same kind of thing happens they can figure it out and improve. With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.
> With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.
The only way that an AI model can "learn" is during model creation, which is then fixed. Any "instructions" or other data or "correcting" you give the model is just part of the context window.
Fine tuning is additional training on specific things for an existing model. It happens after a model already exists in order to better suit the model to specific situations or types of interactions. It is not dealing with context during inference but actually modifying the weights within the model.
Depending on your definition of "learn", you can also use something akin to ChatGPT's Memory feature. When you teach it something, just have it take notes on how to do that thing and include its notes in the system prompt for next time. Much cheaper than fine-tuning. But still obviously far less efficient and effective than human learning.
I think it’s reasonable to say that different approaches to learning is some kind of spectrum, but that contemporary fine tuning isn’t on that spectrum at all.
Retraining (or fine tuning) isn't the same thing at all and I think that's obvious
Hold that thought.
As an introvert, that's a pro, not a con.
The burden of human interaction is removed from building.
I'm an introvert and I love working with nice people.
I just need some time by myself to recharge after all the social interactions.
As a team lead, working with people is so... cumbersome. They need time to recharge, lots of encouragement, and a nice place to work in. Give me a coding agent any time!
As a PM working with team leads is so cumbersome...
I wish I could automate PMs :-p
They don't like working on the cumbersome tickets, writing tests, documentation. Talking to businesspeople.
Being antisocial isn't an introvert thing. I'm incredibly introverted and still love having time interacting with people
They're asocial, not antisocial. Antisociality is a diagnosable disorder and is known for interpersonal behaviours that are actively against a healthy society. Asociality, on the other hand, just avoids social interactions, not actively harming the society.
Ah, my bad, you're right
I actually checked that before commenting and went off the Google AI overview -.- eugh
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
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
There's only one electron. It looks like separate ones because it's traveling backwards and forwards in time.
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
>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.
Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.
I have Cursor at work. The only element of the interface I'm using (and know how to use) is the chat window.
IMO, it's an absolutely crappy IDE, crappy editor, with absolutely incomprehensible hostile UI.
I have almost two decades of experience with Vim, Emacs and IntelliJ. FWIW, I was able to easily find my ways in helix, kakoune and Zed.
https://cursor.com/cli
There are some Enterprise plan shenanigans, so cli is not an option.
At home I use claude and gemini in terminal, both work great for me
Really? Can you say what you hate it about it pls
I'd like to retract my critique.
I just opened the app to see what else I can bring up, and while clicking through UI I noticed I had some crappy key bindings extension installed, which apparently caused many of my annoyances.
I've probably installed it very long ago, or even by accident.
For example, I was always annoyed that open file/directory shortcut (one of most common operations) is not assigned and requires mouse interaction -- fixed by disabling the extension. Go to file shortcuts does something completely different -- fixed by disabling the extensions.
I likely won't adopt Cursor as my main IDE/Editor, but it's miles better than I thought just an hour ago.
Thanks for your question :D
it's rare to see someone circle back with a retraction, even on HN. Kudos
Not the person you asked, but I hate how it screws up keyboard shortcuts. It overrode the delete line shortcut with its own inline chat one, for example.
Decided to ditch it for claude code right after that, since I cannot be bothered to go over the entire list of keyboard shortcuts and see what else it overrode/broke.
I've found that annoying too, but you can always rebind them as you wish. It's only a few new keybinds that get in the way of my muscle memory.
That said I also have moved to CLI agents like Claude Code and Codex because I just find them more convenient and, for whatever reason, more intelligent and more likely to correctly do what I request.
From the top of my head in no specific order
- Icons on the toolbar in the left panel have no labels or even tooltips. No way to know what they do without clicking and checking.
- Space in the file explorer in the left panel opens a file (haven't noticed such behavior in other editors -- totally unexpected).
- Maybe that's the artifact of me installing Vim plugin, but Keyboard shortcuts displayed in the main menu don't do what they say they do.
- It often offers installing some plugins, and I've absolutely no idea why, and what will happen if I do or if I don't.
I'm talking about Cursor, which I assume is exactly like VS Code. Tried VS Code only once very long ago.
I think the left toolbar icons do have tooltips, but they show up pretty slowly for me (2-3 seconds).
> just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now.
I don’t know and honestly I hate the assumption of the software industry that everyone knows or uses vs code. I stuck to sublime for years until I made the switch to Jetbrains IDEs earlier this year.
I quickly looked up the market share and VS code seems to have about 70% which is a lot but the 30% that don’t use it is not that small of a number either.
Like I get it it’s very popular but it’s far from the only editor/IDE people use.
These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste resources that could have been better spent improving the AI features.
Until someone finally figures out that we need to rethink editors from the ground up to support different sort of operations and editing experience, to better facilitate LLMs doing work as agents.
But we're probably 1-2 years away from there still, so we'll live with skinned-forks, VSCode extensions and TUIs for now.
Antigravity's agent manager tries do to that. For example, it has an inbox for agent updates and requests for user decisions.
Antigravity is build on top of VSCode, I meant something completely different, not just a "feature" of something else.
It's actually weird to me how none of the big players put their money where their mouth is and vibe coded a new IDE built from the ground up for this paradigm shift regardless of tech stack.
Making an IDE sounds like an insane amount of effort.
FWIW, the Fuchsia team was working on an editor that had a Flutter UI when run in Fuchsia:
https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html
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How would you say Zed is innovating? Never heard of it, just taking a peek now.
Zed team is writing their own in-house GUI stack [1] that leverages the computer's GPU with minimal middleware in-between. It's a lot of work short-term but IMO the payoff would be huge if they establish themselves. I imagine they could poke into the user-facing OS sector if their human-agent interaction is smooth. (I have not tried it yet though)
[1]: https://www.gpui.rs
Sublime did that almost 20 years ago.
What about the text editing part?
It's written from scratch in Rust. It's super fast, polished, etc. A world of difference compared to VSCode.
it's fast
I am very sensitive to input latency and performance but after comparing Zed and VS Code for a while I really couldn't find any reason to stick with Zed. It's been a year or so since I last tried it but VSC just lets me do way more while still, IMO, having a nice, clean UI. I never notice any performance or key input latency with VSC.
If you work in a team there are some pretty good remote collaboration tooling built into Zed.
And it can load staggeringly large files without falling over on itself.
> I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are desperately trying to catch up to desktop now
We need a VS Code fork that just exposes more interfaces, and does nothing else. Then all these forks could just use that with power extensions, and it'd force Microsoft to change its behavior.
You just described Eclipse RCP.
The issue with Eclipse and that approach is the complexity of mixing plugins to do everything, which kills the UX.
When VSCode started, the differentiator from Atom and Eclipse was that the extension points were intentionally limited to optimize the user experience. But with the introduction of Copilot that wasn’t enough, hence the amount of forks.
I think that the Zed approach of having a common protocol to talk with agents (like a LSP but for agents) is much better. The only thing that holds me from switching to Zed is that so far my experience using it hasn’t been that good (it still has many rough edges)
There's actually an ACP that has some traction as well, though I don't think it solves the problem of what the agent can do in vscode: https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome
Microsoft just fork Atom, and Atom had already good and a lot of extensions. Before Microsoft buy Github, there was no reason to switch to VSCode instead of Atom. When Microsoft buy Github, it received Atom from the Github team, and Microsoft stops the development of Atom. VSCode was just Atom with the Microsoft brand, and some little tweaks from Microsoft, never a game changer compared to Atom, like Atom was in it's time. Now Antigravity is again a fork with some little tweaks from VSCode, no game changer, just with the Google branding.
I guess we have different perspectives and information about the “rise” of VSCode.
I was an Atom user. Even before the acquisition of GitHub the major feature of VSCode was its speed and TS integration. AFAIK, the only common part between Atom and VSCode is Electron. Other than that, VSCode started with a different codebase based on TypeScript, while Atom was originally written in CoffeeScript.
Multiple design decisions helped VSCode to thrive (btw Erich Gamma was also part of Eclipse):
- The creation of the LSP. Each release of VSCode is also tied to TypeScript releases and improvements. There is a lot of collaboration between the two teams. That gave VSCode the best support for TS and JS. I used Atom and WebStorm regularly when VSCode came out, and VSCode auto-complete and TS support were orders of magnitude better. Everybody caught up since then, but I guess many users like me switched because of that.
- Unlike Atom, VSCode was designed with web integration in mind. A lot of sites started to use Monaco for code editing, and a lot of web-based IDEs use parts of it (CodeSandbox, StackBlitz, etc).
- Gradual rollout of plugin integration. While Atom has the philosophy of everything is pluggable, VSCode was intentionally limited. Which was a good thing given the poor loading performance of Atom.
By the time MS acquired GitHub, Atom usage was already in decline.
* Note: my side of the history, comes from my experience of working in a company that did a custom Eclipse IDE. We evaluated Atom and then VSCode as alternatives to “modernize” our IDE. So I have experience in looking at both Atom and VSCode code bases: they are totally different. Also, the main problem with VSCode for us was the limited extensibility.
> By the time MS acquired GitHub, Atom usage was already in decline.
I wanted to second this: I compared both, with Atom experience starting before the first VSC release. Atom had performance and stability problems continuously through that period, and never really won any of my coworkers over. A lot of that was simple performance: I remember using Is It Snappy? to test my subjective impression and finding that input latency was a full order of magnitude worse, which is the kind of thing which really colors your impression of an editor.
there are now 15 competing standards
There's also Eclipse Che. They wrote a web based IDE from scratch and made it compatible with VS Code extensions but also provided extra APIs.
Why is it so hard for these to be VSCode extensions and not forks?
Microsoft has very specific constraints on what extensions can and can't do, it's not a free for all. They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a way that extensions couldn't. That's why all the serious contenders make a fork, it's simply not possible to have the same integration otherwise.
A bit tangential, but I asked the new Gemini model about this, and it immediately traced back this quote to your username: https://gemini.google.com/share/144b46094d6e
Creepy stuff :)
Because it just searches Google and HN is indexed regularly, nothing really noteworthy. If you copy paste the same quote into Google you get the same thing.
> They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a way that extensions couldn't
That started to change in may.
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/05/19/openSourceAIE...
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/06/30/openSourceAIE...
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/11/04/openSourceAIE...
Still it would be a lot wiser if all the forkers would do one 'AI-enabled' fork together that exposes all the extras that copilot gets. The barrier for testing would be much lower and all the extension makers would also jump onto the train. Likely MS would finally give in and make all the extras available for everyone. But all the fragmentation only helps MS.
What exactly are the "extras" that Copilot gets?
I've had a Github Copilot subscription from work for 1yr+ and switch between the official Copilot and Roo/Kilo Code from time to time. The official Copilot extension has improved a lot in the last 3-6 months but I can't recall ever seeing Copilot do something that Roo/Kilo can't do, or am I missing something obvious?
The Copilot extension uses proposed APIs, meaning it's on an allowlist bundled with VS Code. Roo likely enables these early. The API can stay proposed for years before Microsoft opens it up to third party users.
They're all going to have quite divergent opinions on how to structure the fork and various other design decisions that would inevitably lead to forks of the fork again.
I think forking VS Code is probably the most sensible strategy and I think that will remain the case for many years. Really, I don't think it's changing until AI agents get so ridiculously good that you can vibe code an entire full-featured polished editor in one or a few sessions with an LLM. Then we'll be seeing lots of de novo editors.
Which is a bit odd given that Claude code extension in VSCode is by far the best agent integration into a codebase that I know of.
The Claude Code extension on VS Code does very little (too little in my opinion). The integration level with agentic functionality provided by Antigravity goes much deeper in my 20 minutes or so of playing with it. The biggest value pieces I see is: Agent Manager window which provides a unified view of all my agents running across all my workspaces (!) where I can quickly approve or respond to followup questions and quickly brings me to the code in context for each agent, additionally, I can select a piece of code and comment on it inline and that comment gets sent to the correct, active agent. These two things alone are items which I have been looking for... Too bad I only have approval to use Claude Code at work. This looks promising.
That’s all very silly and unnecessary in my opinion. Agentic change by change diffs are optimal for a professional.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion but many people would disagree with you, and that's the crux of the issue, everyone has their own conflicting views on what the UX should be, hence all the forks.
I don't even know what the Claude Code extension does in vscode. I have it installed but hell if I know what it's doing. I run Claude in one of vscode's terminals, and do everything through there. I do see (sometimes) diffs pop up in the IDE, I guess that's the extent of this integration.
Thanks, thought i was the only one not getting what the extension is useful for (which i couldn't do easier over the cli)
That's the technical reason - the other is strategic and more important: Who controls the app controls the companies depending on it.
This isn't true. I've gotten Claude and its forks to do things the same way as Copilot.
*moat
AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents.
> AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents. reply
I always wonder how this works legally. VSCode needs to comply with the LGPL (it's based on Chromium/Blink which is LGPL) ; they should provide the entire sources that allow us to rebuild our own "official" VSCode binary
I think that MS provides these extensions as plugins. The core of VSCode is OSS, it's the extra bits that have a different license.
Could you give an example of what they're gatekeeping for Copilot exclusively? I'm kinda confused because Copilot in VS Code isn't exactly a powerhouse of unique features in my experience, it still feels well behind Roo/Kilo Code in most ways I can think of, although much closer to the competition than it was a year ago.
