[HN Gopher] Google Antigravity
___________________________________________________________________
Google Antigravity
https://antigravity.google/blog/introducing-google-antigravi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTOVIGsqCuY
Author : Fysi
Score : 1025 points
Date : 2025-11-18 15:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (antigravity.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (antigravity.google)
| Fysi wrote:
| Looks to be live but no content; OpenGraph description is "Google
| Antigravity - Build the new way".
| meetpateltech wrote:
| > Google Antigravity is an agentic development platform, evolving
| the IDE into the agent-first era.
|
| Antigravity enables developers to operate at a higher, task-
| oriented level by managing agents across workspaces, while
| retaining a familiar AI IDE experience at its core. Agents
| operate across the editor, terminal, and browser, enabling them
| to autonomously plan and execute complex, end-to-end tasks
| elevating all aspects of software development.
|
| via: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/google-antigravity/about/
| 20k wrote:
| I have absolutely 0 idea why any developer would rely on any
| IDE produced by google. It'll be canned within 5 years max,
| with 3-4 seeming like a reasonable estimate of the lifespan of
| the product
|
| I've been using my current IDE for 17 years, and plan to
| continue using it for at least another 15
| whs wrote:
| You mean Android Studio will be canned in 2018 max with a
| reasonable estimate of 2016-2017?
| devsda wrote:
| Isn't Android Studio based on IntelliJ and not a product
| developed from ground up? And Android Studio has second
| order revenue from the playstore.
|
| I wouldn't be even surprised if internally the AS team's
| financials are counted under the Playstore umbrella.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Antigravity is based on VS Code, not designed from the
| ground up, and has second order revenue from the AI
| subscriptions (financials probably counted under the AI
| umbrella).
|
| I still wouldn't trust a Google product to stick around,
| but these hints aren't a reliable oracle either.
| devsda wrote:
| When AS was launched Android was the only other viable
| option and it is the same even today. I don't believe
| Google's AI products will reach and/or sustain the same
| dominance as Android.
|
| It is a product launched in the hype cycle of AI. Google
| has plenty of other products (launched during hype
| cycles) that are gathering dust.
|
| That's not a guaranteed signal that it will meet the same
| fate but its something strong enough to be wary of.
| deeringc wrote:
| It's interesting to think that Google's Antigravity is a
| forked version of MSFT's VS Code, which uses a browser
| engine built by Google, which they forked from Apple,
| which they forked from KHTML.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| It's made by Jetbrains thankfully.
| zevv wrote:
| Which is is, vi or emacs?
| Arcuru wrote:
| It will be very funny if it's vim, since Bram Moolenaar who
| created and ran it worked at Google from 2006 to 2021.
| 20k wrote:
| codeblocks. There are dozens of us!
| CjHuber wrote:
| Do you really think antigravity will last longer than 1 year?
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Yes
| Yeroc wrote:
| It won't matter. The core ideas of an Agent Manager view will
| be copied and improved by others in many project in the
| future.
| denysvitali wrote:
| See the videos:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX-OpeNZYI4
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKQ9b4UMpGQ
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45967787
| Barbing wrote:
| Wonder why they're unlisted.
| xnx wrote:
| This is common for videos embedded in a page that don't make
| sense out of context (e.g. in the YouTube feed).
| phplovesong wrote:
| From what i saw its yet an AI first text editor. Thats a hard
| pass for me.
| nasretdinov wrote:
| - A new "AI" IDE announced
|
| - It's VS Code
|
| Like clockwork!
| jakebasile wrote:
| How many forks of VS Code am I supposed to have installed at
| this point?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| My YC2026 startups are an AI agent that automatically manages
| your VSCode forks, and a public safety computer vision app
| for smart glasses that predicts whether someone can afford a
| lawyer based on their skin color
| collingreen wrote:
| They'll have to compete with these other pending funded
| companies:
|
| - ai therapist for your ai agents
|
| - genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best
| results survive so they have to fight for their virtual
| lives
|
| - prompt engineering as a service
|
| - social media post generator so you can post "what if ai
| fundamentally changes everything about how people interact
| with software" think pieces even faster
|
| - vector db but actually json for some reason
|
| (Edit: formatting)
| whstl wrote:
| Don't forget there's 2 or 3 of each in YC2026.
