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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

> 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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Place your bets now.

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.

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

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

--someone important

Google has just stepped on the IBM path :D

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

What the hell is Google Antigravity?