Has (kinda) not been true for half a year
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/05/19/openSourceAIE...
> AI UI
2026: every day ...
I was going to ask why all these companies choose to fork the entire IDE rather than just writing an extension like every other sane developer, and this response is the most believable reason why.
But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep things like that shouldn’t allow a billion dollar company just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE
Most of VSCode (yes, most) is a mishmash of other OSS products, including Google Chromium! By that logic VSCode itself shouldn't exist.
That does make sense.
> 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced
I think this was more accurate around 2012. My local tech magazine had their own fork and they attached CD with the magazine which included the browser.
> 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced
This is still happening. Didn't you see OpenAI's release of Atlas?
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?
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.
Most of the AI products are not for the end user, they are just signaling shareholders and possible investors that the company is on the hype.
There is also mechanism inside Google that rewards teams that launches new products, more than the teams that actually maintain existing ones.
This kind of cynicism is wild to me. Of course most AI products (and products in general) are for end users. Especially for a company like Google--they need to do everything they can to win the AI wars, and that means winning adoption for their AI models.
http://killedbygoogle.com/ - most Google products are for the temporary career advancement of some exec or product lead.
Their only real product is advertising, everything else is a pretense to capture users attention and behaviors that they can auction off.
This is different. AI is an existential threat to Google. I've almost stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT came out. Why search for a list of webpages which might have the answer to your question and then manually read them one at a time when I can instead just ask an AI to tell me the answer?
If Google doesn't adapt, they could easily be dead in a decade.
That's funny. I stopped using ChatGPT completely and use Gemini to search, because it actually integrates with Google nicely as opposed to ChatGPT which for some reason messes up sometimes (likely due to being blocked by websites while no one dares block Google's crawler lest they be wiped off the face of the internet), and for coding, it's Claude (and maybe now Gemini for that as well). I see no need to use any other LLMs these days. Sometimes I test out the open source ones like DeepSeek or Kimi but those are just as a curiosity.
If web-pages don't contain the answer, the AI likely won't either. But the AI will confidently tell me "the answer" anyway. I've had atrocious issues with wrong or straight up invented information that I must search up every single claim it makes on a website.
My primary workflow is asking AI questions vaguely to see if it successfully explains information I already know or starts to guess. My average context length of a chat is around 3 messages, since I create new chats with a rephrased version of the question to avoid the context poison. Asking three separate instances the same question in slightly different way regularly gives me 2 different answers.
This is still faster than my old approach of finding a dry ground source like a standards document, book, reference, or datasheet, and chewing through it for everything. Now I can sift through 50 secondary sources for the same information much faster because the AI gives me hunches and keywords to google. But I will not take a single claim for an AI seriously without a link to something that says the same thing.
Given how embracing AI is an imperative in tech companies, "a link to something" is likely to be a product of LLM-assisted writing itself. Entire concept of checking through the internet becomes more and more recursive with every passing moment.
Google is still looking for investors?
Of course, Alphabet exists to give returns to their shareholders.
I know Google is quick to shut things down but these ultra-cynical ultra-skeptical HN takes are so tiresome at this point.
I wonder why is that.
This is what Google is like though. It is practically part of their corporate DNA.
I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at wooing investors. I believe it is intended to be a genuine superior alternative to Cursor and Kiro etc. and is attempting to provide the best AI coding experience for the average developer.
Most of the other people (so far) in this sub-thread do not think this. They essentially have a conspiratorial view on it.
> I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at wooing investors.
There is no evidence to support any other motive.
Any experienced (as in, 10+ years) developer knows better than to trust google with dev tools.
What dev tools has Google shut down?
Colab is still going strong. Chrome inspector is still going strong.
They've never released a full-fledged IDE before, have they? Which I don't count Apps Script editor as one, but that's been around for a long time as well.
I think it's much more likely that Google believes this is the future of development and wants to get in on the ground floor. As they should.
> Google believes this is the future of development
This is hardly possible as this is definitely not the future of development which is obvious to developers who created this. Or to any developer for that matter.
This is a stakeholders' feature.
This worldview is so bizarre and uncharitable that I'd be rather concerned to hear what any of your takes on politics might be.
I've played with Antigravity for the past 48 hours for lots of different tasks. Is it revolutionizing development for me? No. Do I think they want it to do that and are working extremely hard to try to achieve that? I think the answer is very obviously: of course. Will it maybe get closer to that within a few months or a year? Maybe.
Agree to disagree, I guess. What you think is obvious, I think is false. And I think the rapidly growing success of Cursor is the proof of that. But I guess you must think Cursor is just a fad or something, since you don't see why Google would want to legitimately compete with it?
Cursor is obviously a fad (unlike Copilot - I'm not at all an AI hater, quite the opposite) and perhaps Google needs to present something to shareholders that will pretend to be competing.
None of that matters for actual development work.
Well, just so you know, there are lots of us who think Cursor is not a fad, and see that Google realizes this as well, and is genuinely competing with it.
A lot of people find it's actually quite valuable for "actual development work". If you want to ignore all that, then I guess go ahead.
But just know that what you're claiming is "obvious", is clearly not. There seems to be large disagreement over it, so it is objectively not obvious, but rather quite debatable.
Isn't it great that in this case we don't have to fight because the judgment of history will reveal itself quite soon on that matter, right? :-)
I wish I could save this comment in a way that we would both come back to it in 10 years ;)
!remindme 5 years
Cursor is very obviously not a fad (Copilot I'd say actually is!), nor are any of the Cursor clones/competitors. Of course it matters very much for actual development work. I feel like everything you're writing in this sub-thread is essentially the opposite of what exists in reality.
I would say it's the opposite. I believe there is zero evidence to support your allegation.
> I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at wooing investors.
I think the comment you’re replying to was addressing the “shutting down” part, not the “investors” part.
exactly.
also i was alluding to the way their promotion policy encourages people to start rather than maintain projects.
Investor money?
Google is highly profitable. It's not looking for investment, it's the one investing.
Maybe you are confusing it with OpenAI?
I think they are referring to public market investors vs private investors. Meaning, their stock valuation.
funny my magic 8 ball says the same thing!
After using Google AI studio, Google Vertex, and Google Gemini Chat I honestly can't wait to use Google Antigravity!
edit: Also Jules...
snark off:
I think the Google PMs should have coffee together and see if all of this sprawl makes any sense.
It does?
Google AI studio is their developer dashboard.
Google Vertex is their equivalent of Amazon Bedrock.
Google Gemini Chat is their ChatGPT app for normies.
Google Antigravity is their Cursor equivalent.
I agree what you’ve listed makes sense as a product portfolio.
But AI Studio is getting vibe coding tools. AI Studio also has a API that competes with Vertex. They have IDE plugins for existing IDEs to expose Chat, Agents, etc. They also have Gemini CLI for when those don’t work. There is also Firebase Studio, a browser based IDE for vibe coding. Jules, a browser based code agent orchestration tool. Opal, a node-based tool to build AI… things? Stich, a tool to build UIs. Colab with AI for a different type of coding. Notebook LM for AI research (many features now available in Gemini App). AI Overviews and AI mode in search, which now feature a generic chat interface.
Thats just new stuff, and not including all the existing products (Gmail, Home) that have Gemini added.
This is the benefit of a big company vs startups. They can build out a product for every type of user and every user journey, at once.
Don't forget Gemini CLI
In another 2 years we'll probably be back to just "Google" as digital agent that can do any research, creative, or coding task you can imagine.
I concede.
> Google Vertex is their equivalent of Amazon Bedrock
Well, that clears that up.
In "real world" you don't use OpenAI or Anthropic API directly—you are forced to use AWS, GCP, or Azure. Each of these has its own service for running LLMs, which is conceptually the same as using OpenAI or Anthropic API directly, but with much worse DX. For AWS it's called Bedrock, for GCP—Vertex, and for Azure it's AI Foundry I believe. They also may offer complementary features like prompt management, evals, etc, but from what I've seen so far it's all crap.
And In practice, when I needed to use one of their models for a small project, it turned out that the only sane way is to go via OpenRouter…
Also gemini-cli (terrible)
Google ADK (agent development kit, awesome)
The also launched a coding agent Jules: https://jules.google/
Jules is the first and only one to add a full API, which I've found very beneficial. It lets you integrate agentic coding features into web apps quite nicely. (In theory you could always hack your own thing together with Claude Code or Codex to achieve a similar effect but a cloud agent with an API saves a lot of effort.)
Google ADK is real nice and gives you an API as well (also web browser and terminal prompt)
Jules is nifty. Weirdly heavy on the browser CPU.
Wasn't there something called Bard at some point?
Bard is the old name of Gemini
you forgot jules
Everybody forgets Jules.
Great point!
Remember took my a while early in my career from changing my resume away from saying "I want to do this at my next job and make a lot of money" and towards "here is how I can make money and save costs for your company".
Google didn't learn that lesson here. They are describing why us using Antigravity is good for Google, not why us using Antigravity is good for us.
More accurately, it should be neither about Google nor about the user, but about the product. Describe what the product is and does, don’t make assumptions about the user, and let the user be the judge of it.
I swear most of these pages is to sell this to companies so they can force it onto developers.
The whole webpage looks like something from Apple.
All these companies were built by self-referential narcissists, and it seems to be their culture at the core.
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.
I think the models are under high load right now, and not working properly.
So the error messaging is wrong, giving the user the impression it's their fault for not paying. I think that's worse..
It's both.
Free tier users get to use what's left over from Google's capacity. They pay with their data, Google uses their inputs for training.
Paid tier users pay with money, Google doesn't use their inputs. They get priority when capacity is running out (like right after a launch as happened here).
There is no paid tier on Antigravity currently.
> 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.
why?
EDIT: why must users care?
Gotta learn all the quirks of the model before it's replaced in 8 minutes.
Quirks? like context window?
I'm saying it's egregious to expect all users to know the fact that an HTML document, for some reason, uses an enormous amount of context in an LLM designed specifically for working with code.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
The accepted answer is one that doesn’t care about the questioner‘s use case and instead gives a pretty excessive "Don‘t do it"
It does also give the right solution, using an xml parser.
We don’t know the use case.
Maybe the questioner is also in full control of the HTML creation and they don’t need a parser for all possible HTML edge cases.
Maybe they are, but they would also need to ensure a well-defined subset of HTML and also show that the subset is a reglar (Chomsky Type 3) grammar.
It seems that even the very conceptually simple example given by the questioner is impossible.
I haven't used it myself but a few of my colleagues used it saying it is good and they completed a huge chunk of work with Antigravity, mind you I am very skeptical of this.
The don't seem to be getting any rate limiting issue which I don't understand, maybe a bug in Antigravity allowing them to use it for more. They are really confident in the IDE after a few hours and the output given is really good.
Jevons paradox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It's the same problem with OpenRouter's free tiers for a long time. If something is truly $0 and widely available, people will absolutely bleed it dry.
Same here. I tried to build a super simple iOS App in antigravity and I was out of quota before it finished. The whole thing was a couple of files and a few hundred lines of code.
If you dismiss and respond something like "proceed" it resumes. Takes a fair while to actually run out of usage.
That'd be my experience with gemini cli.
I had pretty much the same experience.
> 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!
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.
it's funny - nervous funny, not haha funny - that you think drawing a real issue like this out into the open would focus an organization on solving it.
There is a lot more money in selling a tool to manage a problem rather than solve a problem.
Agents pretty good at describing how a particular feature works. It's not as dire as you make it seem.
that's what i mean
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.
> you can ask the agent to give you an overview of the architecture and then dive into whatever part you want to explore more.
This is actually a cool use that's being explored more and more. I first saw it in the wiki thing from the devin people, and now google released one as well.
There's a cool demo from Anthropic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwMu0pyYZBc
Where they use Claude to analyse an old (demo) COBOL application.
And it understands the context of the files, decrypts the process and even draws graphs to the documentation it creates.
I wish I had this 20 years ago when I was consulting and had to jump into really funky client codebases with zero documentation and everything on fire.
Humans are just better at communicating about their process. They will spend hours talking over architectural decisions, implementation issues, writing technical details in commit messages and issue notes, and in this way they not only debug their decisions but socialize knowledge of both the code and the reasons it came to be that way. Communication and collaboration are the real adaptive skills of our species. To the extent AI can aid in those, it will be useful. To the extent it goes off and does everything in a silo, it will ultimately be ignored - much like many developers who attempt this.
I do think the primary strengths of genai are more in comprehension and troubleshooting than generating code - so far. These activities play into the collaboration and communication narrative. I would not trust an AI to clean up cruft or refactor a codebase unsupervised. Even if it did an excellent job, who would really know?
> Humans are just better at communicating about their process.
I wish that were true.
In my experience, most of the time they're not doing the things you talk about -- major architectural decisions don't get documented anywhere, commit messages give no "why", and the people who the knowledge got socialized to in unrecorded conversations then left the company.
If anything, LLM's seem to be far more consistent in documenting the rationales for design decisions, leaving clear comments in code and commit messages, etc. if you ask them to.
Unfortunately, humans generally are not better at communicating about their process, in my experience. Most engineers I know enjoy writing code, and hate documenting what they're doing. Git and issue-tracking have helped somewhat, but it's still very often about the "what" and not the "why this way".