| bblb wrote:
| > genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best
| results survive so they have to fight for their virtual
| lives
|
| AI Agent Orchestration Battle Bots. Old school VMs are
| the brute tanks just slowly ramming everybody off the
| field. A swarm of erratically behaving lightweight K8s
| Pods madly slicing and dicing everything coming on their
| way. Winner takes control of the host capacity.
|
| I might need this in my life.
| zamadatix wrote:
| You'll need a Chromium based app to count the installs for
| you.
| NamlchakKhandro wrote:
| yes
| linhns wrote:
| This is why I have much respect for the Zed team as they are
| chasing originality, not just slap something onto VS Code and
| call it a new IDE.
| Demiurge wrote:
| I love Zed code. Sad that Sublime Text is not keeping up.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| These are two of the fastest editors, and I use both, but I
| don't think they're for the same thing: Zed is for multi-
| file projects with moderate IDE abstractions (Worse than
| Jetbrains; better than most others); Sublime is for editing
| one-off files with syntax highlighting.
| kayart_dev wrote:
| On the contrary, I am glad that the Sublime team did not
| fall for the trends and avoided adding AI slop into the
| editor
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I would bet in time they are vindicated. Then Google et
| al will release something with much advertising hype
| about "returning to basics" or something in a couple of
| years.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Once the UI soup around AI dev use has settled (and it's
| getting closer) I bet you we will see native apps with
| c/c++/zig/rust backends that render so much faster on all
| the junctions that aren't roundtrip limited (and yes, that
| will still matter to many people).
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why would you bet that? It hadn't happened before AI so
| not sure why it would now. In fact this is why VSCode was
| even created, because it was easier hacking on a browser
| renderer than making something from scratch.
| mbesto wrote:
| If both work equally well then why does it matter whether Zed
| or VSCode is under the hood?
| skavi wrote:
| I think the point is that they don't both work equally
| well.
| mbesto wrote:
| Then maybe they shoulda elaborated on that? /shrug
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Is the extension system in VSCode not powerful enough to make
| these just normal extensions for a vanilla VSCode executable?
| Or is everyone just going for lock in, since if you download
| MyFork, you can't start using some other extension that uses
| OtherGuysModel?
| threetonesun wrote:
| Correct. One could say the same thing for browsers. I suppose
| on the one hand it's good that it's relatively easy to spin
| up a new project like this, on the other hand one must swear
| allegiance to their large software company of choice.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| Back when Cursor was new (before literally everything was AI
| hype) they explicitly called out that they wanted to do more
| in-depth integration with the editor than was possible with
| just the extension APIs.
|
| Presumably that hasn't changed much. If you want to do any
| large-scale edits of the UI you need to spin up a fork.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| I don't know, does Cursor offer anything substantial beyond
| an extension like kilocode? (I've only used vanilla
| VSCodium branch with various extensions but they all seem
| to integrate everything from tab-completion to complete UI
| agentic take-over very well)
| mpeg wrote:
| It's also an absolutely basic fork. They haven't even bothered
| with a custom theme, or custom UI, it's just vscode with an
| agents window slapped on top.
|
| Weirdly, out of all the vscode forks the best UI is probably
| bytedance's TRAE
| asadm wrote:
| > VSCode
|
| You mean Chromium wrapper?
| ekropotin wrote:
| Chromium? You mean OS wrapper?
| 9dev wrote:
| OS? You mean HAL wrapper?
| ekropotin wrote:
| HAL? You mean hardware wrapper?
| m-hodges wrote:
| Was expecting https://pypi.org/project/antigravity/
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Nice, if I switch now it'll be killed in two to three years right
| around the time Zed has all the features that I want!
| guluarte wrote:
| and the difference from vscode is...?
| surgical_fire wrote:
| VS Code won't feature in Google Graveyard in the short term
| future.
| pharrington wrote:
| This one forces you to log into your google account before you
| can use vscode!
