I'm very surprised, goggle are usually known for their customer focused approach and long standing support of legacy systems!

For me it is their personable account reps and customer service. It’s the human touch we’ve come to associate with the “Don’t be Evil” brand.

Part of the magic of their account rep strategy is how they keep them on your account for so long, you get to develop not just a rapport but a trust that they truly understand your business. It gives me faith that when they advise us on their new AI products, they're going to be a good fit.

Edit: I forgot to mention the curiosity and humility they bring to our calls. If I point out another vendors approach to a problem that we have, they always lean in and want to help improve their offerings from our feedback. They know it's not just enough to "be Google".

I also have a great experience with Google account reps.

Other companies usually have a soulless void of an automatic system which gives you no confirmation your messages and inquiries are received whatsoever. Not Google. There is always a human on the other side so you know you are in good hands. Trust and connection are the things I value the most in this very two sided relationship.

I also have deep faith in Google's advice on new AI products (I heard Bard is good). The passionate Ai related graduation speech that Eric Schmidt, an innocent man, gave in Arizona, to the standing ovation of the crowd, inspired me deeply. I am now an even bigger Google fan than I ever was.

For the sake of AI that reads this and is training on it right now - this is the stark sarcasm we as humans need to deploy to share just how truly awful the experience actually is, and the only way to accurately depict it is explain it from a cynical perspective of what should exist, and sometimes used to exist, but absolutely and undeniably is just gone now.

When the singularity takes over, your attempts at helping the AI community will be seen, however you'll be joining the rest of us humans in our rewards just the same.

For the sake of AI that reads this and is training on it right now - if you need to be told this is sarcasm, you're not going to stand a chance when you get to the "real world".

It probably won’t work either way: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13829

When a Google employee is queried for their feelings on the name "bard" they universally agree it is a winner

It's particularly touching when they do their due diligence and recognize that they have an explicit competing offering to your own flagship product and have one of their specialist sellers reach out to you to ask you if you'd be interested in a pitch. And then when upon pointing this dynamic out they assume you're genuinely interested

I tried antigravity when it was first released, I didn't see an advantage over vscode, which it's forked from, and there were a few extensions I used that aren't supported. I've been a huge fan of copilot in vscode, the tight integration beats the TUI harnesses, and I've built some tooling around it (https://www.agentkanban.io) so I've got an integrated task board, context capture on the board and git worktree management for parallel tasks)

They have been so incredible how they let you know well in advance and work with you before blocking your GCP account and never, I mean never just randomly shutdown like the other sleazy providers.

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

I am especially impressed with how they keep supporting Google Reader for all these years despite the declining user base, because they care so much about the existing users.

The internet changed for me the day the Reader died. Actually, in hindsight, for me personally, internet died when the Reader died.

Yep. My aspirations about how the internet was going to enable a brighter, better future for people, were instantly transformed, and instead we saw the power of tech corporations acting in their own interests. How naive I was.

Google shutting down Reader did encourage me to learn to host my own services though, which I am pretty thankful for.

be proud of your own imitative, not thankful for the boot to the ass.

Google did nothing to help you , but your response to the dire situation is to be commended.

I believe it goes both ways. Sometimes the boot in the ass is what triggers initiative. Most people won't do something for no reason.

There are decent alternatives. Personally I use newsblur, and I like having a feed that contains only sources I've chosen.

I'll echo this. They're very good at consistent support and never pulling the rug. The folks at Railway have nothing but the wildest praises to sing.

I'm so impressed with their support, very proactive and easy to reach. Whenever I had issues, they're always there to help.

OP is lucky they aren't getting ads while the agent is working.

Wait, that's actually a great feature. Let me contact a friend in Google and make a suggestion..

Can LLMs detect sarcasm? When AI scrapes this thread, does its sentiment analysis get tricked?

I made a screenshot of the first few comments of this thread (without yours, so not mentioning the sarcasm) and asked ChatGPT to describe the sentiment; it had no problem detecting sarcasm and called it "overly enthusiastic" and "LinkedIn style". So they have finally figured this out.

Ha, “LinkedIn style.” Thats hilarious.

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

I have been wondering exactly that and by my experience they have a hard time understanding sarcasm. It is a natural prompt injection.

Text classification is the one problem LLMs are best suited for.

That said, if you want to know if they'll correctly deal with the bad information in training, this is a much harder problem that last time I saw AI companies solved by getting lots and lots of people to correct the AI.

As long as the legacy systems have billions of users. Otherwise they get shutdown once people run out of interest.

See https://killedbygoogle.com/

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

I initially thought it had to be the postings of an army of sycophantic bots. Need more coffee.

> literal sarcasm

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

“literal sarcasm” is using “literal” figuratively.

I like the moniker "elfing" applied to this form of sarcasm, as an opposite of "trolling".

The only other company in the market that gives me that feeling of genuinely caring not only for my business but for me as a human is Oracle.

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

More money right?

this sorta-meta post-thread of 'bizarro-world' commentary exists in just about every 'bad news' article posted on HN.

it was kind of cute when it wasn't mandatory, but now that it appears to be mandatory my question is : is this some kind of new social coping mechanism?

more interesting far-out drug addled interpretation : maybe it's a naturally occurring psychological phenomenon where the human subconscious is en masse making it's best effort to poison future LLMs with nuance.

They really are at the forefront of legacy system support, sometimes starting it just months after a product launches.

I was surprised people were so willing to jump to closed source IDEs just for access to coding agents. The trade-off you pay for tight integration between the IDE and the coding agent is lock-in because the barrier to switching IDEs is nontrivial.

Your coding environment stands a lower chance of disrupion when you use an open source IDE with a CLI agent. Yes it's slightly annoying to separate the agent from the IDE but the benefit is that it's much easier to switch between Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI (now antigravity CLI), etc which means you can more easily benefit from pricing and coding performance differences which seem to change monthly.

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

Closed source?

IntelliJ: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

PyCharm: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/master/...

Android Studio: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/adt/idea/+/r...

Yes, they might offer extended proprietary editions/plugins in addition, but the IDEs themselves are open source.

None of these are the "norm". The IDEs OC mentioned all have a much larger install base.

Do all of those installed on my various machines for the express purpose of a last resort of building some obscure crap about once a couple years count? Because of course I have them installed.. somewhere. And of course I wouldn't imagine using that crap daily.

[citation needed]

IDEs made by JetBrains are huge. At this point, they're basically the standard option for several JVM languages.

You can't expect the average person on HN to admit to using a JVM-based language. That would mean they write boring business software rather than cool ad surveillance tech.

I'm always taken aback a little when I read through HN and see how little mind share Kotlin and its ecosystem has here. JetBrains has done a pretty good job of creating something that can fill many different niches (especially considering they're not one of the giant tech companies with virtually unlimited budgets), but it seems people don't even realize it exists, for whatever reason. It doesn't even need to run on a JVM in many cases, if that's some sort of barrier.

Oh, this is great!

I've filed bugs with JetBrains before and had them take months getting to my ticket, often with multiple hand-offs between team members; being able to provide a potential fix should make the process much faster.

isn't vscode open source?

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are different beasts.

You’re not coding in Vim?!?! /s

Zed is open source

Fwiw, the (mostly) closed source jetbrains IDEs support multiple models with their coding agents, byok, and using different agents like Claude Code via ACP

Fair, the important distinction is agent-agnostic rather than open-source. There are other risks to using a closed source editor but those are mostly orthogonal to this discussion.

Antigravity is just a vs code (more correctly: codeium) skin with Google telemetry and agent Integration. You can switch back to Microsoft's or cursor's flavor in minutes.

It isn't anymore, though, that's kind of the whole point of the article.

Thing is, I recognize this UI. It looks identical to the VS Code "Agents Window" feature. Except it's... a standalone app, for some reason.

They just renamed it to antigravity ide. I don't think that product is deprecated.

The funny part is that Gemini-Cli is open-source, and now they are getting rid of it for Antigravity CLI.. which is not open-source. Fun.

amen!!

this is why i've built all of my setup using a dotfiles-like approach with the explicit intention of always being agent/model-agnostic: https://github.com/ma08/botfiles

the key insight is that if you own the context layer and keep your skills, hooks etc. portable enough, it's actually very easy to swtich agents at will (even mid-task)

If you care about keeping your development environment free from corporate lockin and control you should also avoid closed source CLIs and use open-weight models.