"major architectural decisions don't get documented anywhere" "commit messages give no "why""
This is so far outside of common industry practices that I don't think your sentiment generalizes. Or perhaps your expectation of what should go in a single commit message is different from the rest of us...
LLMs, especially those with reasoning chains, are notoriously bad at explaining their thought process. This isn't vibes, it is empiricism: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388
If you are genuinely working somewhere where the people around you are worse than LLMs at explaining and documenting their thought process, I would looking elsewhere. Can't imagine that is good for one's own development (or sanity).
I've worked everywhere from small startups to megacorps. The megacorps certainly do better with things like initial design documents that startups often skip entirely, but even then they're often largely out-of-date because nobody updates them. I can guarantee you that I am talking about common industry practices in consumer-facing apps.
I'm not really interested in what some academic paper has to say -- I use LLM's daily and see first-hand the quality of the documentation and explanations they produce.
I don't think there's any question that, as a general rule, LLM's do a much better job documenting what they're doing, and making it easy for people to read their code, with copious comments explaining what the code is doing and why. Engineers, on the other hand, have lots of competing priorities -- even when they want to document more, the thing needs to be shipped yesterday.
Alright, I'm glad to hear you've had a successful and rich professional career. We definitely agree that engineers generally fail to document when they have competing priorities, and that LLMs can be of use to help offload some of that work successfully.
Your initial comment made it sound like you were commenting on a genuine apples-for-apples comparisons between humans and LLMs, in a controlled setting. That's the place for empiricism, and I think dismissing studies examining such situations is a mistake.
A good warning flag for why that is a mistake is the recent article that showed engineers estimated LLMs sped them up by like 24%, but when measured they were actually slower by 17%. One should always examine whether or not the specifics of the study really applies to them--there is no "end all be all" in empiricism--but when in doubt the scientific method is our primary tool for determining what is actually going on.
But we can just vibe it lol. Fwiw, the parent comment's claims line up more with my experience than yours. Leave an agent running for "hours" (as specified in the comment) coming up with architectural choices, ask it to document all of it, and then come back and see it is a massive mess. I have yet to have a colleague do that, without reaching out and saying "help I'm out of my depth".
The paper and example you talk about seem to be about agent or plan mode (in LLM IDEs like Cursor, as those modes are called) while I and the parent are talking about ask mode, which is where the confusion seems to lie. Asking the LLM about the overall structure of an existing codebase works very well.
OK yes, you are right that we might be talking about employing AI toolings in different modes, and that the paper I am referring to is absolutely about agentic tooling executing code changes on your behalf.
That said, the first comment of the person I replied to contained: "You can ask agents to identify and remove cruft", which is pretty explicitly speaking to agent mode. He was also responding to a comment that was talking about how humans spend "hours talking about architectural decisions", which as an action mapped to AI would be more plan mode than ask mode.
Overall I definitely agree that using LLM tools to just tell you things about the structure of a codebase are a great way to use them, and that they are generally better at those one-off tasks than things that involve substantial multi-step communications in the ways humans often do.
I appreciate being the weeds here haha--hopefully we all got a little better talking abou the nuances of these things :)
Idealized industry practices that people wish to follow, but when it comes to meeting deadlines, I too have seen people eschew these practices for getting things out the door. It's a human problem, not one specific to any company.
Yes I recognize that, for various reasons, people will fail to document even when it is a profesional expectation.
I guess in this case we are comparing an idealized human to an idealized AI, given AI has equally its own failings in non-idealized scenarios (like hallucination).
Sure, you can ask the agents to "identify and remove cruft" but I never have any confidence that they actually do that reliably. Sometimes it works. Mostly they just burn tokens, in my experience.
> And it's not like any of your criticisms don't apply to human teams.
Every time the limitations of AI are discussed, we see this unfair standard applied: ideal AI output is compared to the worst human output. We get it, people suck, and sometimes the AI is better.
At least the ways that humans screw up are predictable to me. And I rarely find myself in a gaslighting session with my coworkers where I repeatedly have to tell them that they're doing it wrong, only to be met with "oh my, you're so right!" and watch them re-write the same flawed code over and over again.
Because what we need is not lazy people - we need lazy people with AI? How is this even a justification?
Sorry, where did "lazy people" come from? Nobody's talking about anybody being lazy.
I just like that evolution doesnt really care. People can opine on laziness and proper methodology. Its handwaving compared to how things shake out.
Nature does select for laziness. The laziest state that can outpace entropy in diverse ways? Ideal selection.
> The software of the future,
:chuckles nervously:
If you're building something new you'll need some skilled people around
Vibe code fixer seems to be a viable job soon
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Do you want your software to now be stochastic instead of deterministic? That is where the analogy becomes flawed.
This argument warrants introspection for "crusty devs", but also has holes. A compiler is tightly engineered and dependable. I have never had to write assembly because I know that my compiled code 100% represents my abstract code and any functional problems are in my abstract code. That is not true in AI coding. Additionally, AI coding is not just an abstraction over code, but an abstraction over understanding. When my code compiles, I don't need to worry that the compiler misunderstood my intention.
I'm not saying AI is not a useful abstraction, but I am saying that it is not a trustworthy one.
I do still write assembly sometimes, and it's a valued skill because it'll always be important and not everyone can do it. Compilers haven't obsoleted writing assembly by hand for some use cases, and LLMs will never obsolete actually writing code either. I would be incredibly cautious about throwing all your eggs into the AI basket before you atrophy a skill that fewer and fewer will have
How is a compiler and an LLM equivalent abstractions? I'm also seriously doubtful of the 10x claim any time someone brings it up when AI is being discussed. I'm sure they can be 10x for some problems but they can also be -10x. They're not as consistently predictable (and good) like compilers are.
The "learn to master it or become obsolete" sentiment also doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Isn't the whole point of AI as a technology that people shouldn't need to spend years mastering a craft to do something well? It's literally trying to automate intelligence.
I’d worry about mastering the shift key, first.
The software of the future, where nobody on staff knows how anything is built
Doesn't this apply to people who code in high level languages?
The increasing levels of abstraction work only as long as the abstractions are deterministic (with some limited exceptions - i.e. branch prediction/preloading at CPU level, etc). You can still get into issues with leaky abstractions, but generally they are quite rare in established high->low level language transformations.
This is more akin to manager-level view of the code (who need developers to go and look at the "deterministic" instructions); the abstraction is a lot lot more leaky than high->low level languages.
In the 00s I saw so many C codebases with hand-rolled linked lists where dynamically resized arrays would be more appropriate, "should be big enough" static allocations with no real idea of how to determine that size, etc. Hardly anyone seemed to have a practical understanding of hashes. When you use a higher level language, you get steered towards the practical, fundamental data structures more or less automatically.
even JS doesn't churn as fast as the models powering vibe coding, and that cut & paste node app is still deterministic, compared to what happens when the next version of the model looks at AI-generated code from two years ago...
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...
Same here - completely relate.
One thing I’ve noticed though that actually coding (without the use of AI; maybe a bit of tab auto-complete) is that I’m actually way faster when working in my domain than I am when using AI tools.
Everytime I use AI tools in my domain-expertise area, I find it ends up slowing me down. Introducing subtle bugs, me having to provide insane amount of context and details (at which point it becomes way faster to do it myself)
Just code and chill man - having spent the last 6 months really trying everything (all these context engineering strategies, agents, CLAUDE.md files on every directory, et, etc). It really easy still more productive to just code yourself if you know what you’re doing.
The thing I love most though - is having discussions with an LLM about an implementation, having it write some quick unit tests and performance tests for certain base cases, having it write a quick shell script, etc. things like this, it’s Amazing and makes me really enjoy programming since I save time and can focus on doing the actual fun stuff
When I'm doing the coding myself, I'm at least making steady progress and the process is predictable. With LLMs, it's a crapshoot. I have to get the AI to understand what I want and may have try again multiple times, many times never succeeding, and end up writing a lot of text anyway. And in between, I'll have to read a lot of code that probably ends up being thrown away or heavily modified. This probably depends a lot on what kind of project one is working on, though.
But it's like you said, I like using LLMs for completing smaller parts or asking specific kind of help or having conversations about solutions, but for anything larger, it just feels like banging my head to a wall.
Don't use agent mode, only use ask mode. Once I did that, it works as expected. I can still code but not have to rely on the randomized nature of "vibe coding."
Devs are starting to realize that the sweet spot for AI support in coding is on a small scale, i.e. extended code completion. Generating huge chunks of code is often not reliable enough except for some niches (such as simple greenfield projects which profit from millions of examples online).
One AI workflow I rather like seems to have largely vanished from many modern tools. Use a very dumb simple model with syntax knowledge to autocomplete. It fills out what I'm about to type, and takes local variables and pass them to functions I wanna call.
It feels like just writing my own code but at 50% higher wpm. Especially if I can limit it to only suggest a single row; it prevents it from effecting my thought process or approach.
This is how the original GitHub copilot worked until it switched to a chat based more agentic behavior. I set it up locally with an old llama on my laptop and it's plenty useful for bash and c, and amazing for python. I ideally want a model trained only for code and not conversational at all, closer to the raw model trained to next-token predict on code.
I think this style just doesn't chew enough tokens to make tech CEOs happy. It doesn't benefit from a massive model and almost drains more networking than compute to run in the cloud.
Most editors and LSPs offer variable, method, keyword and a bunch of other completions that are 100% predictable and accurate, you don't need an LLM for this.
One of the core principles of my workflow (inspired by REPL development and some unix tools) is to start with a single file (for a function or the whole project). The I refactor the code to have a better organization and to improve reliability, especially as I'm handling more scenarios (and failure modes).
LLMs are not useful in this workflow, because they are too verbose. Their answers are generic and handle scenarios you don't even support yet. What's useful is good documentation (as in truthful) and the code if it's open.
This approach has worked really well in my career. It gives me KISS and YAGNI for free. And every line of code is purposeful and have a reason to be there.
For those discussions with the LLM do you just use Gemini chat or chat GPT etc... i.e. the chat interface?
Depends.
I’ve been actively using the first tier paid version of:
- GPT - Claude - Gemini
Usually it’s via the cli tool. (Codex, Claude code, Gemini cli)
I have a bunch of scripts setup that write to the tmux pane that has these chats open - so I’ll visually highlight something nvim and pipe that into either of the panes that have one of these tools open and start a discussion.
If I want it to read the full file, I’ll just use the TUIs search (they all use the @ prefix to search for files) and then discuss. If I want to pipe a few files, I’ll add the files I want to nvim quickfix list of literally pipe the files I want to a markdown file (with a full path) and discuss.
So yes - the chat interface in these cli tools mostly. I’m one of those devs that don’t leave the terminal much lol
it is absolutely poor skill, or disengenuous at best, for any coder to claim AI tools slow them down lol.
I didn’t make this claim.
I also have a personal rule that I will try something for at least 4 months actively before making my decision about it (programming language, new tools, or in this case AI assisted coding)
I made the claim that in my area of expertise - I have found that *most of the time it is faster to write something myself than I write out really detailed md file / prompt. It becomes more tedious to express myself via natural language then it is with code when I want something very specific done.
In these types of cases - writing the code myself, allows me to express the thing I want faster. Also, I like to code with the AI auto complete but still while this can be useful I sometimes disable it because it’s distracting and consistently incorrect with its predictions)
claim that i claimed you claimed: "for any coder to claim AI tools slow them down"
---
claim you made: "One thing I’ve noticed though that actually coding (without the use of AI; maybe a bit of tab auto-complete) is that I’m actually way faster when working in my domain than I am when using AI tools."
---
You did make that claim but I'm aware my approach would bring the defensiveness out of anyone :P
> any coder to claim AI tools slow them down
This is what you said - and I didn’t make this claim. I specifically said that in “my domain”. Meaning a code base I know fully well and own, and it’s a language, framework and patterns that I’ve worked with for years.
For certain things - yes, it’s faster to do myself than write a long prompt with context (or a predefined one) because it’s faster to express what I want with the code than natural language.
or the complete opposite. Very skilled people with a lot of experience in a specific project. I am like that too at my current job. I've REALLY tried to use AI but it has always slowed me down in the end. AI is only speeding me up in very specific and isolated things, tangent to the main product development.
For seasoned maintainers of open source repos, there is explicit evidence it does slow them down, even when they think it sped them up: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
Cue: "the tools are so much better now", "the people in the study didn't know how to use Cursor", etc. Regardless if one takes issue with this study, there are enough others of its kind to suggest skepticism regarding how much these tools really create speed benefits when employed at scale. The maintenance cliff is always nigh...
There are definitely ways in which LLMs, and agentic coding tools scaffolded in top, help with aspects of development. But to say anyone who claims otherwise is either being disingenuous or doesn't know what they are doing, is not an informed take.
I have seen this study cited enough to have a copy paste for it. And no, there are not a bunch of other studies that have any sort of conclusive evidence to support this claim either. I have looked and would welcome any with good analysis.
"""
1. The sample is extremely narrow (16 elite open-source maintainers doing ~2-hour issues on large repos they know intimately), so any measured slowdown applies only to that sliver of work, not “developers” or “software engineering” in general.
2. The treatment is really “Cursor + Claude, often in a different IDE than participants normally use, after light onboarding,” so the result could reflect tool/UX friction or unfamiliar workflows rather than an inherent slowdown from AI assistance itself.