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Curious if the name is a reference to https://xkcd.com/353/
|
| > Come join us! Programming is fun again! It's a whole new world
| up here!
| benatkin wrote:
| The name Bard didn't fly, so they went for literal flying
| instead.
| Thrymr wrote:
| I hope Google is at least acknowledging the origin of the name,
| even if they are not paying royalties to Randall Monroe.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Don't take my random pondering as any kind of evidence
| tpoacher wrote:
| Either that or google sampled everything in the medicine
| cabinet
| TIPSIO wrote:
| I actually like the workflow they are suggesting. There's
| something there for sure:
|
| - Nano Banana => Mockup
|
| - Antigravity/IDE => Comments/note
|
| - Gemini => Turn to code
|
| - Antigravity/IDE => Adjust/code
|
| All on the same platform so can maximum automate / "agentic"
| dnw wrote:
| Jules
| gnarlouse wrote:
| So the whole world is a scam for your data now basically.
| Oarch wrote:
| Neigh, a Trojan Horse.
| collingreen wrote:
| This pun made me actually laugh out loud. I almost lost some
| coffee.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| Something something, "my kingdom for a horse." Obligatory
| upvote, wp
| monegator wrote:
| Wow this page is an endless source of memes and broken UX madness
|
| Google at its finest
| spuz wrote:
| > Your new focus is architecting the solution, not implementing
| every single step. So congratulations, you have been elevated to
| a manager of agents.
|
| I'm not sure many engineers will welcome this "promotion".
| elif wrote:
| Few horse racers became automobile racers.
|
| If existing engineers don't change it doesn't matter because
| new engineers will take their place.
| vosper wrote:
| Horse racing didn't go away and there are more people who
| race horses professionally than who race cars.
| mxkopy wrote:
| Horses also run faster than pictures of cars
| augment_me wrote:
| Copium
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| There are many more truck drivers than buggy drivers
| zem wrote:
| there is a lot more buggy code than truck code
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Truckers code better than bugs
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Buggy drivers are adapted to racing conditions better
| than truck ones.
| elif wrote:
| "Professional riders number roughly three to six thousand
| worldwide, while professional drivers number roughly twenty
| to forty thousand across major sanctioned series."
| croes wrote:
| We'll wait and see.
|
| Car manufacturers made profit
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Some will wait and see, yes.
| AstroBen wrote:
| I don't think this is speaking to the engineers
| spuz wrote:
| Then who are they targeting? Who else would currently be
| "implementing every single step"?
| sp4cec0wb0y wrote:
| Project managers and higher level management.
| wduquette wrote:
| Reminds me of the pre-GitHub days, when I had to use CM
| tools designed to appeal to project and CM managers, not
| to the poor developers who had to use them every day.
| Anybody else remember Harvest?
| orphea wrote:
| Yeah, we'll see how that'll go.
| salawat wrote:
| You weren't the target audience. The target audience was
| manager types tired of being told no by engineers. Always
| listen to the quiet parts left unspoken/unacknoeledged.
| pyrale wrote:
| They will equally be tired of being told yes by LLMs.
| ihumanable wrote:
| It's the same thing they tried to sell with low/no-code.
|
| The problem is that the engineer turning what you want into
| code isn't normally the bottleneck. I would say about 50% of
| my job is helping people specify what they want sufficiently
| for someone to implement.
|
| Non-technical people are used to a world of squishy
| definition where you can tell someone to do something and
| they will fill in the blanks and it all works out fine.
|
| The problem with successful software is that the users are
| going to do all the weird things. All the things the manager
| didn't think about when they were dreaming up their happy
| path. They are going to try to update the startTime to the
| past, or to next year and then back to next week. They are
| going to get their account into some weird state and click
| the button you didn't think they could. And this is just the
| users that are trying to use the site without trying to
| intentionally break it.
|
| I think if managers try to LLM up their dreams it'll go about
| as well as low/no-code. They will probably be able to get a
| bit further because the LLM will be willing to bolt on
| feature after feature and bug fix after bug fix until they
| realize they've just been piling up bandaids.
|
| I am cautiously optimistic that there will be a thriving
| market for skilled engineers to come in and fix these things.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Perhaps it's worth posing the question: what sorts of
| "engineers" might feel threatened by agents? Those doing
| engineering, or those who spend their careers wading in the
| shallows? Competent designers with deep comprehension, or, at
| best, the superficial pedants?
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Why is google so bad at product branding and strategy? My
| complaint is aesthetic: why would you name your product a five-
| syllable word??
| hobs wrote:
| Its clearly a reference to the xkcd comic which does have
| mindshare.
| nfw2 wrote:
| Thank you for the demonstrating the reasoning that leads to
| these decisions.
| hobs wrote:
| This made me laugh, I assume you are calling me an old
| fogey and I will be glad to take it. This is why they don't
| let me near the marketing stuff.
| paganel wrote:
| Which comic would that be?
|
| Later edit: Probably this one [1], which is par for the
| course for Alphabet, they're, conceptually, still living in
| the early 2010s, when this stuff was culturally relevant.