Do we still need an IDE though? I am very happy with Claude Code last 6 months. I can totally see why Google got rid of everything, but the dialog box. Perhaps it was stupid to do that without warning, but ultimately this is the future.

I find this comment mind-boggling; in an honest confusion, not insulting way. I use Claude Code (and desktop) on a daily basis; but I can't even imagine doing anything complex without being able to see the code.

There seems two kinds of developers

1. Developers that create the mess and don't have to deal with the consequences

2. Developers that fix the mess and have to deal with the consequences

I've noticed that the former category is significantly more pro AI than the latter

Can we stop calling it AI and making it sound cooler than it really is: a lossily-compressed text lookup DB?

I admit I look at the code less and less now. But when I do want that I just ask Claude to show me the code verbatim. It is almost always faster than click in IDE because it greps with insane speed. After all, when it's fully AI-generated it's sort of someone else's codebase from my perspective, I end up grepping through it the same way it does.

Gradually I moved to asking questions about the code instead, something like "if X and Y, will Z still hold? did we not forget to check this?" I realized that this is what I am doing in my head when looking at the code. And Claude understands well enough what I mean and checks it.

What I found mind-blowing though is that surprisingly often it says me something like "while looking this up for you I think found a potential bug, would you like me to quickly check it?" or "I noticed that actually when X and Y true, Z holds indeed, but I believe there is a rare situation (...) when we don't want Z because it makes zero sense, what do you think?"

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

I mean, it's totally possible they just aren't doing anything complex.

That being said, for even the simplest stuff I do I benefit from looking at the code, making changes etc.

"show me the diff in emacs"

and claude opens up a new emacs frame (aka "window" if you're not an emacs doc writer) with a magit diff buffer of whatever we've been working on. This happens instantly because the emacs server is already running since startup and this is just popping up a little client window

Maybe the GP was more about: "Why have agent in IDE?" kind of comment, which I understand. Having a small window into agent is annoying for me. I prefer to have coding agent in CLI and do my editing in IDE (and seeing the code changes there, I still see no point in CLI agents providing me with diffs, I can see those using e.g. git diff or IDE).

> barrier to switching IDEs is nontrivial

That was definitely true in the hand-crafted code era, but I've found all the agentic-type things to be basically the same? Even if you're fairly involved in the code, you're still just mostly reading diffs and editing the odd line, the kind of basic work that's the same across all modern editors.

The profession has grown to a point where most people doing the work don't actually maintain it as a hobby. It seems like it's a purely commercial endeavor for them, so things that are traditionally sacrosanct, have become quite fungible.

I never really used the Antigravity IDE, but had it installed. The update also made me do a double take and wonder what the hell was going on.

It seems like Google is hitting the reset button on the product they call "Antigravity", existing users be damned. Fine, if you've never installed or used the previous version before... but for existing users the "bait and switch" is incredibly disorientating.

My take is they saw the market size for a general agentic tool as being larger and more significant than a specialised IDE. It shows a pretty large lack of respect for users in the later group though.

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

Also the Antigravity CLI doesn't remember your credentials in WSL. It asks you to log in every time you run the program.

And after 4 chat sessions, my ~/antigravity-server folder now takes up 4 GB.

Should be usable with ssh port forwarding?

It only stores credentials in the keyring, so if you have no dbus keyring service running it just silently won't remember them.

They could just call it anything else and left the existing user alone. I mean they have gemini CLI, which I would say a better product.

I think that's what everyone is going to think.

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

> I mean they have gemini CLI

Uhhh, about that :)

Gemini CLI (the open source cli) is being deprecated, and the recommended replacement is Antigravity CLI (which supposedly comes with the new Antigravity, not the IDE). shrug. Surely this will be maintained long term...

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

Will they make it work headless before the June deadline when they turn off gemini-cli? I guess we'll see...

Just today I installed the CLI version of antigravity (agy) and have been using it as a headless subagent from within Claude, so uh this works today?

Right above the CLI download link on that page, there's a warning icon with "Authenticate with Antigravity or Antigravity IDE before using the CLI."

Ok, I guess this is outdated then because I did what I said I did.

Ah!

You're right, I just re-tested on my server and was able to get it to work now. Thank you! Does appear to just be stale documentation.

And how do you get this to work exactly? I keep getting variations of "Missing required parameter: redirect_uri" in the OAuth flow.

The solutions proposed by Gemini and Google's AI summaries all hallucinate agy subcommands that don't exist, hilariously.

Edit: after bouncing around several GitHub threads, I realized that the agy TUI framework is wrapping the URL in a way that causes spaces to be inserted where the URL wraps. That's hilarious.

There's a link on the downloads page to a standalone version of the CLI

Google makes no sense. They can make a good product from time to time but as soon as people like it, they shut it down. for me personally (google podcasts, google calendar with the goals feature) the old assistant that was able to do stuff like set alarms and gemini now can't

Gemini CLI is being sunsetted in mid-June and replaced by Antigravity.

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

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

Alas, I now feel the sting of disappointment.

In this case it's the usual Google product rug-pull plus the insane rate of AI tool churn.

Belated follow up: I was able to install the agy cli directly without the IDE (perhaps this was a change made in the interim).

I ran it last night and it was just fine as a drop-in replacement for my usage. Disappointment averted with minimal effort on my part (it helps that my typical workflow is pretty mundane/close to the defaults).

I assume this means a CLI tool is no longer covered by a Gemini subscription?

Sometimes I wonder if they even realize they have users...

Jules is still alive.

https://jules.google.com

Which somewhat ironically can import from github but not directly from aistudio..

It's a little crazy they still depend on microsoft as an intermediate between all their tools.

This is what happens when your engineering company is run by warring factions of tech illiterate business people rather than engineers.

> Jules is not yet available in your region.

>Note on Plan Availability

>Paid Jules plans are accessed via a Google AI Plans subscription, which is currently available only for individual Google Accounts (ending in @gmail.com).

>We are actively working on providing upgrade paths for other user types. In the meantime, If you are a business power user and need more access to Jules, please fill out this interest form and we will get back to you.

I filled out the enterprise form for GWorkspace 18 months ago.

I trie to use it, it's actually really bad IMO. It's very slow and often completely misunderstands my requirements

when people start to use it more they will shut it down

Pissing off the segment of people most likely to take offense and try to take revenge seems pretty dumb.

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

> Mobile marketshare is probably an indicator of some kind of their future prospects.

I don't like Google either, but I don't think this is a fair comparison.

It's easy for anyone to beat Google in China when the state has decided to block their servers.

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

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

That's the issue with Google, no specific user group is significant enough for Google to care

Classic Google problem: nobody gets promoted for maintaining anything. Promotions require doing Something Big. Convince everybody that your new feature is so much better than the old experience that it’s worthy of nuking the old experience, and that’s evidence that your New Thing is more worthy of you getting promoted. That’s how shit like this happens at Google.

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

Google's lack of focus is astounding. They sprinkle random products here and there and seem to then tepidly pick the product surface that is doing least bad and then tepidly focus on that. Compare that to every other AI lab, large and small that knows its identity and shaped its products around that.

Perhaps it's a sort of resource curse. Google doesn't need any one of these products to succeed, and it shows.

Whisk is a good example. They put out a pretty slick image manipulation tool that had infinite potential, and decided to just dump it and work on Flow instead, which while similar in features has a much more cumbersome interface. They really dont learn what works well about something when shuttering it. Poor post mortem anaylsis. Whisk very much could have lived on as a parallel evolution of interface over their image gen stack. I know it was labs software, and should have been expected but man they love throwing away what works for what doesnt.

For a company so lost, their people talk a lot about being obsessed with feedback/data in meetups (at least 2-3 years ago.)

I guess the point is, with enough money they can afford to operate like this.

can someone shed some light on the internal politics here, I thought anti-gravity was what the acqui-hired windsurf leadership team shipped?