3. The only primary outcome is self-reported time-to-completion; there is no direct measurement of code quality, scope of work, or long-term value, so a longer duration could just mean “more or better work done,” not lower productivity.
4. With 246 issues from 16 people and substantial modeling choices (e.g., regression adjustment using forecasted times, clustering decisions), the reported ~19% slowdown is statistically fragile and heavily model-dependent, making it weak evidence for a robust, general slowdown effect.
"""
Any developer (who was a developer before March 2023) that is actively using these tools and understands the nuances of how to search the vector space (prompt) is being sped up substantially.
I think we agree no the limitations of the study--I literally began my comment with "for seasoned maintainers of open source repos". I'm not sure if in your first statement ("there are no studies to back up this claim.. I welcome good analysis") you are referring to claims that support an AI-speedup. If so, we agree that good analysis is needed. But if you think there already is good data:
Can you link any? All I've seen is stuff like Anthropic claiming 90% of internal code is written by Claude--I think we'd agree that we need an unbiased source and better metrics than "code written". My concern is that whenever AI usage in professional developers is studied empirically, as far as I have seen, the results never corroborate your claim: "Any developer (who was a developer before March 2023) that is actively using these tools and understands the nuances of how to search the vector space (prompt) is being sped up substantially."
I'm open to it being possible, but as someone who was a developer before March 2023 and is surrounded by many professionals who were also so, our results are more lukewarm than what I see boosters claim. It speeds up certain types of work, but not everything in a manner that adds up to all work "sped up substantially".
I need to see data, and all the data I've seen goes the other way. Did you see the recent Substack looking at public Github data showing no increase in the trend of PRs all the way up to August 2025? All the hard data I've seen is much, much more middling than what people who have something to sell AI-wise are claiming.
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Turn off the noise, just keep coding and get better at it, go all-in with the fundamentals it will pay off over time. You can leverage autocomplete to go as fast as you can, don't waste your time writing md files, most of the world still does hand coding, sure with some ai assistance, but without totally ceding control. They want you to believe the contrary to keep the bubble inflating or to sell you some ai courses where you spend hundreds of dollars for "learning" how to please a statical tool into doing what you want to do, spoiler alert it eventually won't and steer away in unpredictable ways
> The agentic spam is exhausting. I just wanted to code.
Ditto. And we still can.
I've yet to use an "agent", and still use a chat UI to an LLM in Emacs. I rely on these tools for design discussion, rough prototyping, and quick reference, but they still waste my time roughly a quarter of the time I use them. They have gotten better in the last year, though, and I've been able to broaden my reach into stacks and codebases I wouldn't have felt comfortable with before, which is good.
I just have no interest in "agents". I don't want to give these companies more access to my system and data, and I want to review every thing these tools generate. If this makes me slower than a vibe coder, that's intentional. Thankfully, there are still sane people and companies willing to pay me for this type of work, so I'm not worried about being displaced any time soon. Once that happens, I'll probably close up shop, figure out an alternative income stream, and continue coding as a hobby.
I feel this. Tbh I was excited about most of the previous tech fads I have come across. Sure, people got overzealous with them and also failed to realize that what F*NG needs is not what your three person startup needs, but there were always some good and interesting ideas there.
This just feels... a little too dystopian. Companies hoovered up the entirety more or less of all of our collective thoughts and writings and output and now want to sell it back to us- and I fear that cost is going to be extremely steep.
It's impressive, but at the same time, just feels like its going to somehow be a net detractor to society, and yet I feel I need to keep up with each new iteration or potentially get washed over and left behind by the wave.
I am somewhat fortunate to be towards the top of the pyramid and also in a position where I could theoretically ride off into the sunset, but I fear the societal implications and the pain that is going to come for vast numbers of people.
Wow, this sums up exactly how I feel.
The very last thing I want is to be "elevated to a manager of agents," as they so smugly say in the video.
> The agentic spam is exhausting. I just wanted to code.
Ability to code within an IDE will not make shareholders happy while shoving AI down developers' throats most definitely will.
It's never too early to retire, there are plenty of other things to work on outside of tech
The robots have that covered
I've been thinking a lot about John Henry since this AI stuff has started
You might as well be saying you want to make physical architecture draft drawings.
Wrong. Continuing with the architect metaphor, he doesn't understandably want to delegate digital draft drawings to a non predictable statical tool ridden with idiosyncracies and biases based off mostly on poor open source training data and write some dumb architect.md to try steer the will of the tool. He wants to design and do it better with some highly integrated hidden ai. So far whenever I heard product x says that has AI, most of the time is a product with zero real integration and just a chatbot in a separate window
> 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.
Then there's this:
"A more intuitive task-based approach to monitoring agent activity, presenting you with essential artifacts and verification results to build trust."
The whole thing around "trust" is really weird. Why would I as a user care about that? It's not as if LLMs are perfect oracles and the only thing between us and a brave new world is blind trust in whatever the LLM outputs.
I'd say that because right now, verifying the LLM output (meaning: not trusting it) is a huge bottleneck (rightfully so). I guess they are trying to convince people that this bottleneck is no more, with this IDE.
wow, you weren't kidding about the scroll induced nausea.
Written by AI now summarise and explained by AI.
Translation: "don't trouble your little brain actually trying to read the code that our model produced. we can show you pictures of the output instead."
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.
Yeah I've used it today quite heavily and I genuinely feel it's given me the best AI workflow yet, and I say this coming from Jetbrains + Claude Code.
Personally I felt having immediate access to the VSCode extension ecosystem to be a huge boon and I quickly got a setup to my liking.
Have you tried Cursor though? To me, that is the system to beat.
I haven't no. I could be wrong but I always saw Cursor as more of a low-code tool whereas Claude Code + IDE as the more professional combo.
AI integration into all aspects of the IDE is the killer feature of Cursor for me. Also access for $20 a month to every important model out there, and once you go over your credits, they grant you about another $25 in free credits and then you can work pretty much unlimited in Auto mode where it automatically picks the model for you.
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.
Hadn't heard of jj, it's a source control tool that advertises that it's fast and compatible with the git on disk format. https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj
Lots of discussion about it on HN if you want to explore more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952796
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30398662
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45083952
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641961
As a daily Claude Code and Codex user, I've really got to start getting into jj. I keep telling myself I will but I'm just so used to git.
Can you elaborate on how you personally use jj workspaces with command-line coding agents?
Sure. Honestly I think you can get the same with git work trees, though I haven't tried.
After a couple iterations on this, I've ended up having claude code vibe-code a helper CLI in Go for me which I can invoke with `ontheside <new-workspace-name> <base-change>` and will
- create a new jj workspace based on the given change
- create a docker container configured with everything my unit tests need to run, my claude code config mounted, and jj configured
- it also sets up a claude code hook to run `jj` (no arguments) every time it changes a file, so that jj does a snapshot
- finishes by starting an interactive claude code session with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`
- it also cleans it all up once I exit the claude code session and fish shell that's running it
With this I can have Claude Code working asynchronously on something, while I can review (or peek) the changes in batch from my main editor by running `jj show <change-id>` / `jj diff -r "..."` (which in my case opens it up in the Goland multi-file diff viewer). I can also easily switch to the change it's working on in my main editor, to make some manual modifications if necessary.
This is, in general, primarily for "in the background async stuff" I want to have it work on. Most of the time I just have a dead-normal claude code session running in my main workspace.
Minor self-plug - if you want, I posted a jj intro article a while ago[0], though it doesn't include my current workspace usage.
[0]: https://kubamartin.com/posts/introduction-to-the-jujutsu-vcs...
The Agent Manager view providing a unified view of all active agents and allowing you to immediately respond to any approval requests or followup questions looks very useful regardless of which VCS you're using under the covers. Am I missing something here that jj does?
See my setup detailed in another sibling comment of yours, jj is just a small part of it, and you can probably get that with git too.
I’m already at full mental capacity planning and reviewing the work of two agents (one foreground which almost never asks for approval, and one background which never asks for approval).
I don’t really need the ability to juggle more of them, and noticing their messages is not a bottleneck for me, while I’m happy with the customizability and adaptability of my raw’er workflow.
Maybe if they’re as slow as codex…
Fair enough. I use git worktrees (with a script that creates the git branch, worktree and opens a new vs code workspace). You're right, managing more than about two active sessions at once is probably the limit though I'm somewhat hopeful that better tooling similar to the Agent Manager window here would allow me to scale a bit past that especially if some of those sessions are more design explorations.
It's a good start, but I found it lacking compared to VSCode+CLINE+Gemini Pro.
> 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".
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.
It's the same thing they tried to sell with low/no-code.
The problem is that the engineer turning what you want into code isn't normally the bottleneck. I would say about 50% of my job is helping people specify what they want sufficiently for someone to implement.
Non-technical people are used to a world of squishy definition where you can tell someone to do something and they will fill in the blanks and it all works out fine.
The problem with successful software is that the users are going to do all the weird things. All the things the manager didn't think about when they were dreaming up their happy path. They are going to try to update the startTime to the past, or to next year and then back to next week. They are going to get their account into some weird state and click the button you didn't think they could. And this is just the users that are trying to use the site without trying to intentionally break it.
I think if managers try to LLM up their dreams it'll go about as well as low/no-code. They will probably be able to get a bit further because the LLM will be willing to bolt on feature after feature and bug fix after bug fix until they realize they've just been piling up bandaids.
I am cautiously optimistic that there will be a thriving market for skilled engineers to come in and fix these things.
They will equally be tired of being told yes by LLMs.
I don't think this is speaking to the engineers
Then who are they targeting? Who else would currently be "implementing every single step"?
Project managers and higher level management.
Reminds me of the pre-GitHub days, when I had to use CM tools designed to appeal to project and CM managers, not to the poor developers who had to use them every day. Anybody else remember Harvest?
Yeah, we'll see how that'll go.
Few horse racers became automobile racers.
If existing engineers don't change it doesn't matter because new engineers will take their place.
Horse racing didn’t go away and there are more people who race horses professionally than who race cars.
There are many more truck drivers than buggy drivers
there is a lot more buggy code than truck code
Truckers code better than bugs
Buggy drivers are adapted to racing conditions better than truck ones.
"Professional riders number roughly three to six thousand worldwide, while professional drivers number roughly twenty to forty thousand across major sanctioned series."
Horses also run faster than pictures of cars
Copium
We‘ll wait and see.
Car manufacturers made profit
Some will wait and see, yes.
Perhaps it's worth posing the question: what sorts of "engineers" might feel threatened by agents? Those doing engineering, or those who spend their careers wading in the shallows? Competent designers with deep comprehension, or, at best, the superficial pedants?
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- A new "AI" IDE announced
- It's VS Code
Like clockwork!
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.
If both work equally well then why does it matter whether Zed or VSCode is under the hood?
I think the point is that they don’t both work equally well.
Then maybe they shoulda elaborated on that? /shrug
I love Zed code. Sad that Sublime Text is not keeping up.
Once the UI soup around AI dev use has settled (and it's getting closer) I bet you we will see native apps with c/c++/zig/rust backends that render so much faster on all the junctions that aren't roundtrip limited (and yes, that will still matter to many people).
Why would you bet that? It hadn't happened before AI so not sure why it would now. In fact this is why VSCode was even created, because it was easier hacking on a browser renderer than making something from scratch.
These are two of the fastest editors, and I use both, but I don't think they're for the same thing: Zed is for multi-file projects with moderate IDE abstractions (Worse than Jetbrains; better than most others); Sublime is for editing one-off files with syntax highlighting.
On the contrary, I am glad that the Sublime team did not fall for the trends and avoided adding AI slop into the editor
I would bet in time they are vindicated. Then Google et al will release something with much advertising hype about "returning to basics" or something in a couple of years.
[dead]
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?
Back when Cursor was new (before literally everything was AI hype) they explicitly called out that they wanted to do more in-depth integration with the editor than was possible with just the extension APIs.
Presumably that hasn't changed much. If you want to do any large-scale edits of the UI you need to spin up a fork.
I don't know, does Cursor offer anything substantial beyond an extension like kilocode? (I've only used vanilla VSCodium branch with various extensions but they all seem to integrate everything from tab-completion to complete UI agentic take-over very well)
Correct. One could say the same thing for browsers. I suppose on the one hand it's good that it's relatively easy to spin up a new project like this, on the other hand one must swear allegiance to their large software company of choice.
> VSCode
You mean Chromium wrapper?
Chromium? You mean OS wrapper?
OS? You mean HAL wrapper?
HAL? You mean hardware wrapper?
It's also an absolutely basic fork. They haven't even bothered with a custom theme, or custom UI, it's just vscode with an agents window slapped on top.
Weirdly, out of all the vscode forks the best UI is probably bytedance's TRAE
How many forks of VS Code am I supposed to have installed at this point?
My YC2026 startups are an AI agent that automatically manages your VSCode forks, and a public safety computer vision app for smart glasses that predicts whether someone can afford a lawyer based on their skin color
They'll have to compete with these other pending funded companies:
- ai therapist for your ai agents
- genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives
- prompt engineering as a service
- social media post generator so you can post "what if ai fundamentally changes everything about how people interact with software" think pieces even faster
- vector db but actually json for some reason
(Edit: formatting)
> genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives
AI Agent Orchestration Battle Bots. Old school VMs are the brute tanks just slowly ramming everybody off the field. A swarm of erratically behaving lightweight K8s Pods madly slicing and dicing everything coming on their way. Winner takes control of the host capacity.