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/353/
| igleria wrote:
| well they sure seem to make product naming after going
| through the whole medicine cabinet too, just like the comic
| shwaj wrote:
| Informally, people will way "antigrav".
| brazukadev wrote:
| Informally, nobody will be talking about it in one week
| xplt wrote:
| Because it's awkwardly close to the letters AGI, maybe
| RubberSpoon wrote:
| It's actually this, the command line tool is `agy`
| roman_soldier wrote:
| Another google product, there are too many and which ones will be
| around in a year or two?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Loads a blank white page and breaks the back button in Firefox.
|
| Console error:
|
| > Loading module from
| "https://antigravity.google/main-74LQFSAF.js" was blocked because
| of a disallowed MIME type ("text/html").
| Slogsworth wrote:
| I recognize the guys in the video, they were in marketing videos
| for the Windsurf IDE before its founding team was cannibalized
| by/absorbed into Google.
| arrowleaf wrote:
| Kevin was CTO / head of product engineering at Windsurf, Anshul
| was a founding engineer
| 6thbit wrote:
| I found the demo videos off-putting, people come off a bit
| smug, not sure if intended.
| phyzome wrote:
| It's really kind of pathetic how we live in a future where
| "antigravity" is a text editor that lies to you, "hoverboards"
| are one-wheeled electric skateboards that burn your house down,
| and... well, can't think of a third thing at the moment, but you
| know the vibe.
|
| Lotta people mining science fiction for cool names and then
| applying them to their crappy products, cheapening the source
| ideas.
| seanhunter wrote:
| A third thong could be "self driving cars" are cars that you
| have to stay alert and in full control of at all times.
|
| We _are_ in the future, it's just a much more rubbish version
| than people imagined in scifi
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Neat, but the world doesn't need another IDE, and people want
| choice. Provide tools that plug into open workflows and step
| back.
| craftkiller wrote:
| I don't get it. It's a completely blank web page. Did they not
| test in firefox?
|
| Ah Google misconfigured their web server:
|
| > Loading module from
| "https://antigravity.google/main-74LQFSAF.js" was blocked because
| of a disallowed MIME type ("text/html").
|
| Edit: And a couple minutes later, it is now working. Guess Google
| is reading HN.
| jkrems wrote:
| Looks like it's back again!
| mentalgear wrote:
| Honestly, the full page doesn't give you much more. Not a
| SINGLE product image. All paragraphs about "agentic" blah-blah
| you have read 100s of times by now - I do not see how this is
| anything different from all the other AI VS Code forks, besides
| that it comes with Gemini from the start.
| thekevan wrote:
| "Not a SINGLE product image."
|
| But there is a 13 minute demo video.
|
| https://antigravity.google/product
| halflife wrote:
| Seems like they jumped the gun on the website release, the
| first version I saw was a wall of text, now it has photos and
| videos. Maybe they have an agentic CICD
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| They're blitzing all media with a Gemini 3 push, it seems.
| yawnr wrote:
| Can't even scroll on Firefox mobile lol
| dehugger wrote:
| Nice to see that it's not locked to just Gemini models
| dehugger wrote:
| Nice that you can use non-Gemini models with it
| andrewk17 wrote:
| can't get past the "Setting up your account" step atm
| rco8786 wrote:
| same just hanging on the spinner
| peterldowns wrote:
| same here, hope they fix this soon
| lefstathiou wrote:
| Same. I wonder if it is because I'm signing in with my Google
| Apps for business account.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| I worked in a factory one summer when I was a teenager. It was a
| totally brain dead work, but the morale was good. The workers
| weren't unhappy.
|
| I'm concerned that the new role of "manager of agents" (as google
| puts it) will be a soul destroying brain dead work and the morale
| won't be good.
| oytis wrote:
| Haven't we got enough of new eras yet?