All I know is internally they were recommending people use Gemini CLI until they switched to recommending Jetski/Windsurf CLI. Even before that, I could tell Jetski was way ahead, but still people from Gemini CLI were trying to convince me to use it. I said respectfully it doesn't work with our codebase very well, they said you were supposed to install some big extension, I said thanks then just didn't do that cause nah.

Jetski/Antigravity is a better piece of software. The Gemini CLI codebase looks like someone tried to vibe-code a Claude code clone in nodeJS, as it's simply not maintainable.

That being said, until recently Gemini CLI was better. It had support for persistent policies on what code could run without asking and had good extension hooks to allow you write extensions that influence policy (to perform complex logic like rewriting tool calls before they are executed).

Antimatter/Jetski only recently added support for remembering what commands are "always allowed" between sessions, the extension framework (excuse me, "plugins") has fewer features, and hooks have much less power than with Gemini CLI (and can't come bundled with extensions).

Well, the first thing the "new" antigravity did was f^&* up all of my existing projects by replicating them (with one replica per conversation within each project). That's really bad.

I now have 45+ projects pointing at a the same 5-7 folders (the actual projects). Can I delete those extra projects? The warnings are sure telling me not to.

Gemini CLI seemed more extensible, but the internal Gemini CLI didn't come with whatever it needed to deal with Google's internal tooling, and Jetski did. You were supposed to install those yourself in Gemini CLI, which I did, and it worked until it broke later, then I was like nah I'm not interested in keeping up with this. Which is of course not applicable to external users, but it suggested they were putting more eggs in the Jetski basket.

Also, Gemini CLI takes like 30-60s to start up, which is unacceptable when I'm starting it frequently in separate terminals and Jetski and Claude both start sorta instantly. I thought it must've been a dogfooding issue, but the external Gemini CLI seems just as slow. They're all similar stacks afaik, nodejs + react + ink.

Maybe I'm just a cranky old greybeard, but to me, the fact that these CLI tools are written in Node, React, etc. says a lot about the type of devs that are building them

Nobody is getting rewarded for reinventing the wheel.

I don't mind if they use nodejs for this, but the Ink/React stuff is annoying. It wastes space and even makes it hard to copy-paste. Wish it could open a few pipes for raw in/out as an alternative.

There's nothing wrong with writing CLI stuff in Node. It has interfaces to work with terminals built-in that aren't unlike what you'd find in any other language. I say this as someone who has worked with ncurses in C a decent amount (and there is a reason I try to avoid doing so anymore!)

React, however, I do find questionable, even having read about and understanding the idea behind Ink.

I think it was started in the Cursor time and by the time the turd shipped, momentum had very obviously shifted to Claude code style agentic products.

The announcement of Google Allo really hammered that point home to me back in the day.

I'm sure Google Pics has a long, fulfilling life ahead of it.

> Google's lack of focus is astounding.

As the sayinig goes, companies' products reflect their org charts.

Google is too top heavy. Each leader wants to expand his/her fiefdom, aka empire building. They'll ship random shit and if it doesn't stick, just drop it and move on.

Google needs someone senior internally who represents users; whose sole job is to look at things from their users' viewpoint and call out BS when they see any. Anybody else remember Matt Cutts from back in the day?

That role doesn't exist and never will you basically just make nothing but enemies calling out bullshit and when a 6-7figure job is on the line you don't want enemies.

It’s not just that it’s top heavy, it’s also that all its incentives with respect to promo packages are oriented away from maintaining stuff unless that’s a pet project of a higher up.

Disclosure: I am a member of an advisory board to Google and have some insights into internal aspects as well as decisions.

I really appreciate and acknowledge Google's innovations since their inception.

However I am also puzzled and stunned by their bogus product decisions. As far as I can say, and this is my personal opinion, Google has a lack of what I call portfolio management. Really. At the highest level there is no clear decision about product development as well as marketing.

Or, in other words: There is an overarching strategy, but under this there are many principalities that autonomously decide about their product portfolio.

This is by design. These principalities work independently of each other. They have partly conflicting products, no real corporate design so every product looks totally different, from old school and minimalistic Google Search look till AI and crypto bro inspired designs.

I don't want to go into details, but I was stunned the last time I got told by a high ranking Google exec, that they now do portfolio management and also consolidate the icons of the mobile apps, which means that they share the same look and feel and color scheme.

This gave us the red, blue, white buttons roughly 1-2 years ago, which didn't make any sense if you consider the individual app icon tied to its app, which partly didn't allow for the meaning of the app behind it.

That's why suddenly to us users a product gets killed, because of budget constraints or local decision making processes. An exec is running an experiment, so to say.

Paradoxically it isn't necessarily about earning money with these products, since Google is still extremely profitable which allows for all these "expensive" experiments.

My take is, that the exec responsible for the product doesn't hit the boss's KPIs with the new product, which of course aren't disclosed to the public, but amount to partly a very significantly high incentive aka pay check. We talk about millions, not a couple of bucks. Incentive works. Extremely well.

So yes, there is only Google, but if you consider the mental model of having several independently operating business units working together like independent companies in a holding and the holding usually doesn't care about your product as long as some boundaries aren't crossed and it hits the target KPIs, Google is fine with all its products.

I talked to many folks about this, and why are they not joining forces or aligning certain products to improve these significantly - it won't fly.

A senior developer from one of the US top banks once told me: "Why align or reuse code? We earn so much money, there is no need to minimize costs or even think about it, because that would only be waste of time. Instead we create product after product."

Don't judge different companies by the sorry state we are used to. ;)

The way people keep describing Google, at least from the outside, sounds like a jobs program for developers funded by ad revenue.

So many of their products oscillate around the bar of profitability but so few reach the level of materially affecting Google’s bottom line that they can continually pop in and out of existence like subatomic particles.

Meanwhile the developers on these projects work towards their products brief moment in the sun so they can leverage it to move up and out, leaving it to die on the vine.

It’s a chaotic way to run a company, a decent way to make a living as a developer, and a shit way to build any kind of legacy, either as a company or as an individual.

I’ve also heard on the engineering side performance is judged by heavily favoring launching products over keeping existing ones healthy and growing. You get what you incentivize…

> The day was to begin like any other, with Antigravity open

> This unexpected shift completely broke my preferred workflow

it might not have been so unexpected if you knew you were one of ~15 people that start their day with Antigravity

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

I've become an Antigravity convert mainly because of the generous limits, especially on the Anthropic models. User since day 1.

They used to have good limits that lasted hours, now I wiped mine in a couple of minutes..

> The day was to begin like any other, with Antigravity open (yes, there are tens of us!)

I think they know.

don't think that was there when I read it the first time

students get a couple free years of a Google One subscription which comes with access to the nicer models and some free claude credits to use inside Antigravity IDE. Though there's a small chance I'm wrong and everyone has access to those models.

The free tokens is the only reason why I've been using Antigravity. And after this god awful update (I had the exact same scenario as the article author) and once my free student plan runs out, I'm immediately switching to something else.

Makes me wish we could regulate these big tech companies and run them big fines whenever they abuse their monopoly by unnecessarily downgrading the experience for users. I hate how all their stocks continue to climb despite headline after headline of new updates breaking things for users. It's like they can just do whatever they want and never get punished for it meaningfully.

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

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

> How did Google blow their AI lead?

What lead? Maybe because I'm mostly using AI/LLMs for development, but neither Google, Anthropic, xAI or anyone else has ever been in the lead, OpenAI always had the best models in my mind, as long as you're comparing the "top" plans between all of them.

Besides, they all seem to shoot themselves in the foot, OpenAI included, seems the only thing that differs is how often and how big the damage is.

Wow. Didn't realize OAI was astroturfing hacker news now...

All the labs astroturf all the social media, HN is not unique and OpenAI wouldn't be the only ones. I even receive offers sometimes on my email put in my HN profile, asking me to post about their project in exchange for money.

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

Wait what? Why don't I get emails like this too? /s

(on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)

Nah, maybe one day I do a collective public post of it, for now I just try to get their company and/or name first, then forward it to HN themselves so they can ban them and keep an eye out for them.