I might need this in my life.
Don't forget there's 2 or 3 of each in YC2026.
You'll need a Chromium based app to count the installs for you.
yes
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.
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.
> feels like a vibe-coded VSCode fork
That's 100% what it is, and rushed at that. Competition is (generally) a good thing though, only time can tell which IDE comes out on top.
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.
Looks to be. The UI has almost the exactly the same bits, and I even got 'Cascade' references as using it.
I haven't used Windsurf (been using Claude Code and similar). Does it provide an Agent Manager window/view? This to me looks more useful to me than the browser integration piece.
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.
Why is scrolling modified on this page? I how to disable it?
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.
Basic-to-great rationality or skill may not be what is being rewarded here (although the baseline of course needs to be met) - it could well be compliance capability. Hence the string of arbitrary memorization exercises.
> Google likes to fuck with basic browser functionality for some reason.
Apple is the worst offender here. Their product pages are always sluggish.
Yeah, though with theirs I can usually see why they did it (even if I’d rather they didn’t). Google’s MO is messing with scrolling for what often appears to be no user-facing reason at all.
> I can usually see why they did it
wut? scrollhijacking is bad, and doesnt matter who does it.
I never wrote that it wasn’t? In fact I implied I think otherwise, just a few words after what you quoted.
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.
Put this in your browser console to force default scrolling
Thank you. Seems the website didn't like this btw, Safari macOS. Forced return to top of page when scrolling too fast.
They want everyone to see what the webpage looks like on their Mac.
I'm on a Mac and that scrolling speed is not how Mac's scroll. The acceleration and drag are all wrong.
It's weird and laggy on Mac too. Not sure who this is for.
They could vibe code this feature as well so they did.
Came here to say this, it's super frustrating.
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.
I threw up a little in my mouth at "you can verify your code quality at a glance".
Should read
> You can skip verifying your code quality, then ship with absolute chutzpah.
> 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.
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.
Arguably this is like every other automation in the Industrial Revolution but this time for knowledge workers.
The masses will get their metaphorical fake leather belts made by slave labor operating machines and won’t know better.
A few artisans will make very little money making the real thing manually, mostly for their own enjoyment.
This is assuming AI can actually be made to lower knowledge work’s training/education requirements, and that debate is still ongoing.
> Please someone, make me feel something with software again.
Work with what you love, and you will never love anything again.
There is cool stuff out there! Look beyond the companies with $B valuations and you can find smart, passionate people making neat stuff.
Challenge accepted
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"
Jules
Product leaders that apply world-changing technology breakthrough names to their yet-another cloned SaaS product deserve more shame.
Antigravity would be a world-changing technology. This isn't.
Why? There's nothing wrong with metaphor.
And agentic coding is about working at a much higher conceptual level. Further from the ground. Antigravity is a functional metaphor.
My only issue with it is that it's too long at five syllables, and "anti-" is an inherently negative connotation. I'm guessing this will eventually get renamed if it gets popular, much like Bard was.
As the parent said, actual anti-gravity is world-changing technology. It's telling the very laws of nature to go fuck themselves, you're gonna do what you want, even if all of known physics says it's impossible.
Working at a higher conceptual level is just project management. You're the legislator giving out unfunded mandates rather than the agency staff that has to figure out how to comply. There's power there, but it isn't anti-gravity.
That said, I suspect this is really meant to allude to https://xkcd.com/353/.
> There's power there, but it isn't anti-gravity.
That's why it's metaphor. "Operation Warp Speed" also delivered vaccines quickly, but not faster than the speed of light.
The list of company and product names that are based on a metaphor that is very obviously exaggerated is endless. Google doesn't index a googol number of pages either.
I feel it's a bit ignorant of you to double down on your argument and compare a cloned product release by some macbook swinging google engineers with vaccination, which actually positively impacted many human lives.
Are you for real? When someone disagrees, it's not "ignorance" or "doubling down". It's just legitimate disagreement. There's nothing I'm ignorant of here, so please don't throw around insults like that.
I just continue to stand by the fact that naming products using exaggerated metaphor is standard practice. The idea that it is "shameful" or "ignorant" seems absurd. I think it's OK not to take it too seriously. Nobody is going to be confused and walk off of a cliff or something because the product is named "antigravity"...
Do you get upset that the Milky Way candy bar doesn't actually contain a galaxy within? Or that the Chicago Bulls aren't as strong as actual bulls?
so your point is that you are policing what people think is shameful or ignorant? Is it too much to not think too high of a VSCode fork?
Geez, people are still this impressed by big tech?
Since when did disagreeing become policing? But yes, if someone calls me ignorant without any justification, I'm going to disagree. And if you think that's "policing", I'm sorry but you seem to be the ignorant one here around the meaning of that word.
"Geez," it's just a name. Is it too much to not get worked up over a perfectly innocent and fun name?
Perfectly innocent and fun name, coming from Google? Are you for real? That's one of the craziest things I've read in this forum, someone still thinking Google is an innocent startup with a "Don't be evil" motto.
You think the name is evil...? Sorry, but that's one of the craziest things I've read in this forum.
We're not talking about monopolistic business strategy here or anything. We're talking about a product name. So yeah, I think the name is perfectly innocent and fun. I cannot understand the level of conspiratorial thinking that must be involved to think "antigravity" is some kind of offensive choice. Bizarre.
The name that you are treating as a separate entity, does not exist by itself. Naming a product is an act of a company, Google. There is no conspiracy here, we are talking about bad taste and low quality.
Whether the name is "shameful" has nothing to do with who names it. Yes, the name does exist by itself.
The name is fine. You are bringing some kind of anti-Google prejudice to this that is irrelevant and frankly baffling.
not me, I wasn't the one that started the thread but anti-google sentiment (not prejudice) is everywhere now, what is less common, but not here in HN, is ex-google employees and people with a one-sided relationship with google spending a good amount of their time defending Google. That is indeed irrelevant and baffling.
They should not be too metaphorical when naming a clone, tho.
Why not? And clone of what?
This 'Antigravity' software is far below the expected Google software engineering standards I have ever seen.
Quite shocking to see that Google would consider using this crass software and is the most inefficient software libraries ever made.
What were the engineers thinking?
Wait until you see Google Perpetual Motion Machine, their appointment-booking virtual assistant.
This is a vibe-coded VSCode fork. In a simple task, I got overload/quota exceeded errors with horrible error handling. lol
Same for me also. I have Gemini Pro subscription, still it is showing quota exceeded error.
I recognize the guys in the video, they were in marketing videos for the Windsurf IDE before its founding team was cannibalized by/absorbed into Google.
Kevin was CTO / head of product engineering at Windsurf, Anshul was a founding engineer
I found the demo videos off-putting, people come off a bit smug, not sure if intended.
Just from the name, I thought this was going to be Google's official take on the classic "Google Gravity" site from ages ago: https://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google-gravity...
I used to love leaving that site open on public PCs and watching the reactions that resulted :)
I've been using it today and honestly I'm impressed. I seem to be the exception when I say I don't care it's a vscode fork. Having access to the extension ecosystem seems like a boon to me and I could quickly get a setup to my liking to rival my current Jetbrains Claude Code setup.
It seems to streamline my existing Claude Code workflow with a much better UI. The tab complete seems the best I've experienced and the text/image selection, adding comments and iterating on a plan is genius.
Depressing to see everyone here unable to see the forest for the trees.
I agree! It's great. Until you hit the limit, then there's literally no path to continue.
I would happily pay 20 or whatever for 4x limits. I'm very curious what they end up offering. My major reservation is side project vibes. I think it's hard to believe on this long term unless Google themselves adopt it.
I think hitting limits is a common complaint I see across all the AI tools. I used it with Gemini Pro and didn't hit such limits.
How is it compared to Cursur though?
I haven't used Cursor sorry.
""Autonomously, an Antigravity Agent writes code for a new frontend feature, uses the terminal to launch localhost, and actuates the browser to test that the new feature works."
very interesting times; i'm glad to see browser automation becoming more mainstream as part of the ai-assisted dev loop for testing. (disclosure: started the selenium project, now working on something similar for a vibe coding context)
is that "vibium" ? as someone who tried setting up selenium in a workflow im definitely interested.
yup, vibium!
Most people are missing the point here. Testing the GUI/feature more reliable is something that Gemini 3 could unlock (looking at the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark and its general improvement on visual understanding). At least for the (hobby-)projects I attempted this was really a bottleneck having to always test the GUI after each change as its quite often breaking something.
It's insane to me that I can't pay $20/$200 bucks after running out of limits in ~5 messages.
Why would you not at least link it to the pro and ultra accounts
at least you could upsell the pro subs to ultra. Millions of claude code and codex users who are into agentic coding is your servicable market paying attention today.
Now I'll delete antigravity and go back to codex / claude code / cursor ...
> Google Antigravity is an agentic development platform, evolving the IDE into the agent-first era.
Antigravity enables developers to operate at a higher, task-oriented level by managing agents across workspaces, while retaining a familiar AI IDE experience at its core. Agents operate across the editor, terminal, and browser, enabling them to autonomously plan and execute complex, end-to-end tasks elevating all aspects of software development.
via: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/google-antigravity/about/
I have absolutely 0 idea why any developer would rely on any IDE produced by google. It'll be canned within 5 years max, with 3-4 seeming like a reasonable estimate of the lifespan of the product
I've been using my current IDE for 17 years, and plan to continue using it for at least another 15
You mean Android Studio will be canned in 2018 max with a reasonable estimate of 2016-2017?
Isn't Android Studio based on IntelliJ and not a product developed from ground up? And Android Studio has second order revenue from the playstore.
I wouldn't be even surprised if internally the AS team's financials are counted under the Playstore umbrella.
Antigravity is based on VS Code, not designed from the ground up, and has second order revenue from the AI subscriptions (financials probably counted under the AI umbrella).
I still wouldn't trust a Google product to stick around, but these hints aren't a reliable oracle either.
When AS was launched Android was the only other viable option and it is the same even today. I don't believe Google's AI products will reach and/or sustain the same dominance as Android.
It is a product launched in the hype cycle of AI. Google has plenty of other products (launched during hype cycles) that are gathering dust.
That's not a guaranteed signal that it will meet the same fate but its something strong enough to be wary of.
It's interesting to think that Google's Antigravity is a forked version of MSFT's VS Code, which uses a browser engine built by Google, which they forked from Apple, which they forked from KHTML.
It's made by Jetbrains thankfully.
It won't matter. The core ideas of an Agent Manager view will be copied and improved by others in many project in the future.
Which is is, vi or emacs?
It will be very funny if it's vim, since Bram Moolenaar who created and ran it worked at Google from 2006 to 2021.
codeblocks. There are dozens of us!
Do you really think antigravity will last longer than 1 year?
Yes
I really don't know why I struggle so much with this stuff. I believe these models / agents / whatever write code that is often at least as good as the code I write, and they are super helpful tools, but it just feels like it takes away so much of the joy that is programming to me. I'm not saying it's "right" of me to feel this way, but for me the struggle, and the figuring things out by testing, identifying patterns, or looking deeper into a library's implementation (etc) is part of the challenge that makes programming and software construction fun.
I'm in your boat. I picked this career because I enjoy solving problems and thinking and understanding. I'm interested in how things work inside below the layers. To me, it's like the tech has a purpose of its own, and not just to provide value.
Using agents effectively is this whole other skillset including managing requirements, prioritization and, worse yet, I'm rarely left with any knowledge. I don't nearly get the same joy out of "I finished a task with an agent" like I do with "I had a problem, I delved deep to understand it, learned something new and solved it"
Then again, I bet people making furniture out of wood felt the same about industrial furniture factories. And it can be argued that not every use case needs custom tailored furniture...
It is kind of joyless that my day is now wait 20 min, QA, report back.
Absolutely.
You can still do that, don't use LLMs.
This is the fruit of Windsurf brain-drain and I think it might be better than what's out there since those guys got to start from scratch from everything they learned building Windsurf
I forgot all about Windsurf from ... 4 months ago. The pace is crazy.
Google subscriptions and services are so terribly mismanaged that I will be staying away, no matter how incredible this shallow fork of vscode may be.
I remember a previous story months ago about Gemini that had Google PMs trying to hype their product, but it was all question about how nobody knows how to get Gemini API keys with any number of paid subscription.
On top of that how long until it’s https://killedbygoogle.com/ ?
My heart really sinks every time someone launches a "new IDE" and it turns out to be VS Code. VSCode can be turned into an IDE for _some_ platforms. But not for others. It remains a text editor with some nice extras (syntax highlighting, navigation) but lacking others (debugger, testing, ...).
What's most astonishing is that I can't seem to find what actual platforms it works for. I don't doubt the LLM's can write code in almost any language and for almost all frameworks, with varying success.
But which languages/platforms/framework will the IDE work for technically, having compilers etc built in? I don't care if an LLM can help me with the code, if I then can't compile it within the same IDE!
They have a "full stack" use case here, which doesn't even suggest what this stack consists of? https://antigravity.google/use-cases/fullstack
Am I going crazy or are they just handwaving the _actual_ development tasks in all this?
Haven't we got enough of new eras yet?