| klysm wrote:
| No the investment amount demands a new era per week
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Each VSCode fork with some random AI junk slapped on will be a
| new era! I can't imagine how many eras behind I'm at this point
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| On the pricing page it says that for public preview they are
| offering a free individual plan with "generous rate limits". I
| gave it an HTML file and asked it to create Jinja templates from
| it and 2 minutes later (still planning, no additional prompt) I
| got this:
|
| > Model quota limit exceeded. You have reached the quota limit
| for this model.
| riskassessment wrote:
| > html
|
| Would be willing to bet this is the issue. Adding html files to
| context for gemini models results in a ton of token use.
| gcr wrote:
| why?
|
| EDIT: why must users care?
| SPICLK2 wrote:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-
| open...
| croes wrote:
| The accepted answer is one that doesn't care about the
| questioner's use case and instead gives a pretty
| excessive "Don't do it"
| lukan wrote:
| It does also give the right solution, using an xml
| parser.
| croes wrote:
| We don't know the use case.
|
| Maybe the questioner is also in full control of the HTML
| creation and they don't need a parser for all possible
| HTML edge cases.
| SPICLK2 wrote:
| Maybe they are, but they would also need to ensure a
| well-defined subset of HTML and also show that the subset
| is a reglar (Chomsky Type 3) grammar.
|
| It seems that even the very conceptually simple example
| given by the questioner is impossible.
| kulahan wrote:
| Gotta learn all the quirks of the model before it's
| replaced in 8 minutes.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| Quirks? like context window?
| kulahan wrote:
| I'm saying it's egregious to expect all users to know the
| fact that an HTML document, for some reason, uses an
| enormous amount of context in an LLM designed
| specifically for _working with code_.
| malshe wrote:
| I had pretty much the same experience.
| egeozcan wrote:
| That'd be my experience with gemini cli.
| leoff wrote:
| I think the models are under high load right now, and not
| working properly.
| onion2k wrote:
| So the error messaging is wrong, giving the user the
| impression it's their fault for not paying. I think that's
| worse..
| agotterer wrote:
| Same here. I tried to build a super simple iOS App in
| antigravity and I was out of quota before it finished. The
| whole thing was a couple of files and a few hundred lines of
| code.
| dabockster wrote:
| Jevons paradox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
|
| It's the same problem with OpenRouter's free tiers for a long
| time. If something is truly $0 and widely available, people
| will absolutely bleed it dry.
| Supercompressor wrote:
| If you dismiss and respond something like "proceed" it resumes.
| Takes a fair while to actually run out of usage.
| thecaspercraft wrote:
| I haven't used it myself but a few of my colleagues used it
| saying it is good and they completed a huge chunk of work with
| Antigravity, mind you I am very skeptical of this.
|
| The don't seem to be getting any rate limiting issue which I
| don't understand, maybe a bug in Antigravity allowing them to
| use it for more. They are really confident in the IDE after a
| few hours and the output given is really good.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| I went ahead and downloaded it, it looks to be a VSCode fork very
| similar to Cursor, with support for the following models:
| - Gemini 3 Pro (High) - Gemini 3 Pro (Low) - Claude
| Sonnet 4.5 - Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking) - GPT-OSS
| 120B (Medium)
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Oh no, not another VSCode fork...
| rvz wrote:
| Many software engineering principles have been broken.
|
| Google using Electron tells us that quality control is
| completely out of the window.
|
| Unbelievable.
| user34283 wrote:
| I tried writing a native Windows app using WinUI 3.
|
| I wasted a day on trying to get some PNGs to render
| correctly, but no matter the config I used, the colors came
| out wrongly oversaturated.
|
| I used Tauri with a WebView, and the app was rendering the
| images perfectly fine. On top of that the UI looked much
| better, and I was done in half the time I spend trying to
| fix the rendering issue in WinUI 3.
|
| Never again will I go native.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| To be fair WinUI3 is particularly bad. If you're forced
| to install a 100MB runtime anyway, might as well make
| that runtime be a browser.
| user34283 wrote:
| Since Tauri uses the system's WebView, it shouldn't be
| that big. The docs say a minimal app could be 600 KB.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Yeah, Tauri is _better_ in that regard. My point is if
| the comparison is with WinUI, you might as well use
| Electron.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the
| mercy of Apple etc. It's unfortunate that things are so
| inefficient now, but competition is good, and native
| platforms can get good.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at
| the mercy of Apple etc.
|
| ... Aren't we talking about a _programming IDE_ here?