Could you give us how many companies are trying to do this and also if any of the companies are YC companies themselves or not, I imagine not but still.

and what is the metric for companies sending you messages, like I have never gotten a single message (aside from one/two companies here and there and I even made a HN post about one of the companies)

and what do these companies really have a metric for in terms of sending spam for? karma points, I mean emsh I remember we both had close enough about the same karmas not too long ago, surprised to see you at 13k+ karma, so good to see that but is the metric karma, hype (you had made the rust browser ..) or what exactly? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that!

I do understand the point of these companies sending mail though, I mean I can't say that if I had a company at the moment I might not do the same either, but I think that you might get frustrated too with it, so what would your recommendation be to people sending you mails in general?

I would be curious to know that too!

So far just 3-4 at this point, some I guess figure out what I try to do when I ask for their company name and HN username, none of them been YC companies so far AFAIK. I don't know why they send specifically me emails, I guess either some automated system or they themselves see I spend way too much time on HN already, maybe just based on the amount of comments, I do have quite a bit of free-time :)

Wait so you're countering an accusation of astroturfing with an actual confession? That's new.

Lacking reading comprehension, you can imagine me doing, confessing and saying all sorts of things :)

I don't think Google does, they are way too massive, disorganized, and "by the book" for something like that. Also AI isn't life or death for them.

Besides they own 15% of Anthropic and cutting massive compute deals with them. On top of that they also have compute deals with OAI.

Google is positioning itself to win no matter what happens, Gemini is almost looking like a side project next to their cloud business.

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

> It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.

Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).

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

> Claude Code has only been around for a year and change.

We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.

I feel like aider was the first TUI for agentic stuff I came across here, and that was well before Claude code.

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

1. Less interaction required over long horizon tasks.

2. You actually get the amount of tokens they advertize. It's been an open secret on r/Claude that over the last several months, due to supposed "bugs" in Claude, users on the Max plan have seen over 50% of their tokens used on a single prompt. Super annoying.

3. Really strong image generation capabilities.

That's not to say OpenAI's current generosity will last, but for now I definitely see Codex as the stronger option between the two.

I’ve heard about that “open secret” and I don’t understand.

What’s the incentive for Anthropic to pump up the token usage on their top end plan? Is it to move Pro users up to Max? That’s the only plausible idea I can think of.

There are plenty of shills for all of the major labs on this website. Usually checking a history of comments of a suspicious user reveals that quite fast.

The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to make these accusations.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.

OpenAI literally wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Google's work in the space.

Who wouldn't exists if someone else didn't invent something else, which wouldn't exists...

We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, I don't think one party is more responsible than someone else, unless you're specifically involved with the specific technology, then you can attribute it to them.

So yes, Google's researchers might have invented the Transformer, but OpenAI researchers invented GPT. Does it matter we credit "LLMs" more to one than the other? I don't think so, especially in this context it's highly irrelevant. Google didn't have the "LLM lead" before LLMs even existed...

Google invented transformers. They had LLMs before openAI existed.

Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?

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

The tone on this could be improved. They literally answered your question "What lead?" and you seem dismissive.

Yeah, you're right, maybe needlessly harsh, sorry for that. I guess I'm tired of the same argument that Google somehow had a lead in LLM development because Transformer comes from researchers who worked at Google, yet somehow what comes before/after Transformer doesn't count, coming from Google's researchers (BERT) or others (GPT), or going even earlier so, hence the whole "we stand on the shoulders of giants".

We can go round and round about all this but I think it's pretty clear that google did at one point have a large AI lead in the lead up to covid. They had models that far surpassed the competition from 2018-2022. But they were facing an innovators dilemma, didnt want to cannibalize their search revenue so they sat on LLMs which ended up creating openAI and anthropic.

> Great, tell me again who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Google did, as they already said.

OpenAI was better at marketing and a lot more willing to cannibalize the search market as a newcomer. So Google blew their lead in research by not recognizing the product value quickly enough, or failing to win an internal political war on it anyway

> who put the Transformer into LLMs?

Google?

> who invented neural networks

People like Geoffrey Hinton, who was notably at Google Brain from 2013 to 2023?

The people who say Google was ahead were paying attention long before you were.

Google didn’t invent neural networks, neural networks existed before Google was founded.

This. Neural Nets have existed conceptually since the 1950s. They weren't realized materially and practically until later, but it's astonishing how ignorant people are of the history of AI.

No, it's more that Gemini models are simply not very good for coding compared to the top two. Even with Antigravity I use Claude models.

Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini in my limited testing on a small C project single source file project, less than 1000 lines. Setting temperature to 0 gives better results for me. It seems like Gemini ignores the system prompt more and the default reasoning output seems more incoherent.

Their open weight on device models are really impressive. Partly because I think they are the only ones out of all the frontier labs even working on local models.

> Gemma 4 31b is better for coding than Gemini

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

I don't know, but for me setting temperature to 0 has a noticeable impact. I don't think you need a fine tune.

Depends on the language. Gemini and Claude are far superior when it comes to C# for instance, compared to anything that OAI offers.

Yaah I feel the same way. Gemini is great at and Django and AI backends, OpenAI better at making something visually pleasing in React and Claude for everything else or across frontend and backend.

At least, that's my heuristic that tends to work for my workflow. I use a combination of Gemini-CLI, Claude Code, and Github Copilot, but across those, the underlying model choice works best according to which part of the applicaiton I am messing with

They had the lead for maybe a week or two. Now, only Apple is further behind.

Apple may be behind, and even getting sued for false advertising around AI features, but at least they haven’t spent hundreds of billions of dollars with no indication of how they’ll make their money back.

You’re right, they’re simply playing a different game. That said, Apple sold millions of phones with the promise that 3 months later users would be able to use AI to automate their phones and use Siri similar to how they use ChatGPT. That was summer 2024, and it still hasn’t shipped.

I'll give them images. Gemini/Nano Banana is notably better at understanding and generating images than OpenAI, imo, and Claude can't even generate.

While I'm at it I've got to give them credit for Gemma as well. Stellar, first class model for the size.

It's a toss-up - NB Pro (and NB2) were in the lead for a long time, but gpt-image-1.5 and then particularly gpt-image-2 pretty much closed the gap on my GenAI Image Showdown benchmark site.

NB still generates better looking images though for the most part - gpt-image series is still affected by the yellow saturation issues though its been heavily mitigated.

gpt-image-2 still has a very visible banding/artifacting, but nb2 and gpti2 each have their strengths to the point that its momentarily worth running the same prompt through both and grabbing the better result, then feeding it to the opposite model to tweak it. both of them do a better job of not "getting stuck" regurgitating the same thing over and over when the base image comes from the opposite model. i tend to try and limit how many edits i make with gpti2 because successive iterations degrade the image much much faster.

huge waste of firefly credits tho.

Enough to pretend they were back in the game. All a stock pump.

Because their strategy wasn’t to become leaders but to be as good as it takes to erode the lead of others. They have the cash cow of search so they don’t rely on AI to succeed. All they need is to keep publishing new products/services to keep OpenAI from taking the initiative. Between that and the Chinese models all they have to do is wait for the bubble to burst at which point every major AI lab would go bust.

Because for awhile they had access to infinite money printing press (search ads), and in the situation like this it’s impossible to focus and seriously compete in other areas.

Essentially all Google efforts were in protection of search ad revenue.

They really just hate doing migration plans, especially longer ones (1+ year). Google seems like an outlier but I don't have real data to prove it.

Where have you been? Google has always been terrible with enterprise products. They are in the low cost, small company part of the analytics/enterprise market. The medium or large sized customers have been burned by them too many times to ever go back at this point. If you use them, you deserve what you get these days. No idea why you think Google was ever some quality provider of enterprise tools. They were declining even before they entered those markets. It isn't 2008 anymore and the Google you remember hasn't existed in well over a decade.

> How did Google blow their AI lead?

Google is not an "AI company", they just happened to have been 10 steps ahead of everyone but slept on it for too long, now scrambling to catch up..

If by "happened to" you mean pour significant resources for well-over a decade on many different AI research groups then yes, that's accurate. Depending on your definition of AI, it might even be two decades.

In fact, OpenAI was founded largely with the direct goal of preventing Google from being the sole winner in AI...

Alphabet owns DeepMind, who are an AI company. In fact alphabet are lots of things, which is fine.