No the investment amount demands a new era per week
Each VSCode fork with some random AI junk slapped on will be a new era! I can’t imagine how many eras behind I’m at this point
See the videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX-OpeNZYI4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKQ9b4UMpGQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45967787
Wonder why they're unlisted.
This is common for videos embedded in a page that don't make sense out of context (e.g. in the YouTube feed).
MacOS/Safari User here. Stuck on 'Setting Up Your Account' once I've authorized it in the browser. /shrug
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968731
https://antigravity.google/docs/faqI love how being a paying Workspace customer for a decade or more has actually locked me out of so many Google products and features.
Not that I have any desire to try this at this point, but it's always felt ironic.
Thanks. Actually did use my personal account and got the issue nonetheless.
Same
Same
To save others the trouble, it doesn't matter whether you use Chrome or Safari for the auth flow. It's broken on both. (I'm using a personal @gmail account.)
Had the same issue, have been able to sign in finally using a Google Cloud Identity (former Workspace) account by changing my IP via a VPN to Singapore. No idea why, but that worked. Tried a few other countries too, but only had success with Singapore.
Nice, if I switch now it'll be killed in two to three years right around the time Zed has all the features that I want!
Was expecting https://pypi.org/project/antigravity/
Thanks for the detailed article. I used a devtool in order to speedup the development with google antigravity. This tool not only provides prompts it provides workflows MCP and lot more to make developer life easier while using Antigravity. Check this out - https: https://antigravityai.directory/
Just sits on "Setting Up Your Account" pane and does nothing :)
I'm having the same issue. I thought it was just me or something with their cloud network. I also haven't been able to download Android Studio from the website for a month. I couldn't even download it from my Macbook so probably not the same issue.
Possibly a problem with "organization" accounts? I'm seeing the never-ending spinner too.
My personal mac worked, my work mac is spinning.
It has jamf among other stuff
Had same issue until I disconnected from Tailscale, in case that helps anyone.
Same issue here. Are you on Mac?
I am and am having the same issue. Edit: And just as I posted this comment, on my second launch, it went through after about a minute of waiting.
[dead]
Tested it for roughly two hours now, far from ready for prime time, very buggy and clearly just quickly build on Windsurfs already rather issue laden code base. Essentially a less well thought out imitation of Trae's Solo mode, added in a second window on top of VSCode and not very well integrated, struggling with terminal commands and despite showing issues in the browser window and screenshot taken by the model, proclaiming the task to be completed. Tool calls also aren't as reliable as I would have expected considering their ownership of the code base, hard to tell whether that is underlying in the model (it was a major issue with 2.5 Pro) or simply Antigravity specific, hoping the latter.
Additionally, there are issues setting up accounts (Singapore VPN solved that for me), no support for Workspace users, only a free tier that requires data sharing, no additional rate limits for paying Pro or Ultra customers, etc. Even worse, Gemini CLI currently does NOT provide Gemini 3 Pro for Ultra Business customers despite paying over € 260,- per month, which is frankly ridiculous.
Will be honest, I was speculating that the reason for the multi month delay between the first A/B tests of Gemini 3 class models and the final release was so they'd have all their dugs in a row. Have some time to test everything, improve tooling, provide new paid subscriptions and/or ensure existing ones get access to everything day one, but they didn't.
Gemini 3 Pro seems very interesting (to early to say), but compared to every other recent launch by OpenAI (5, 5.1, Codex variants), Anthropic (Sonnet and Haiku 4.5), even Kimi (K2 Thinking) and Z.AI (GLM-4.6), this is by far the least organized launch of any frontier lab.
A buggy IDE which is unusable for paying customers, no CLI access for Ultra business (and none at all for Pro of any kind), etc. is frankly embarrassing when considering what competitors manage to provide the day a model launches.
What have they been working on these last two months besides going on X and posting "3" every couple of days? Why is there no paid Antigravity tier, no way to use Workspace accounts, etc? Before launching in this state, I feel it'd have been better to delay a bit more if it was absolutely needed.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this the fourth or fifth IDE built by Google for LLM assisted coding? What happened to IDX and Firebase Studio and aren't they also based on VSCode?
If I use this does it mean Google has access to all my code and it may popup as"AI generated" in someone else's code?
Generally if you are paying full price (paying per token), then it's not used for training.
If you are not paying, or paying a consumer level price ($20/mo) you will be trained on.
ETA: In the terms they say they use your data because "free" is the only option available in preview. However it does say you can disable sharing in your settings...
There is a setting to disable telemetry, unclear what this means though.
That's not quite how LLMs work.
Not but you can be quite sure somewhere deep inside the TOS there is a line saying their telemetry swallow your soul. If not, it will be added. It's google, that's what they do.
I wanted to like it as a Gemini Pro subscriber who does not want to also pay for Claude Code, but after running Antigravity for ~ 10 minutes, and a few back and forward exchanges I got the 'Model quota limit exceeded' message with no indication when it will reset. You get the impression that these products from Google (including Gemini CLI ) are just made as prototypes -- they are supposed to work as a demo, but Google does not actually care about having a working workflow with them. Claude Code on the other hand is an actual product that works well.
Can't wait for my IDE to get sunset on me with no recourse. Thanks google, but I'll pass.
> with no recourse
Why does the IDE eat your files? If an editor shuts down, open up another one and continue. What's with the melodrama?
I installed it, entered one prompt, clicked the "Proceed" button, and got "Model quota limit exceeded."
Those quota limits brought me back down to earth quickly.
Especially since:
So basically just another case of vendor lock-in. No matter whether the IDE is any good - this kills it for me.Theory: the naming of this product is strategic. Google's goal is to push something else above "Google antitrust" in the autocomplete.
Wouldn't that have the opposite effect, now every person googling for Google antigravity will see the second suggestion as Google antitrust
It's just an xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/353/
I can't get the agent to use my MCP server. The MCP config is provided, and the application can query the tools, but the agent can't access my server, only the http operations the application performs to list the tools is something i see in my server logs. It knows there are tools, because it sees the list, it tells me when it's trying to connect to which tool. But that fails.
where are the MCP settings in Antigravity?
https://antigravity.google/docs/mcp
Connecting custom mcp servers.
We have a real, serious problem when even Google (presumably with a large share of the world's engineering might) is just forking VSCode.
Something incredibly weird is going on in the "AI space", everyone seems to believe that they need their own browser and IDE. All of them are just forks of each other, so why aren't they extensions or plugins?
I can't really explain what the issue is, I'd assume it's about lock in, but I don't see a VS Code fork or yet another Chromium browser being something that a person couldn't easily replace with another similar fork, but with a different AI. It that the pitch internally? Lock users into a browser or IDE, so they'll be forced to use a certain AI?
> It that the pitch internally? Lock users into a browser or IDE, so they'll be forced to use a certain AI?
Shrugs that's the only reason that makes any sense short of they're just being blindly mimetic (which, let's be honest, isn't outside of the realm of possibility these days).
Reusing open-source code is a "real, serious problem" now...?
With every AI VSCode fork we get closer to the bubble popping.
Wait till you hear about how much Linux they use.
Curious if the name is a reference to https://xkcd.com/353/
> Come join us! Programming is fun again! It's a whole new world up here!
I hope Google is at least acknowledging the origin of the name, even if they are not paying royalties to Randall Monroe.
Don't take my random pondering as any kind of evidence
The name Bard didn't fly, so they went for literal flying instead.
Either that or google sampled everything in the medicine cabinet
I spent a few days with Firebase Studio when it was announced. I stopped using it because it was clearly a very early alpha - tons of bugs, and didn't seem well thought out. Now, less than a few months later (!!!), they announce a competing IDE with essentially the same functionality, but a different brand? Is the right hand talking to the left?
Seems interesting, makes for the second vscode clone with ai google has made. The demo they showed in the video avoided showing code so I guess thats what they're aiming for. Although when they mentioned you can easily verify code quality by looking at end product screenshots it felt like they don't know what 'code' quality means.
On my m2 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, it took over 12 minutes to startup and get to a usable state. When it did, it was plainly just a jacked version of VSCode. Opening a project caused it to hang again. Dumped it. VSCodium, with the terminal pane open so I can talk to Claude works fine for me...
The name sounds like it is not going to stick around for long.
A product name with five syllables is doomed.
The amount of New Eras stuffed into New Eras is too damn high!
It's a shame not even mention the amazing work of VSCode.
The VSCode homepage does not mention Chromium or Electron.
It might sound smart your defense of Google but VSCode is not a fork or electron and chromium, there's a lot of work there, not just clicking a fork button
Loads a blank white page and breaks the back button in Firefox.
Console error:
> Loading module from “https://antigravity.google/main-74LQFSAF.js” was blocked because of a disallowed MIME type (“text/html”).
So the whole world is a scam for your data now basically.
Neigh, a Trojan Horse.
This pun made me actually laugh out loud. I almost lost some coffee.
Something something, "my kingdom for a horse." Obligatory upvote, wp
Looks great, won't touch since they are probably going to do a switcheroo or a shutdown as usual.
And of course I would need to look at all the implications of spying, being locked out of google account and absence of support that are google amo. No time for that. Not for them.
After the first five minutes of using it on Ubuntu, it crashed with error saying I don't have enough free memory, quick look into system stats proved that wasn't the case.
Anyway, not a great first impression. I guess I'll try again in a few months.
> Cross-surface Agents
Nice that it's built-in, Claude Code needs an MCP for this at least.
> User Feedback: Intuitively integrate feedback across surfaces and artifacts to guide and refine the agent’s work.
I wish they'd just let me edit the implementation plan directly instead of me having to explain the corrections. Claude Code has the same weakness. Explaining the corrections is slower than editing the plan manually, and it still keeps the incorrect text in context as well.
> An Agent-First Experience: Manage multiple agents at the same time
Sounds nice in theory but I assume you can run multiple agents for 5 minutes or so and then you're out of credits.
As a claude code user I'm not really sold on this product.
I tried it. Maybe I got unlucky, but Gemini performed poorly in my testing. I gave it a task that I was working on with VSCode and GPT codex 5.1. Gemini3 repeatedly failed to finish the task and started to go down a rabbit hole on an unrelated task.
The browser extension is really cool and it provides a needed tool for the agent to use. It used the extension to show the page that it updated in the task document (the task doc is great too). However it showed me a page and did it was done, when it was clearly not done and not what I asked for.
I was expecting weaker tooling and a better model. I got good tooling and a not very good model.
Maybe 3.1 will deliver?
I'm enjoying the concept. Tight browser integration/control. Controlling agents by commenting on Artifacts (Task List, Implementation Plan).
But the user experience for basic things has just been difficult. Unresponsive Agent Manager window. Agents hitting file permission errors because I don't have a proper "workspace". Agents getting blocked waiting for me to confirm a command line's "y/n".
They even packaged it for Linux.
>>Google Antigravity's Editor view offers tab autocompletion, natural language code commands, and a configurable, and context-aware configurable agent.
Okay, but is it configurable? Also, can you configure it to write DRY code?
Oh no. What's with the scrolling in the blog page. What a terrible experience. It's clearly vibe-coded and AI-tested. If a senior saw mingling with the scrolling behavior, it would have been never in production.
I was very hyped: maybe Google finally did something new, complete, unifying CLI and IDE, a sort of Claude Code Web but as an efficient, IDE-like, local thing.
Then I installed it and it was a VSCode fork.
Does anyone here have a take on why so many people are forking VSCode instead of writing a plugin? Is AI codegen the kind of thing that would be impoasible with a plugin or something?
My best guess would be that plugins are limited into what they can do within VSCode, and rewriting a whole IDE/Text editor just for AI Agent seems a lot of work.
For example a while back vscode-pets[1] plugin became popular and tried it and noticed that the pet can only live within a window, whether its the explorer section or in its own panel, I thought it'd be more of a desktop pet that could be anywhere within VSCode but apparently there are limitations (https://github.com/tonybaloney/vscode-pets/issues/4).
So my guess is that forking VSCode and customizing it that way is much easier to do things that you can't with a plugin while also not having to maintain an IDE/Text editor.
[1] https://github.com/tonybaloney/vscode-pets
Yes, it’s to avoid getting bitten by any arbitrary (and potentially self-serving) limits Microsoft chooses to put on the plugin interface.
My experience with GPT and Claude, is that they are fantastic for learning something brand new to me, as a kind of tutor..
But for writing code in some domain I am good in, they are pretty much useless.. I would spend a lot longer struggling to get something that barely functions from them VS writing it myself, and the one I write myself will be terse and maintainable + if it has bugs they will be like obvious ones, not insane ones that a human would never do.
Even just when getting them to write individual functions with very clear and small scopes.
can't get past the "Setting up your account" step atm
Same. I wonder if it is because I'm signing in with my Google Apps for business account.
same here, hope they fix this soon
same just hanging on the spinner
<snark>
Pressing the "Submit" button on their "Google Antigravity for Organizations Interest Form" (https://antigravity.google/interest-form) doesn't actually do anything for me (tried Firefox and Chrome) -> their metrics will indicate that there's no interest from organizations -> the product will be killed in a year.
</snark>
The problem with this whole product category is that vcs cannot track what was actually the source input and what was generated.
If I write "float exp(float base, float exp){"
Then that is the source code and the rest is generated. Mixing it all up is as dumb as uploading a compiled binary or bytecode to git.
Especially annoying when you are working with other people and you can't tell what they actually wrote and know about.