| When did mobile become anything like the primary market
| for that? Are people expected to sit around for hours
| inputting symbols with an OSK?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Mac. It's a pain to target, and I don't mean cause of the
| code signing.
| timeon wrote:
| If Zed can make it, even with completely new stack, why
| not Google?
|
| What are all this LLMs for when everything is just fork
| of electron app? Does not look like good marketing.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I'm not ignoring this question, I'm just not familiar
| with Zed and don't know how native it feels. Maybe Vscode
| is quicker to modify in the future as needed (esp if
| Google already uses it), or Antigravity is better in ways
| than Zed, or Zed just has a more skilled team than
| Google.
|
| Also I'm used to vim and sensitive to lag, so I always
| hated vscode, but seems a lot of people don't notice or
| something. And when you're using AI for 90% of the loc,
| it matters less.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Looks like they managed to make it Mac only in the process.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I would love this to be true to further make fun of
| Electron, but I don't think it's Mac only.
|
| https://antigravity.google/download
| badgersnake wrote:
| Ahh you're right. The UX of that site is bad on my phone.
| modeless wrote:
| Thank you for saying what this entire blog post doesn't. It's
| actually disrespectful of Google to launch this without even a
| mention of the fact that it is based on VSCode.
| shrikant wrote:
| It's so obvious from even just the vague screenshots that are
| hidden somewhere on the site that it's a VSCode fork, that I
| suppose I can see why they've tried to obfuscate that as much
| as possible.
| echelon wrote:
| Google is going to win AI and kill all the other market
| participants.
|
| They have the revenues to support all of this.
|
| They spent time learning from all the players and can now
| fast follow into every market. Now they're fast and nimble
| and are willing to clone other products wholesale, fork
| VSCode, etc.
|
| They're developing all of this, meanwhile Pichai is calling
| it a "bubble" to put a chill on funding (read: competition).
| It's not like Google is slowing down.
|
| We had a chance to break them up with regulation, and we
| didn't. Now they're going to kill every market participant.
|
| This isn't healthy. We have an invasive species in the
| ecology eating up all the diverse, healthy species.
|
| a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.
|
| As engineers, you should certainly hate this. Google does
| everything it can to push wages down. Layoffs, offshoring,
| colluding with competitors. Fewer startups mean fewer rewards
| for innovation capital and more accrual to the conglomerate
| taxing the entire internet.
|
| Chrome, Android, Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Workspace,
| Other Bets, and AI/Deepmind need to be split into separate
| companies.
|
| Call or email your legislators and ask for antitrust
| enforcement: https://pluralpolicy.com/find-your-legislator/
|
| Demand a Google breakup.
| tayo42 wrote:
| >They spent time learning from all the players and can now
| fast follow into every market.
|
| Google has never successfully done that? Maybe once?
| poemxo wrote:
| For the wage suppression thing, Google pays their engineers
| better than say Amazon or Microsoft.
| soperj wrote:
| He was talking about when Apple(under Steve Jobs)
| colluded with everyone (including Google), but doesn't
| seem to want to name Apple specifically.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Has Google *ever* successfully entered and taken over an
| existing market?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Search, back in the late '90s
| darkmarmot wrote:
| Besides search, Android kinda killed Nokia and friends
| for the consumer phone market.
| wiseowise wrote:
| iPhone did it, not Android.
| dotancohen wrote:
| With Nokia specifically, I would say that Windows Phone
| killed it.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I truly believe Nokia committed suicide. Meego-Harmattan
| was _really_ good and early enough that iOS and Android
| weren't completely entrenched yet.
|
| Or perhaps it would be most correct to say Microsoft
| assassinated Nokia by sending in Stephen Elop as a double
| agent?
| dotancohen wrote:
| > most correct to say Microsoft assassinated Nokia by
| sending in Stephen Elop
|
| That is exactly how I see it. It also makes perfect sense
| for all parties involved.
| abirch wrote:
| To be fair, Microsoft killed Nokia.
| mksreddy wrote:
| Search, browser, Mobile.
| Aspos wrote:
| maps as well. email client in the browser.
| cpa wrote:
| Chrome?
| ghc wrote:
| You mean like web search, webmail, internet ads, maps,
| calendars, browsers, smartphone operating systems, online
| document editing, and translation? I mean, I'm not even
| including stuff they acquired early like YouTube. Google
| was the most feared company for a decade or more for a
| good reason: they absolutely devoured competition in what
| were thought to be mature markets.