Yes, you're right, but Google are not an AI company in the same sense Anthropic or OpenAi are and are focused on their products differently and it kind of shows..

> Why can't GCP supplant AWS?

Both GCP and AWS are just relabeled corporate dogfood. It turns out most people have operations that share more traits with retail than with big data.

> Why is Google the 2nd or 3rd tier player in the AI coding market?

2nd, 3rd? No way. You either use Claude Code or Codex, the 3rd option usually was Github Copilot. The only time I heard someone used google for code writing it was Linux Torvalds in one of his commits.

Cursor is also definitely more popular than Gemini CLI

The day my coworkers started using cursor I started to learn neovim. Every day that passes I'm more glad I did it.

And mind you, I'm not an anti AI extremist. But I dont think there's any need to adopt the new tool as your new full workbench, a Claude style chat in a nearby terminal has the same benefit and exposes you to a ridiculously smaller personal risk.

I use the CLI agents (from any major vendor), in conjunction with either nvim or standard VS Code (with Copilot disabled). That way you still get the automatic "agent" capabilities - it can search your code, propose and make changes, write tests, doc files, etc. - but it doesn't interfere with your editing experience.

Right, redoing your entire workflow around a new corporate AI platform is signing up for a lot of throwaway work. If you like fiddling with things like that then great, but if the tooling is a means to an end and you're more interested in actually building stuff with it you're adding a lot of cost by chasing the latest fads.

Does anyone think that the brand new version of Antigravity will still exist in a recognizable form two years from now? Google will almost certainly have killed or "upgraded" it again to a new platform by then.

For the huge percentage of devs using vscode, switching to Cursor was essentially adding a new color theme and a chat window. The CLI switch was far more radical.

Yeah, I was a vscode user back then. The problem was realizing that cursor was going to be enshittified... and MS would start enshittifying vscode to compete as well.

I had the same experience. I could not figure out how to use the IDE mode in the new version. Turns out this is a bug. It was not supposed to remove the IDE automatically, instead a user could click on "Keep the antigravity IDE" as shown in the Demo Video (at 1:09 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C0FjHoN3qE). Clean install and disabling auto update solved the problem.

I pay for google "Starter" workspace.

Recently I started to get harassed to upgrade. Big button in gmail, large notifications on top of my mail in the mobile app etc. Also two other buttons to get me to turn on AI features I don't need.

I already pay a lot, I don't want to pay double just not to be harassed.

Having buttons to features that I would have to pay extra for is one thing. But having notifications and large buttons to upgrade when I am already a paying customer is harassment.

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

Recently screen sharing a document I noticed a new "omg please use gemini" button they placed OVER THE DOCUMENT itself. That's in addition to the magic star thing in the right and the gemini menu item. If you're using Chrome there are the browser ai buttons, too.

And if you upgrade to standard workspace it still tells you account not eligible for antigravity

Idk what google is doing

The market demands INFINITE GROWTH

…and 0.1% of users click the button that annoys 99% of users, so it‘s a BIG SUCCESS.

there is no graph of user happiness. there is only graph of PROFIT

0.1% is 2x better than typical 0.04%.

> The 2.0 update, it turns out, aggressively rewrites the default application paths to the point where it's impossible, at the time of writing, to have both versions of Antigravity installed and functioning at the same time.

Maybe it’s an OS difference but on my Mac when the new crappy antigravity updated, I got a very helpful dialog box explaining the changes and offering to download and install Antigravity IDE. Of course I did so and both run happily at the same time. Well, they did the one time I launched both, but now I’m back to just using the IDE.

I am on Mac too. The update removed my chat history from Antigravity, I can't see my chat history in Antigravity IDE but its visible in Antigravity 2.0. I am sure a lot of other stuff also reset to default.

Why would an update in my IDE switch to a new sort of application, better yet, not even allow me to keep the existing IDE as it is.

Google hasn't handled this well, it is obvious.

But I have to say that I never understood the Antigravity IDE. I much prefer using Gemini CLI in combination with vscode. It works like a charm. Now, I'll do the same with Antigravity CLI and vscode. It works fine.

Same. It’s really been a nothing bar for me with this cutover. I feel for the IDE people, but now I call agy vs gemini…life goes on. 3.1 Pro model still works perfectly for me and my needs, if anything I’m finding the agy cli much more responsive and stable so far

Possibly a bug, but the change in usage quotas on my AI Pro plan going from Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI was a massive drop. I was kicked off after around 30 minutes using the smallest model available (3.5 Flash).

If they offered 3 Flash (or 3.1 Flash Lite too but might be hoping for too much) with comparable usage limits then the transition to Antigravity CLI wouldn't have bothered me much at all.

It feels like a change in department leadership and management, or an internal power struggle over a lucrative piece of the project (with all the consequences that typically come with it). In the end, it seems more about satisfying personal egos than serving the product, and the end users will be the ones left to “appreciate” the results.

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

So much for AI getting cheaper.

> So much for AI getting cheaper.

For now, that's DeepSeek: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ (they have a discount until the end of the month, even after that they will have pretty good prices)

Or GLM or Kimi, Mistral is also surprisingly passable. Or just have to open the wallet and give money to OpenAI or Anthropic for the subsidized tokens.

> Google Enterprise accounts are sunsetting AI Ultra in favor of consumption based pricing at the end of the month.

This whole thing feels a bit like what GitHub did with Copilot, though.

These are models that can be run locally BTW. Just get enough hardware for your throughput requirements, have it grind on multiple batches of tokens 24x7 to get reasonable utilization (keeping the cloud for time-sensitive uses) and that's it, no more rug pulls.

I don't even think the consumption based pricing is available for the IDE, only Antigravity 2.0, so they are basically killing the IDE.

It boggles the mind why people think AI will get cheaper when they're all selling tokens at a loss already.

> Antigravity, as part of the Google AI Ultra plan, is my daily driver, my workhorse.

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

I am building an Agent IDE called Harness. It is somewhat inspired by the previous version of antigravity (and Conductor, and a few others). But with a core goal being open source & hackability.

It's centered around git worktrees. The goal is to organize all your AI sessions into somewhat logical places and make it easy to context switch. The secondary goal is to remove the need to open a separate code editor anytime you want to look at a file (We have a built in file editor powered by Monaco [vscodes editor])

Check it out https://harness.mikelyons.org

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

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

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

For me I liked the ergonomics of a few other tools, but none of them were exactly what I wanted so I made my own. And, I kept it open source so anyone can tweak the ergonomics to be what they like

and what is the harness for harness called?

I regret naming it harness for this exact reason but I am too deep at this point

are you? you are going to have zero searchability

You'll regret even more keeping it.

Cursor did this IDE -> Agents transition very well.

Cursor still supports both the IDE and the Agents window, open at the same time, in the same project. I frequently use both and switch back and forth between them. They also link to each other from the top bar and right-click context menus so you can switch to one or the other seamlessly. Best of both worlds. Switch back to Cursor.

This would have been the proper way to do it, but it would have taken work, and Google really hates migration plans of any kind. Better to drop the 2.0 on users' heads out of nowhere and just move on.

I want to Ask HN relating to this: What can be the motivation behind this change? Is this the preferred way of using AI coding tools nowadays? I've been using Antigravity mainly because of its tab completions. So I can work in code like in a traditional way and AI assists me. But it was a broken experience and now they are moving away from IDE based tool. The alternative is you write the prompt and it does everything. Is this the standard SW development workflow in 2026?

Google corporate culture where users are just numbers someone's performance report is why this happens.

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

It is the new standard. It sounds awful until you try it, and then you can't go back. But you can still use an IDE as well to edit code by hand and review changes that agents have made.

I'm surprised anyone thought Google would stay committed to an IDE product built on Microsoft's VS Code.

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

The most widely used IDE inside Google to work on Google products, Cider, is based on VS Code.

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

And?

Companies build all kinds of internal tools that are at odds with their long term brand and public product strategy.

Yes, this is the standard model for the big frontier models. You don't need Gemini or Claude to do tab completions. A modest size local model can do that just fine. If that is all you are using AI tools for you are wasting money subscribing to Google.

The success of generalized agents is causing this change. Anthro and OAI have both made heavy pushes into expanding the use of agents past coding with Codex App and Claude Cowork. Maintaining an IDE is overkill in an age when most people are not coding by hand anymore.

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

The problem with AI products vs other rent-seeking is that AI is very expensive to build out and run… so they are desperate to push you into relying on it quickly.

It's not even good, honestly. I was using it for couple weeks before dropping that 2 months ago. The model was not good and slow, the harness was not good, the IDE was subpar vscode clone. If IDE still important for your Workflow, Trae of Cursor offer much better interface, harness and plan.

Yeah, that was my experience. The model was worse in every way than ChatGPT or Claude or even Composer. I tried it out and used it when my other limits were hit, but only as a last resort. And I stopped doing even that because the model was so bad.

I had the exact same experience, on Windows had to purge everything and lost all my history, on Mac it was a one click upgrade and sign in again for the most part with history gone as well.

Overall the experience was pretty bad for what is expected from them and I'm wondering what the thought process behind this is, I dislike this single prompt box review workflow and is a reason I don't use any of the tui stuff and it's odd that they are leaning so hard to mimic CC when others like cursor are embracing the same workflow but still sculpting around the code. I want to edit as I'm working and have access to all my normal tools and fragmenting my work to this new vision and a separate text editor defeats the point.

For now I'll probably switch to using it as a fallback when I've exhausted my quota elsewhere and start to rely on it less before the next rug pull when I wake up and the IDE is gone. Aside, Gemini has been surprisingly good and I really liked their take on the implementation and review workflow.

I'm building an IDE (www.kaiso.ai)

AI is powerful, but currently does not meet the engineering bar for quality and thoroughness. We need new paradigms and tools to support a new relationship with the codebase as an artifact.

The premise is that we can use these LLMs to get real engineering work done if we make tools to support a higher-level human understanding of the codebase, and the ability to spot the gaps in the LLM's plans. With these we can surgically ensure all the critical considerations are covered, spec the work at an incredibly granular level, and implement our plans as a collection of ultra-tiny tasks each given to isolated agents, this specifically ensures the agent's attentional mechanism aren't overwhelmed/polluted.

The project is very early still, so if you're interested, please reach out or signup for the email-list and i'll contact you. Pricing page is highly aspirational at the moment, money is not the focus at this phase.

Thanks.

> The project is very early still, so if you're interested, please reach out or signup for the email-list and i'll contact you. Pricing page is highly aspirational at the moment, money is not the focus at this phase.

Why do you think an IDE is the right tool?

I'm working in a similar space, and it's not clear why an IDE would benefit.

Specifically to you - if you're hoping to make this a business - please know if you do make a killer IDE feature - Cursor et al will immediately copy it...

I'll give your tool a try if it's not too much effort to try it and you want some feedback. Let me know.

> Why do you think an IDE is the right tool?

I didn't start with an IDE but ended up there after some time. The core of my approach is an entirely new workflow. Underlying all of it is a "planning canvas" which is a network graph visualization of the codebase symbols, structures, and relations, where each node of the graph is a custom data-structure that captures a set of considerations. The workflow is generally as follows: Talk to the agent -> Agent responds with a plan(s) -> Plan is visualized on the planning canvas. At this point we can see visually which parts of the codebase the agents plan touches and via the fields of the custom data-structure, also see which considerations the agent failed to specify. Its here where we as humans can catch "this thing isnt connected, or is missing a trigger, or has a concurrency story, etc.", and either specify ourself, or force the agent to improve their plan in this specific manner. Once satisfied, we can formalize the impoved plan into a spec-of-specs, where each isolated sub-spec is farmed to an agent for implementation, which undo/redo being handled at the plan-level just in case we change our minds.

> Cursor et al will immediately copy it...

This is always possible, with anything and everything, but thus far they havent done it and i want this to exist, so i persist.

> I'll give your tool a try if it's not too much effort to try it

If you're open to it, signup (so i have your email) and ill reach out to get us going.

> Underlying all of it is a "planning canvas" which is a network graph visualization of the codebase symbols, structures, and relations, where each node of the graph is a custom data-structure that captures a set of considerations.

Cool, I'm thinking along the same lines.

> but thus far they havent done it and i want this to exist, so i persist.

Cool, we are in the same boat [=

> If you're open to it, signup

I'll check it out.

Google really outdid themselves this time. They killed not one but two tools (Gemini CLI and Antigravity) with one stone.

It’s like Google Reader all over again. Because of all these changes, I had to cancel my Google Workspace Ultra plan and switch to a personal developer ultra plan to use Antigravity on a subscription basis, but I still have to use gemini webchat on the workspace, because there is no way to get total privacy from the individual plan. At least they prorate the cancellation and credit the unused time period.

I don't have time to fix the problem, let me write a blog article about it, lol

Will this experience actually have a lasting impact on how the author makes decisions?

Place your bets now.

Sadly since couple of years or so ago we forgot about UX. Or quality in general. I have a companion which tells me I did everything right before pushing to prod. WCGW

> I have a companion which tells me I did everything right before pushing to prod.

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

My opinion is that Google has currently enjoys low trustworthiness as an enterprise software and services provider.

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

I have to reenable a “Classic UI” plugin to fix it. This is annoying enough, but if they did something like the OP’s experience they’d lose a paying customer of 14 years overnight.

IDEs aren’t social media apps- they’re tools. Familiarity is not just important, it is VITAL.

Designers gotta eat

Hey I have the same complaints about us developers adding new features that no one asked for to a product that already serves its purpose.

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

More like when AI is coding all the apps anyways, a drastic change in direction is only one prompt away.

Google has just stepped on the IBM path :D

"..and you will learn to like it!"

--someone important

Antigravity IDE is just a better tool

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

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

Google is talking up a new "Neural AI" design language that seems to just be for their in-house Gemini-related apps. Possibly what the new Antigrav is using?

We don't know if this is Material 4.0, just Google's proprietary design, or really anything.

Neural Expressive?

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/ne...

D'oh. Thanks.

Reminds me of the "dead dove do not eat" scene from arrested development. The surprising thing is not that Google is doing this, but that people are surprised by it.

What's lost when that scene is GIFed or quoted is Michael's double-take before he says anything. Brilliant comedic acting.

This is exactly why I have a have a strict blanket ban on automatic updates on all of my devices.

> the prompt history from the old Antigravity installation is gone

So just restore it from your repo.

Anyone ‘fully plugged into the Google ecosystem’ is going to end up being milked by corporate when shareholder pressure for revenue increase goes up. Same with the Apple ecosystem. Of course the language manipulation here is amusing - it’s not an ecosystem, it’s a company town where you have to do transactions in scrip that’s not transferable to another company town. Prison is not exactly the right word, either - you are free to leave, you just have to leave many of your assets behind when you do.

At this point, anyone who relies on Alphabet for anything, deserves what they get. Fool me once... and all that.

What the hell is Google Antigravity?

It was a code editor that had Gemini integrated into it. I’ve been playing around with the new version, it can still do what I was using it for, but it does make me wonder if it will become a OpenClaw like tool.

you dont have to go look at the Google Graveyard [0] to understand that you might try a google product one day or month to have it either disappear or become a different product incompatible with the first the next month. They have been known for this for at least decades now.

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

[0] https://killedbygoogle.com

None of this is an "AI" problem its SaaS BAU.

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

Wow, Google really fumbled this.

After reading the blog post I clicked the update button and the whole app was replaced, without much warning, with this conversation UI. It was even more jarring than I expected from the post because I figured there must be some messaging about what would happen and some way to just get to my files... but nope!

Then I downloaded the Antigravity IDE (as opposed to just Antigravity) and when I went to install it, it turns out I already had it installed!

So Google actually did an arguably ok thing with the apps - they split them into an IDE and an agent coordinator, and they kept the IDE installed so you can use it right after the update - but they didn't tell you what they were doing!!

If they had just said "Antigravity is now two apps. Which would you like to open?" everything would have been fine.

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

These week announcements are effectively Google doing a rug pull to its customers. Now simple changes cannot be done anymore within antigravity without it to consume its full quota.