Too bad they never show these magic AI-Assisted tools being used to fix real-world bugs / implement feature requests in their open source GH repositories.
What about a demo that shows how this can be used to fix for example https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/24792?
heads up: it installs a persistent background process that silently squats on the default kafka client port (9092) at startup
there went 10 mins of debugging why kafka wouldn't start
there went 6 hours of debugging why my applications are getting out of memory errors when trying to connect to my inside-docker-running kafka. they were getting an actual answer from antigravity but because of the first 4 bytes of the message, the clients were thinking a huuuuge message is coming and tried to allocate byte array memory for that. such an unthoughtful decision to actually use one of the most common used ports for a developer when developing an actual IDE for DEVELOPERS.
Why is google so bad at product branding and strategy? My complaint is aesthetic: why would you name your product a five-syllable word??
Because it's awkwardly close to the letters AGI, maybe
It's actually this, the command line tool is `agy`
Its clearly a reference to the xkcd comic which does have mindshare.
Thank you for the demonstrating the reasoning that leads to these decisions.
This made me laugh, I assume you are calling me an old fogey and I will be glad to take it. This is why they don't let me near the marketing stuff.
Which comic would that be?
Later edit: Probably this one [1], which is par for the course for Alphabet, they're, conceptually, still living in the early 2010s, when this stuff was culturally relevant.
[1] https://xkcd.com/353/
well they sure seem to make product naming after going through the whole medicine cabinet too, just like the comic
Informally, people will way “antigrav”.
Informally, nobody will be talking about it in one week
Vibe coding has taken a way to where its become psychological, and these days all I work with is just a "fast apt" solution like Cursor's Composer 1, I tried Gemini 3 inside Cursor, and while I had no real application to a real stratified properly to benchmark it with, it felt "already slow" in a very fast race.
Anyone else getting this error: "Agent execution terminated due to model provider overload. Please try again later."
Yes I just tried GP3H and got this. GP3L is fine tho.
I like this tool.
edit: Scratch that, GP3L is erroring out too. Global hug I guess. I still like this.
Small feedback if any of the Antigravity people read here: "Fast" is not a great name for the "eager" option (vs. "Planning") because "Fast" is associated with "dumb" in LLMs (fast/flash/mini). Probably "Eager" would be a more descriptive name
Trip report: I'm using it now to revamp a dashboard I'm working on. TBH it's not feeling much better than Codex - it couldn't figure out how to launch chrome with my default profile nor how to regenerate the css with tailwind. I'm also getting a lot of model quota errors like everyone else.
Notice how "Privacy" is not a talking point anywhere on that page.
⌘F only shows 1 result. and 0 in the comments here!!
Read the title, got excited. Read the page.. ah well, guess we'll have to wait another while for FTL travel.
Same, I thought they had discovered cavorite with their quantum computer or something.
Looks to be live but no content; OpenGraph description is "Google Antigravity - Build the new way".
I was genuinely impressed by the Antigravity browser plugin for "agentic" work.
I ran into a neat website and asked it to generate a similiar UX with Astro and it did a decent-ish job of seeing how the site handled scrolling visually and in code and replicating it in a tidy repo.
So a VS Code fork. At this time, when VS Code is better than ever and ever improving. I think imma pass.
I enjoyed Theo’s take on this https://youtube.com/watch?v=8dTN4PBD2rg
But honestly Google software seems so buggy. The management class took over there a long ago and are quietly ruining the company.
Probably got inspired by Apple and their iOS 26 quality control
Petty nitpick, but this sentence doesn’t sound right
> “Google Antigravity's Editor view offers tab autocompletion, natural language code commands, and a configurable, and context-aware configurable agent.”
Is it a typo or was there a reason to add configurable twice?
They might have made the whole thing with AI to prove you can make things with AI
Nice demo, but they didn't say the most important thing - how much did Gemini API calls in that demo really cost? How much tokens were consumed?
I know there's a "free plan with generous rate limits" but it's obvious that they're losing money there.
It's fascinating to me how far they de-emphasize product screenshots on the website, even in the video on it. And the pricing page is all but blank.
Really reflects how companies are prioritizing hype and adoption over product quality.
(now off to download it...)
I clicked around for ~30 seconds and I have no idea what this is. Great job, Google marketing
I have lamented the fact that download buttons can be hard to find on software home pages sometimes. But having just a download button and a "more" button on your landing page seems to be taking things a bit too far.
I don't get how these agents can work when even Claude Sonnet 4.5 (for example) needs a lot of hand-holding for basic, simple bugfixing stuff. Wouldn't the agents just be huffing and puffing their way off the rails all the time?
They do and it is often entertaining.
This is the key question.
I'm stuck on "setting up this account" like most people. What a botched launch. This kind of bugginess and unreliability has become so much more frequent since big tech started tightening the screws with mass layoffs.
Had some issues setting up with my Google account, never went past the setup page. Some friends faced the same problem, but managed to advance by skipping installing extensions. Trying that now to see if it works!
This thing crashes on Ubuntu LTS 24.04 during start. Apparently all these agents are not able to ensure that a desktop app starts on a popular Linux distribution.
If Google has forgotten how to do Software, than the future doesn't look bright.
On Windows, it behaves like a malware. Suddenly flashing command prompt windows when you interact with it. Not very nice (also, lazy, since you don't need to do that flashing if you're a legitimate app).
Landing page instantly spun up the fan on my laptop. The animation was about 3fps.
I enjoy that the post-login confirmation page (https://antigravity.google/auth-success) still says "Docs | Twitter"
> we added pieces that evolved the IDE towards an agent first future such as ... an additional novel agent-first form factor
"Novel agent-first form factor" feels very buzz-wordy. Does it refer to an actual feature?
Did they build this site with Antigravity because it sure is broken on my iPad.
Blog post: https://antigravity.google/blog/introducing-google-antigravi...
Tried Antigravity for 2 queries and my model quota limit breached. Model definitely felt better than GPT 5.1 (my current daily driver). I am continuing to use Gemini 3 Pro on Cursor to evaluate further.
I couldn't get it to work on M1 mac. it spins forever on login screen.
It's probably just under a huge load right now. Set it up pretty easily earlier on an M1 Air, but agent chats fail quickly with "model under load"
That floating chess board was a subliminal message: Your project will teeter, and critical pieces will fall off. You will occasionally make an illegal move as the board annoyingly shifts beneath you.
When it starts it prints: Using Cloud Code URL: https://daily-cloudcode-pa.sandbox.googleapis.com
Is this being used internally at Google? What's the "dog-fooding" situation and is it leading to productivity enhancements?
I keep getting: "Antigravity server crashed unexpectedly. Please restart to fully restore AI features." On Ubuntu 24.04 - others on reddit reporting the same with 24.04.
I don’t really understand, if replacing developers is right around the corner, why throw money into so many IDEs. Or perhaps it’s really cheap to produce something like this?
I've spent time with this today and I really like it.
The problem is the rate limiting is both aggressive and has no option to pay to bypass.
Also call it "antigrav". Less of a mouthful
Looking at that page makes me think I should go the other direction and switch from a graphical IDE to vim or something. You know, ground myself by adopting more gravity.
I agree that the name is horrible. It has Anti, gravity and Google in it. Vim and all other non-graphical tools are great because they work in WSL, they work in linux servers and they may even work in Docker containers, although sometimes you have to do something like: apk add vim
The name strange indeed. However, Gravity is able to connect to WSL in the same way as VSCode: Ctrl+P -> ">Remote-WSL: Connect to WSL"
It's a hard sell for Cursor users using Gemini 3 to switchover to AntiGravity. There's nothing innovative they have introduced for me to switch IDEs.
the thing is, I tried it and it took 10 seconds to import all settings from cursor. the moat for vscode clones is really small. i imagine people will jump a lot from clone to clone, like from model to model now.
Did any of these VS Code forks yet fix their issues from official marketplace access leading to extensions being severely outdated and ripe with security issues?
Well, I can't even use it at all, it's just stuck on the 'Setting Up Your Account' step forever. That's a pretty sad product launch lol.
I don't want to hate on this but I remember last week, when as a backend developer doing frontend, I spent about 20 minutes prompting Claude Sonnet in a loop trying to build a landing page for a new feature.
The task was to put create a header, putting the company logo in the corner and the text in the middle.
The resulting CSS was an abomination - I threw it all away and rewrote it from scratch (using my somewhat anemic CSS knowledge), ending up with like 3 selectors with like 20 lines of styles in total.
This made me think that 1: CSS and the way we do UI sucks, I still don't get why don't we have a graphical editor that can at least do the simple stuff well. 2: when these model's don't wanna do what you want them to the way you want them, they really don't wanna.
I think AI has shown us there's a need for a new generation of simple to write software and libraries, where translating your intent into actual code is much simpler and the tools actually help you work instead of barely allowing to fight be all the accidental complexity.
We were much closer to this reality back in the 90s when you opened up a drag and drop UI editor (like VB6, Borland Delphi, Flash), wrote some glue code and out came an .exe that you could just give to people.
Somewhere along the way, the cool kids came up with the idea that GUIs are bad, and everything needs to go through the command line.
Nowadays I need a shell script that configures my typescript CDK template (with its own NPM repo), that deploys the backend infra (which is bundled via node), the database schema, compiles the frontend, and puts the code into the right places, and hope to god that I don't run into all sorts of weird security errors because I didn't configure the security the way the browser/AWS/security middleware wanted to.
>Somewhere along the way, the cool kids came up with the idea that GUIs are bad, and everything needs to go through the command line.
It's important for people to feel like "hackers" that is the primary reason why command line sort of exploded among devs. Most devs will never admit this... they may not even realize it, but I think this is the main reason it went big.
The irony is that the very thing that makes devs feel like "hackers" is the very thing that's enabling agentic AI and making developers get all resistant because they're feeling dumber.
Once upon a time, all you needed to program was a compiler. Now, it's moving toward paying to write code. This will certainly kill open source
All of this is entirely optional. You're free to code the "old-fashiond" way, if you so prefer.
Not sure what this gives me over Copilot in VSCode that has access to OpenAI, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Raptor(?) models.
I assume that Copilot will have this model soon...
Gemini, create an RSS feed for https://antigravity.google/blog
you would need to be bonkers to trust Google at the intersection of 1. vibe coding, 2. supporting developers, and 3. a product that's not selling ads
Anyone else stuck on 'setting up your account'?
Need to use a personal account. Check the first question in the FAQ: https://antigravity.google/docs/faq
My guess is it fails if you use a workspace account. I was able to use it with my personal Google account.
Hmm that does indeed seem to be the case.
Yes, its also failing on my workspace account but worked on my personal. Might be a bug or a delayed deployment for workspaces b/c it might need to be "enabled" by admins?
Doesn’t work with a workspace account for me but it does work with my private account
I'm not using a workspace account and am unable to get past this step.
Oh well. Uninstalled. This was my first experience doing software development guided by AI. Doesn't seem like a tool that will serve me well in the long run.
I probably wouldn't have been drawn to coding if I was young these days based on the same motivations that led me to venture into it as a teen.
I wanted to try it. How to install it on Opensuse (Tumbleweed)? I was unable to install the rpm for Fedora.
Man does this thing spam new windows... why spawn new window instead of panels in a single instance?
I have to close 4+ after just a few minutes of poking around
Tangential I know but what a clumsy sounding name
I really dislike the name. Apparently:
That's good because my arms were getting tired pushing code around in emacs everyday.Lame. Still like things like Zed that look a bit like vscode but without all the electron trash.
It’s just google’s attempt at cursor. Nothing to see here.
And for the first time since I have this MacBook Pro (M2 2023) I heard and felt the fans. I was wondering if they were imaginary.
I'm not switching from Claude code. It did the job but didn't do it as good as Claude Code with the details and context.
Even if this is good, I'll never know because I'm not investing time into something that will be canceled in one year.
Apparently there are only three kinds of developers according to Google, and enterprise developers code mainly Next.js.
Nice that you can use non-Gemini models with it
I was never really a fan of Cursor. I'll use this if it's free and eventually gets generous free quotas.
What's an "enterprise developer"? Is that what normal people call a "backend developer"?
Semantically, it sounds like anyone who develops for a big company, normally an employee or contractor.
Slightly off-topic, but I really hate this trend that now every developer / researcher / engineer also needs to be an actor (typically cringy one) pretending to be quirky for the camera while trying to act unnaturally excited about the technology.
I really miss the days of the professional casualness and naturalness of something like the "mother of all demos" [0]. Like, can you imagine the guy wearing a turtleneck and going, "but wait!" and acting surprised after every sentence? It would NOT have been the same demo.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
> I really miss the days of the professional casualness
Yes, the professional actor that doesn't seem like a paid actor is preferable to the autistic weirdo. That's why they get paid the big bucks and we get relegated to the basement.
Someone decided that the audience of standup comedy overlaps with tech meetup one 100%.
Jokes aside though, it's much broader than that, it's just that the zeitgeist dictates that everyone shifts from work to meta-work: musicians must impress not with their music but the way they make music, researchers must entertain, developers must manage agents, children watch someone else play games instead of playing themselves.
That's yet another increment to the already dizzying level of simulation per Jean Baudrillard.
To stay relevant in the AI race, DeepMind presumably thought to come up with a pop-up AI product.