| rvnx wrote:
| Do you have a source for that ? Because according to
| official papers submitted by Google to the court this is
| absolutely not the case
| Towaway69 wrote:
| There are official court documents where google disowns
| google search? Or for what do you need a source?
|
| Google spreadsheet was another amazing product back in
| the day.
| rvnx wrote:
| Mh ?
|
| https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5
| c36...
|
| > Plaintiffs maintain that Google has monopoly power in
| the product market for general search services in the
| United States.
|
| > According to Plaintiffs, Google has a dominant and
| durable share in that market (general search), and that
| share is protected by high barriers to entry.
|
| > Google counters that there is no such thing as a
| product market for general search services.
|
| > What exists instead, Google insists, is a broader
| market for query response.
|
| (+ yes obviously, products like Sheets or Maps were
| amazing, and are still very much the best.
|
| It was a joke to say that even Google denies its own
| success, the same way as the earlier comment).
| fl0ki wrote:
| Putting aside that several of these were acquisitions,
| these are all great examples of things where Google
| introduced something for free because it would make the
| money through advertising, both directly and through
| ecosystem effects. Even the paid enterprise versions of
| these services were a tiny % of Google's overall gross
| revenue.
|
| Prior to the push into Cloud computing, Ad revenue was
| well over 90% of all Google gross income, and Cloud was
| the first big way they diversified. GCP is definitely a
| credible competitor these days, but it did not devour
| AWS. Other commercial Google services didn't even become
| credible competitors, e.g. Google Stadia was a
| technically exceptional platform that got nowhere with
| customers.
|
| The question now is whether Google carves out an edge in
| AI that makes it profitable overall, directly or
| strategically. Like many companies, there seems to be a
| presumption of potentially infinite upside, which is what
| it would take to justify the astronomical costs.
| ghc wrote:
| I'm not sure you can call Docs (Writely) and Android
| acquisitions though. Android was an OS for cameras and
| Writely was an experimental rich text editor, not a word
| processor.
|
| It's not like Youtube where they legitimately bought
| their way to dominance. And I'd argue that even in the
| case of DoubleClick, google was already dominating the
| search advertising market when they bought DoubleClick to
| consolidate their dominance.
| harrall wrote:
| Google's main ability is to win by pure technical
| prowess. They hire a lot of bright engineers. Google
| Search won over Altavista by pure algorithms. Google Docs
| (and Writely) were way more feature complete than
| competitors.
|
| You love a Google product because of its features but
| never actually because of the product itself. But you
| can't win everything by engineering and sometimes Google
| struggles with the product side.
|
| AI is part engineering so we'll see.
| gcr wrote:
| Google's definitively taken over search, ads, e-mail,
| maps, office (for small/medium business).
|
| They're struggling on cloud, AI, ISP, videoconferencing,
| and others...
| hirako2000 wrote:
| They clearly don't want to fold on AI.
| Fairburn wrote:
| You ok?
| astrange wrote:
| Google? Push wages down? Google is mostly known for paying
| top of market to keep a zoo of engineers whose only output
| is blog posts about how smart they are because they solved
| a problem they also caused.
|
| (presumably because if they touch the ad system it might
| break)
|
| > a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their
| returns.
|
| And a16z's main business is investing in financial scams.
| dweekly wrote:
| There's some irony in that, given how many other companies
| have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and
| rubbed Google the wrong way.
|
| The intro checklist for Antigravity includes watching VS Code
| tutorials!
| abirch wrote:
| VS Code is based on Chromium:
|
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/
| v...
|
| We've come full circle.
| breppp wrote:
| Chromium is based on Webkit which in turn is based on
| KHTML, so maybe KDE needs to develop a cursor clone?
| kaufmann wrote:
| Kursor.
| infthi wrote:
| Kursor Klone
| dsmurrell wrote:
| Get back to reddit! :)
| askvictor wrote:
| Or, for the non-AI version, Kode
| gmueckl wrote:
| Well, Kate has been around as an KDE based advanced text
| editor for nearly 2 decades now - its base feature set
| isn't too different from a base VS Code installation. And
| there's also KDevelop as a more full featured IDE.
| zekica wrote:
| Yeah, