Google has been relatively quiet when it comes to making agentic coding or vibe coding announcements. The furthest it went was with Jules, Vertex AI, or Gemini CLI, obviously apart from acquiring Windsurf. But now, the company has decided to enter the field formally with Antigrativy.
The company is trying to land its agentic IDE into a space packed with hype, skepticism, forking drama and an audience tired of experimenting with half-finished tools. Antigravity allows agents to “autonomously plan and execute complex, end-to-end software tasks” with direct access to an editor, terminal and browser.
It comes with Gemini 3, which is already ruling a ton of hearts amongst creators and developers in Cursor, GitHub and Replit.
Out in the open, opinion on Antigravity remained split. Some are cancelling their $6o Cursor subscriptions, some claim “Google is changing the VIBE CODING game.” Others say that it seems like it’s still in Beta and is worse than Cursor and Copilot.
But What’s Really Happening?
Coming to the positives first, Antigravity does things that others cannot. It can do full screen recordings to verify your app actually works in real time. “Screen recording + live debugging gives AI the kind of context developers used to dream about,” a software engineer demoed on X.
I’m bullish on Google Antigravity for 1 simple reason.
It can now do full screen recordings to verify your app actually works in real time.
Screen recording + live debugging gives AI the kind of context developers used to dream about. pic.twitter.com/q64kVVyNjO
— corbin (@corbin_braun) November 20, 2025
Some are obsessed with the UI, while others with the agentic capabilities, where developers were able to fix errors that other AI editors struggle with. Some are in love with how it integrated Nano Banana Pro for multimodal reasoning.
But for many long time AI coding tool users, Antigravity arrived with a shape most developers recognised in the first second. A Hacker News thread on launch day saw more than a thousand comments, with users repeating a familiar line.
While one person wrote: “Oh no. Not another VSCode fork…,” another said, “Oh cool, another IDE for programming… aaaand it’s a vscode fork. I don’t know what I expected tbh.” This captured the fatigue that has grown around the rise of agentic editors that look the same, act the same, and often stumble the same.
Yet, this launch was not only about VS Code. In an attempt to push out Cursor, Antigravity pushed an older story back into view: Google’s decision in July 2025 to hire Varun Mohan from Windsurf and license its technology for roughly $2.4 billion. The Windsurf acquisition by Cognition Labs came later, though many developers now believe Antigravity carries Windsurf’s fingerprints, with Mohan in the lead.
This is reflected in its references to Cascade, the proprietary agent system inside Windsurf, which were spotted inside Antigravity’s code. Visual Studio Magazine had already hinted at the same direction in its piece titled “Google Joins AI IDE Race to Compete with VS Code, Apparently Forking VS Code.”
And yes, the discussion continues.
Rate Limits the Real Issue, At Least for Now
Adarsh Shirawalmath, founder of Tensoic, a company that provides custom LLMs, fine tuning, and inference, told AIM Antigravity provides good quality edits and debugging/testing tools in the browser, and brought new ideas that stood out. “It’s the first good agentic IDE I’ve used that can actually connect to my remote SSH machine through the CLI, run commands there, manage dependencies, and navigate the entire remote filesystem properly.”
He said it “may follow some design aspects of Windsurf but it is a form of VS code.” Shirawalmath was clear about the flaws too. “There are quite a lot of bugs such as agents being stuck in a loop, other models not working, quicker rate limits consumption.”
This is a recurring theme on discussion forums as well. “There were some UI glitches,” the top commenter on Hacker News said. Cursor, he argued, had “real annoying usability issues” and he found Antigravity “more polished.” He imported his old settings, got working on a project, enjoyed the Gemini 3 model for a while and then hit a wall.
But then, the dreaded rate limits kicked in. “After about 20 mins – oh, no. Out of credits,” he said, while adding that he looked for a purchase button, but found none. “If you release a product, let those who actually want to use it have a path to do so,” he wrote.
He switched back to Cursor soon after and discovered that Cursor itself already had Gemini 3 Pro. His conclusion was brutal: “Real developers want to pay real money for real useful things.” This reminded of a similar scenario when developers were cancelling Cursor subscriptions.
Adithya S Kolavi, founder of CognitiveLabs, told AIM that he has been trying to use Antigravity, but the rate limits don’t allow him to. “Not an overall good experience so far,” he said, while adding that integrating into the browser is unique. “Like most IDEs just focus on text basically code, they [Google] have taken a more multimodal approach natively, which is nice,” he said.
On the company side, Google tried to calm the situation. Varun Mohan said, “We’re also aware of the capacity constraints everyone is facing given our growth and working to address them as quickly as we can,” he said, which is fair since it is still in beta.
But, the forking allegations continue as some developers call it Windsurf 2.0 with a new UI.
This is where the story rests today. Antigravity has people excited, irritated, curious, hopeful, and tired — all at once. Google has built something that feels half Windsurf, half VS Code and fully trapped inside the expectations of a community that has seen too many promises from too many AI IDEs.
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