I've clocked out on agentic AI IDEs. Not installing anymore until I hit an obvious wall with my current ones.
The odds of me using a Google IDE are the same as me logging into my Google+ account to connect with friends.
Does anyone notice that this story has had almost the same number of points and comments for 24 hours?
Are they explicitly excluding OpenAI in their IDE? (gpt-oss running on Google cloud doesn't count)
Just throw it onto the pile, I guess
Is it safe to use these types of AI enhanced editors with files that contain sensitive information?
I tried it and ran out of credits during the first prompt. No visible way to upgrade or purchase.
Why is this not a VS Code Extension?
I know it is not place to seek help but anyone else stuck while trying changing google accounts ?
Okay, maybe I'm stupid, but the demo video included pasting and API key into the chat window.
That seems bad.
Meanwhile I don't feel like the era of AI assisted software development has even started.
It is my understanding that no experienced programmer would even consider touching that stuff given Google's stellar track record in developers' satisfaction.
I believe it is aimed at investors. Thus it will be forgotten the minute it stops influencing stock price.
Thus there is no need to take it literally as a developer tool - it's not.
> I believe it is aimed at investors.
I think it’s more likely aimed at the (internal) promotion committee.
That’s what it feels like yes. It has a lot of overlap with a ton of stuff that Google already does, and it seems like it’s one of those “rather than improving an existing product, let’s create a new one because that gets us a promotion” situations which Google is well known for.
This is very true. 10 years ago I'd be one of the first to try. Now? Thanks, I'm good
Yes... also, why would I use this when it will get shut down soon?
Until they stop supporting it and rug builders using it in typical Google fashion
Seems like they are trying to attack both Cursor and Lovable at the same time...nice !
Can someone inside comment if this is this a cider fork or a new branch off vscode?
In my first test of it, it's pretty bad. Guess I'm sticking to codex.
Still hopeful but the biggest issue for a python user: Pylance
If you manage to even get the Pylance extension to show up (I had to change the "marketplace" settings) it will say: > This extension is not compatible with Antigravity
What the heck am I supposed to do with the Jedi fall back? Legitimate question: Can Jedi even highlight unused imports? Can it import symbols not found?
If Pylance doesn't work, fork it. But the LSP needs to just work out of the box.
Hey Karter did you find any solution to that? I'm facing the exact same problem... were you able to use Pylance or any other similar? Thanks
Pylance is MS-proprietary and so no one can use it (incl Cursor/Windsurf).
I think you can use BasedPyright? Not sure if other Pyright variant work (e.g., * for Cursor/Windsurf etc.) but this one works for me.
Yeah just kind of frustrating how the Python plugin (which has a dependency on Pylance) just fails to install Pylance in Antigravity. I even got some error messages related to it.
In windsurf installing the Python plugin it will install Windsurf Pyright: https://marketplace.windsurf.com/extension/Codeium/windsurfP...
It looks like that is a fork of basedpyright. I have just been using basedpyright now. Better than Jedi / Windsurf Pyright (at least in the import area which was frustrating me).
Idk what cursor does, my free credits ran out a while ago :P
As if this was something one could trust it won't be shut down 3 years from now...
No thanks...
This could have been a plugin.
I wonder how long they're gonna keep this around before they pull the plug.
Maybe they should have used an ai to code an ide without all these glitches
0$/month. Wow, someone is really pushing for widespread adoption.
I downloaded it, but I was not even able to get past `Account Set Up`. :(
I just feel second-hand embarrassment when seeing these kind of posts.
Something felt really "artificial" about that youtube video.
Is this what they recruited the windsurf team for a billion for?
It's impossible to use it, stuck in the loading screen forever
I wonder how many meetings where necessary to come up with that name
https://xkcd.com/353/
I downloaded Antigravity this morning and was able get this Mobius Clock debugged in a few minutes - then for the heck of it added a whole list of features! I'm blown away by how fast you can work. Yes, there were a series of problems, as expected whenever you attempt hard stuff, but at the end of the day, do check out the improved mobius clock!!! https://www.mobiusclock.com
It's really kind of pathetic how we live in a future where "antigravity" is a text editor that lies to you, "hoverboards" are one-wheeled electric skateboards that burn your house down, and... well, can't think of a third thing at the moment, but you know the vibe.
Lotta people mining science fiction for cool names and then applying them to their crappy products, cheapening the source ideas.
A third thong could be “self driving cars” are cars that you have to stay alert and in full control of at all times.
We are in the future, it’s just a much more rubbish version than people imagined in scifi
Anyone got stuck on the "Setting Up Your Account" page ?
i tried with my personal account and still stuck on that page
yep
I switched to my personal gmail identity and it succeeded.
Not interested in trying something that will be killed shortly.
Really hope the quality of the IDE is better than the website...
There's no way I am using such an important piece of life as an IDE from Google just because I know they are going to kill it within 3 years, if it survives that much. Probably will die with the Windsurf guy jumping ship again.
No ... no, thank you. Keep your AI away from me and my stuff.
I cannot see any difference than VS Code with a theme...
"You know what I want? More Google inside my tools."
—No one, ever.
Nice to see that it's not locked to just Gemini models
I cannot stand webpages that hijack scrolling like that.
So deceptive name. It has nothing to do with gravity.
I worked in a factory one summer when I was a teenager. It was a totally brain dead work, but the morale was good. The workers weren't unhappy.
I'm concerned that the new role of "manager of agents" (as google puts it) will be a soul destroying brain dead work and the morale won't be good.
New Era. A New - think about it for a sec - Era.
It's 2025 and a code editor is now 600MB.
I've seen "agent" and "agentic" so many times in the last few months that the usage of the term is quickly becoming one of my biggest pet peeves. The previous one was "enshittification", and I'm glad that one was a short-lived fad.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic about enshittification being a fading fad. I'm seeing non-technical people start to use it now.
Short lived only in my corner of reality I suppose.
dupe https://antigravity.google/
Google AI products are the new chat product
why isn't antigravity finishing the setup on my mac? it's been more than half an hour.
Neat, but the world doesn't need another IDE, and people want choice. Provide tools that plug into open workflows and step back.
What I don't get is why they didn't fork emacs, then build a VScode mode and then add AI to that.
I guess it must have been the GPL which isn’t compatible with their AI agents.
Oh, wait I was meant to take this announcement seriously?
Vim mode isn't working, oh no!
yeah I also cannot get Vim to work in Antigravity?
the funny things is that you can use all the models but you cant switch the browser
Finally! Affordable antigravity!
That's a big name for a slop fork. So many possibilities (with LLMs and without) but Google just can't bring themselves to do anything creative, let alone transformative.
Oh lucky, another free AI beta.
I'm going to treat this like Kiro, and just use it until they start charging for it and then probably switch back to VS code with its built-in agent support.
Eventually they're going to do a rug pull, and instead of paying $10 a month for tons of AI code request, it's going to be two or $300 for that. The economics just aren't there to actually make a profit, hopefully before the rug pool happens local models on normal hardware will be fast enough.
How long until it's killed?
I mean, google doesn't have the greatest track record.
Also, why does that site's scroll behavior is so weird? Just use the browser's default for Ford's sake!
so this is what Google was doing with their 2.5B Windsurf acquisition...
Long live the cursor. RIP.
Comments here complaining about the fact that it's vscode seem to miss the point here.
That's a huge advantage, it's means all the obvious stuff will just work. LSPs, debuggers, version control, customisation.
As much as I like Emacs, it's an insane pain to make all these things work.
If your value prop is agents on a codebase, there's no point in trying to reinvent those. They have basically been solved.
What the hell is going on with scrolling on their website?
yeah... almost completely broken on my iphone. something tells me they used antigravity to vibe the website. would explain other issues mentioned like vim keybindings being ignored.
..."Youre absolutely right! I did mess up the internals of that feature and incorrectly reported that it works. let me try again..."
weird name. abbreviating it to GAG isn't much better.
reads title
Wow was google researching some kind of anti-gravity device behind the curtains for real and then dropped it out of nowhere?
Ah damn, yet another ai-assisted-something. Crap.
A 5 syllable name for a product makes me wonder wtf the marketing team is doing.
Another Google product whose launch will be used to justify somebody's promotion, only to be left for dead only a few months later after said promoted person moves on to something else.
Why would I even bother getting mildly invested in this when the product launch/promotion incentive structure at Google is so well known?
Program not needed.
the agent keeps giving me errors. no thanks.
why it could not be a VS Code extension?
what's the value prop over cursor
probably discontinue it in a few months
Even the launch trailer sucks.
The people at Windsurf who worked on this must be laughing at us driving on their Lambos and Ferraris.
They glued slop together, shipped this and now are in Tahoe drinking Martinis watching the sunset from their private chalets.
The people that made Windsurf are in this trailer. Those who got bought by Cognition were either fired or forced to work 100h weeks
yes, hence why I said the people at Windsurf that worked on this...because they are the ones that have been shipping this slop after the buyout.
so it can be dumped 1 year later?
Nobody is interested in proprietary editors. People only accepted vscode because most of it was open source. AIUI this is a fork of that, but seriously, push out the changes or pass.
How long until they discontinue it?
Can we mark this as a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968065
Wake me up when there's an IDE that cares about performance. My coworkers are amazed my laptop can run for days because I don't use Electron crap.
I get so annoyed when Google launches things like this without Vertex support. Instant no-way from compliance and I'm left sitting on the sidelines.
“agentic” is the new “ai”, which was the new “web3”, which was the new “5G”, which was the new “4G”, which was the new “HDR”, which was the new “HD”…
This looks like an experimental IDE, which is fine. The whole AI bubble is an experiment. It will burst and that's OK as well.
Nice ide, can I disable the AI?
vs code is great!
A tiny part of me was disappointed to find something other than a product involving actual antigravity.
Meanwhile I'm still on my trusty vim and letting the AI do work separately in another CLI.
I moved from Vim to Zed recently.
I've been burned enough by Google Graveyard experiences that this is a hard pass.
Another google product, there are too many and which ones will be around in a year or two?
I've been burned by Google Graveyard enough that this is a hard pass from me.
Oh no. Not another VSCode fork…
Am I the only one stuck in the "Setting Up Your Account" loading screen?
same
Oh cool another ide for programming... aaaand its a vscode fork.
I dont know what i expected tbh
I mean ok, another VSCode fork, but am I the only one seeing the .google TLD?
From what i saw its yet an AI first text editor. Thats a hard pass for me.
Any reason why this isn't just an extension instead of another fork?
Oh look, another piece of shit AI slop I won't use. Next!
and the difference from vscode is...?
This one forces you to log into your google account before you can use vscode!
VS Code won't feature in Google Graveyard in the short term future.
Another VSCode fork! This is getting ridiculous.
yawn.
opencode with it's superior feature set and ability to use any model provider i want is....
superior
why would you even bother with google at this point?
well, I'm not even willing to try it because of whatever retarded thing they did with the page scroll
”We must also do Loveable”
Another VS code fork?
Wow this page is an endless source of memes and broken UX madness
Google at its finest
great, now everybody can vibe code even harder.
cool, more chromium/electron slop.
I don't get it. It's a completely blank web page. Did they not test in firefox?
Ah Google misconfigured their web server:
> Loading module from “https://antigravity.google/main-74LQFSAF.js” was blocked because of a disallowed MIME type (“text/html”).
Edit: And a couple minutes later, it is now working. Guess Google is reading HN.
Honestly, the full page doesn't give you much more. Not a SINGLE product image. All paragraphs about "agentic" blah-blah you have read 100s of times by now - I do not see how this is anything different from all the other AI VS Code forks, besides that it comes with Gemini from the start.
"Not a SINGLE product image."
But there is a 13 minute demo video.
https://antigravity.google/product
Seems like they jumped the gun on the website release, the first version I saw was a wall of text, now it has photos and videos. Maybe they have an agentic CICD
They're blitzing all media with a Gemini 3 push, it seems.
Looks like it's back again!
Can’t even scroll on Firefox mobile lol
yet another Google project heading to the graveyard in 4-5 years. If this AI bubble even lasts that long.
Anyone want to bet how long this product will last before being killed? From looking at the frontpage, my bet is 2 years at most.
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It’s…a VSCode fork? Really? What has become of Google? Ten years ago, when I was getting into the world of software, there was still an aura about them. They built everything in this huge monorepo, and it worked. They were this deeply technical company for whom it seems anything could be done.
And now they can’t even ship a desktop app without forking VSCode? Look, I get it. There’s this huge ecosystem. Everyone uses it. I’m not saying it’s damning or even bad to fork it.
But why is this being painted as something revolutionary? It’s a reskin of all the other tools which are variations on the same theme, dressed up in business speak (an agent-first UX!). I’m sure it’s OK. I downloaded it. The default Tokyo Night theme is unusable; the contrast can’t be read. I picked Vim bindings, but as soon as I tried to edit a file I noticed that was ignored.
What happened? Is this how these beautiful, innovative companies are bound to end up?
I can see why people don’t release stuff on a permissive lisense anymore. It is absolutely insane that google is even allowed to do something like this.
This. I don't think it'll move the needle. I already use vscode with copilot and it's "good enough".
They should've made an ACP server https://agentclientprotocol.com
Yeah. I really like opencode, which provides an ACP.
Do any white people still work at Google or has DEI gone so far that being white means you can't be in their marketing videos anymore?