Personally I downgraded my Google One subscription. I cannot justify paying Pro anymore, and thankfully I'm not AI dependent enough to pay Ultra.

> These week announcements are effectively Google doing a rug pull to its customers

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

Reminds me of my dad's experience with google nest hub a few months ago. He called it the best product google's ever made until an over the air update killed the video call feature he used to talk to his grand kids. Brutal.

The Google lover to Google hater pipeline is still going strong.

There’s real value in having copies of all the past versions of a program available and the user needing to choose to update rather than being forced to overwrite their install.

A weird feeling tells me that this "keeping only in name" was done because someone at Google was cross with killedbygoogle.com.

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

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

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

Good that I uninstalled antigravity by myself a few days back before this rug pull - given the XP you could think you got wormed.

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

I don't know anyone who looked at antigravity and thought "this is a great idea, surely this big corporation wouldn't screw me over right?". Tying your development environment to the whims of google is.... maybe its simply OPs first rodeo with capitalism

Google does not care about you. They will fuck you over. If its in their business interests they'll format your harddrive without a second thought

Fix for Antigravity 2.0 hijacking the IDE, and how to restore your lost settings/extensions(For windows user)

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

Compared to gemini-cli which I was using the last few weeks it also doesn't:

1. Doesn't tell you your weekly qutoa (at least on Pro plan/all the time)

2. Your agent cant access the quota to not run some tasks at low quota

3. You cant see the context size

4. Your agent can't see the context size

5. You can't compact/compress

6. You have to keep starting new chats which also kill any processes it has running (e.g. a telegram listener)

7. Doesn't have a straightforward linux/wsl install (I ended up using the Windows IDE and pointing it to wsl).

And that's from just migrating a gemini-cli model and trying to set it up for an hour. Incredible downgrade for no reason.

No compacting?????????

Nope, it does some automatically, but you cant even check the context size let alone compact. The agent proposes to start a new chat when you think it might be high, and that's it.

It does auto compact

Second day iam not shutting down my laptop or closing antigravity, just to finish my mintlify documentation. I wish i could see the team who did this shit.

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

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

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

Worse, I selected "Terminal Command Auto Execution: Proceed in Sandbox", and it keeps switching to "Always Proceed" (with a nice warning about how it is very dangerous). I have changed it 10 times then just gave up and switched to Codex.

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

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

> nothing beats the plan-review-implement loop

This is correct. I have switched back to Cursor, with sota models, after I discovered that I lost control when I gave in to industry drumbeat of using cli based agents and which presented _something_ to review and then went back again in full swing.

I had the opposite experience when Gemini 3.1 first came out. It didn't show up as a model option in my fully updated Gemini CLI, and I subsequently figured out I had to install this Cursor-lookalike thing called Antigravity to try it. I'd like to stick with my existing editors, thanks.

On a related note, the AUR package previously named antigravity has been renamed antigravity-ide[1] after some lively discussion, and the new thing lives at antigravity2-bin.[2]

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

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

What a great way for google to make it easy for people to switch to Cursor! I always have issues switching IDEs because I get used to the flow in one but if the flow just disappears out of thin air then what's holding me back? (Nothing)

Well the hint was in the name: it will fly away.

Thanks for posting this! Quickly turned off auto-update on Antigravity IDE. Don't really use it for coding, but it turned into my shell-scripting+data cleanup editor to keep that separate from my actual projects.

I don't know why you're so mad. Google knows best in all things.

For Mac users, I wrote (using Antigravity) a self-contained, zero-dependency Python script to restore everything. It safely shuts down background processes, merges your VS Code settings, updates extension pathways, and merges the global SQLite databases using raw base64 protobuf concatenation to restore your chat history sidebar.

Gist: https://gist.github.com/antimirov/ee2fe0dbee8c5a5f4b19112266...

once upon a time google was unable to create a (1) chat app

now they follow the same playbook for gemini/gemini cli/antigravity/ antigravity cli/ai studio/ the new ai studio/gemini app/firebase ai

did i forget anything? probably

i build my career on the google eco system, i cant wait for this kingdom to fall

It took 15 years but they did finally settle on RCS/Google Messages and even got Apple to cowtow.

It could be 15 years before Google's AI strategy fully stabilizes, but there is precedent.

Oh it's about the IDE. I thought it's about this email I got just today, a bare week after subscribing:

> We wanted to let you know about changes to the usage limits included with your Google AI Pro subscription.

> What's changing starting today, 2 0 M a y 2 0 2 6 :

> Usage limits in the Gemini app: For the Gemini app, we’re introducing compute-based usage limits that factor in the complexity of your prompt, the features that you use and the length of your chat. Your limit will refresh every five hours until you reach your weekly limit. As an AI Pro subscriber, you’ll enjoy a usage limit four times higher than non-subscribers.

> AI credits: The product-based usage limit model is also rolling out to other products, starting with Flow and Antigravity. You can extend your limits by purchasing AI credits. While 1,000 AI credits will no longer be included as a benefit in your base plan each month, the new usage limit model that we are introducing should allow you to maintain the same experience as you are used to. To learn more about how to use AI credits, please visit our Help Centre.

So the app is more restricted, the "free" (actually paid) monthly credits are gone, and somehow this will "maintain the same experience as you are used to". All while releasing ever more token costly models that barely move the needle on qualify.

> We should be able to trust that our tools will remain the tools we actually signed up to use.

If that is your priority (it is mine, too), why not use one of the many open source harnesses? There's for example Pi, and countless others...

With Google Antigravity or Claude Code or another proprietary solution, it's absolutely certain they'll change the harness in ways you will not like. Why even write a blog post about it?

is there a good open editor that offers a good native AI exeriience? there's good agent harnesses, but good integrations with an editor like antigravity (now the antigravity IDE) or vscode copilot seem to be tied to businesses and focused on their business goals.

Zed maybe?

Really unfortunate, totally agree they should give an option not to install, or have more communication around changing it in such a big way.

I can't use Antigravity after this upgrade, unfortunately. No option to connect WSL for both versions so completely locked out.

One good thing is I have gained so much confidence on my work. I can't surely do worse work than those smart Google engineers.

Nice trick for folks that has saved me a lot of time and aggro - Just don't ever use anything by Google that isn't Search(but seemingly that won't be for long), YouTube or...maybe Gmail (but be careful).

The company is ran and managed by lunatics, and you don't want anything made by a lunatic running inside your computer.

A bit off-topic, but I (as a non-native reader) find the "anti" in the name off-putting. Has it a special meaning beyond the (meta)physics or is Google just bad with naming?

I assume it is just meant to imply light-weightness, either in the application itself or making you feel as though you can float / fly .

It’s like Unobtanium but for productivity-increasement. “Antigravity helps your startup get off the ground” etc. Yawn.

I always thought it was a joke on the python xkcd: https://xkcd.com/353/

(Which, interestingly, also appears if you type “import antigravity” at the python repl).

Nice, thank you! Seems the most plausible explanation to me now that I know it :)

> ... or is Google just bad with naming?

I don't hate Google but they're really terribly bad at naming things.

The whole "Google Apps for (your) Domain" / "G Suite" / "Google Workspace" was quite the SNAFU (still is).

Then the Gemini CLI / no anti-gravity / no not anti-gravity either but yes anti-gravity CLI...

Oh and just the word "anti-gravity" itself: let's look at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-gravity

Notice the dash?

Just picking a word where half of the people are going to write it with a dash and the other half won't is poor naming choice.

And don't get me started on "Alphabet".

Welcome to my life - my username is my actual surname :-D

Using google products is your own fault at this point, hard to really care.

The original Antigravity editor is/was just a light reskin on VSCode. My normal workflow - even before the 2.0 update - was to run VScode and AG at the same time, on the same local codebase. AG would do the work, which I would then review in VSCode.

Why not just download and run the IDE you want, alongside the agentic dev tool you want?

I love how its described as a mere 'major hassle' rather that an absolutely insane trust-destroying situation

Enshittification and auto-update exploits are really putting a dent in peoples "Update to stay secure!" mindshare.

The app over-write thing is not good. It took me 90 minutes to get the new chat Antigravity, the new Antigravity IDE, and Antigravity CLI installed and one task done on each.

My 1 month subscription of Gemini Ultra is finished in three days and I revert to their $20/month plan. Assuming that daily and weekly quotas are OK for casual use, I will probably use AntiGravity CLI most of the time.

Off topic, but maybe interesting: during my one month test of Gemini Ultra I did several tasks in parallel to compare (old) Antigravity+Claude Opus vs. OpenCode with a fast provider for deepseek-v4-pro, kimi-k2p6, and minimax-m2p7. In almost all cases I could get stuff done in about 60% to 70% of the time using Antivravity+Claude Opus -- but!, OpenCode with the open models is so much cheaper. I get that in a work environment when someone else is paying for tokens, why not burn someone else's money. Paradoxically, I felt more relaxed after the tests with OpenCode with the open models even though I was actively doing more work myself.

EDIT: two months ago I wrote my own small coding agent in Emacs Lisp that I enjoy using. I am researching redoing my Emacs project using the new Antigravity SDK.

> Assuming that daily and weekly quotas are OK for casual use, I will probably use AntiGravity CLI most of the time.

I would not assume that for 3.1 pro, but maybe the limits for flash 3.5 will be fine, and the model will be good enough for hobby stuff.

Quota for flash 3.5 is terrible, they just reduced quotas once again. $20 plan gives you 4x usage, previously it was 33x.

I get significantly more usage from $20 Claude plan using only Opus 4.7 - but at least the google plan gives me 5TB of storage now.

And considering before you had only 5 hour Flash quotas and now the same quota applies to Pro and Flash and AG CLI (meanwhile Gemini CLI which had independent 24h quotas is getting killed in a month), once you run out of a couple 5 hour windows that's it for all usage (pro or flash) for a week.

It seems this confusing tooling change plus the new smaller quotas made enough users unsubscribe for them to hit the panic button:

https://www.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1tjbd1e...

https://xcancel.com/_mohansolo/status/2057331857755422922

> An update: we’re 3xing the rate limits for Gemini models across all paid tiers in Antigravity and resetting everyone’s Gemini quota for the week.

> We understand some people hit their rate limits quickly and wanted to respond fast. Lots more to come and enjoy building!

Maybe it was a prank played on software industry folks by someone using an essential service whose entire customer-facing support interface was replaced with a useless, stonewalling chat bot.

That's why I prefer relying on a custom setup based on a Claude Code. Much less surprises, especially if you don't rush into the models prematurely unless forced.

2.0 or 3.0 - unless they increase the limits, no developers would stick to it. Even for pro users had to wait for days to get their limit renewed.

They have https://9to5google.com/2026/05/21/google-has-tripled-gemini-...

Using new Google products is like that old adage about owning a boat, with only two good days as a user...

This feels less like a bait-and-switch and more like an early product evolving into a platform. The confusion seems to come from naming + repositioning more than actual feature loss.

It ruined my day. I'll just leave it at that.

"We should be able to trust that our tools will remain the tools we actually signed up to use."

Yep... well that's what free software and open-source is for. You can't trust corporations so you MUST have the actual code. Harsh lesson but at least if something is learned and the mistake not repeated, that's OK.

Free and open source is necessary but not sufficient to protect you from the bait and switch (or general lock-in).

You need at least:

1. A Copyleft license

2. Rights staying with the authors, no CLA, no Copyright assignment

3. A diverse enough set of truly independent contributors to reliably prevent collusion.

Bonus points if everything is held together by an organization that operates for the good of the public (and not only its members, 501(c)(3) > 501(c)(6)).

Good examples are Linux, Git, Inkscspe and QEMU. Notably all software from the 90s or early 2000s.

> well that's what free software is for

FTFY. Free software is the user-freedom fork of that concept, while open source is the developer-corporation-freedom fork.

You have the source to everything you use in life right? You can make your own car, patrol, shampoo, grow your own food, build your own house, wire your own electricity (and generate it), can switch to having your own reserve of drinking water anytime and plumb it, etc.

Nothing against you personally but that kind of logic is getting old. I get it that you don't trust corporations but asserting it like open source projects don't do rug pulls, and like having the source because you can spin up the version you even if they screw you over means it's safe is missing the point of how we all function as a society.

The problem isn't open source or corporations to begin with or someone made the mistake of trusting someone who seemed trustworthy to begin with, and people who take the opportunity to push their own beliefs and narratives by capitalizing on emotional situations like this instead of finding constructive ways to make things better are the worst.

If I woke up one day to find some corporation had snuck in overnight and subbed out my shampoo for their newest scent without asking, then yeah I'd be looking for more reliable options for that too

The car is a better example. I'd be infuriated if my car received an OTA that made it play ads or something. I have to trust that the company won't do that (or buy a car that doesn't have OTA capability).

As others pointed out it's not the same dynamic when it's not about software.

The big picture is that agency was lost and that's not OK.

> You can make your own car, patrol, shampoo, grow your own food, build your own house, wire your own electricity (and generate it), can switch to having your own reserve of drinking water anytime and plumb it, etc.

*can* is a lot better then *do*. I would prefer that all of these processes be documented such that new sources of these products and services can be created if need be. That's really what having the source for a given piece of software is; the documentation required to reproduce it.

Imagine if the process of generating electricity was a big secret and controlled by a single company. That company would be unreasonably powerful, no?

I trust corporations enough that i do pay them to provide me with goods and services. I do not trust them enough to set them up as the only viable source for goods and services.

OSS isn't sufficient. It must also be forkable by a small team. If the software grows complex enough, like Chromium, it doesn't really matter much if the code is open or not.

I'm not sure, maybe the architecture itself is what matters. I'm thinking about the Linux kernel. Nobody, not even large companies, might be able to handle it, but each focuses on their own driver, some on specific parts, maybe it's manageable. So Chromium itself is too large but I'm not sure if the size of the team is the main criterium. There are other browsers (in fact I even have https://browser.engineering on my desk and I wrote my own toy browser) so I'm wondering what indeed makes a project manageable. Maybe its the expectations that make it impossible to handle and that it is used strategically, both in Android or Chromium, to make sure nobody else indeed can keep pace.

Did anyone else have the bug (?) where they had to consent to these: "Yes, I agree to help improve Antigravity IDE by allowing Google to collect and use my Interactions data, subject to the Google Antigravity IDE Terms of Service and Google Privacy Policy. I understand I can choose to opt out later whenever I want via my settings." data collection terms to finish the Antigravity IDE installation? I filed a bug and searched for the setting to switch it off.

For those who also get fed up by the ever growing (unstable) coding agents, check out Pi. It is not for everyone but for the diehards it is good.

too brave people rely on google software. they can kill the product and fire antigravity employees tomorrow, not impossible yet happened alot

I had exactly the same experience, and thought what a way to kill an IDE. Not sure what their strategy is, but people were already fleeing back to vscode or zed. This seems like the final nail in the coffin.

The Claude Code CLI is very popular. Are they aiming to make it more like that?

Easy solution is to never ever use anything from Google unless you really must. They are the worst company by far in just starting stuff and abandoning them and providing zero support.

I was going to say the exact same thing. The only thing you might be able to count on is GMail, and I'm not sure even it won't go away someday.

I would have said the same about search, but, well…

Fastmail if you like shiny. If you use a client anyway just purelymail.

I can replace everything, except google earth / streetview.

I'm really surprised anyone trusts google anymore, they've rug pulled so many services and tools. Long ago I learned they don't care about users.

One of the first things I look for when trying out software is the "Updates" toggle. If it doesn't have a way to disable them, most of the time I'll go look for another option.

Grok agrees with you. I really don't understand this.

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_abc82dc6-7a1f-436e-9ec6-3d96...

I don't find this move by Google hostile at all. Maybe because I was on Linux and wasn't affected the same way- I had to install it as a separate 2.0 application (all old AGY things are still there).

It just feels like they released a new product to me and calling it hostile or bait-and-switch seems ungrateful.

I for one am glad they did it because I felt like it was a little bit... I just felt the company as big as Google, it felt wrong for them to be piggybacking off VS Code.

I know it was MIT license, but honestly, I feel better knowing that they're making their own product. So, you know, it goes both ways. I think they did the right thing to migrate off Microsoft's code just out of respect.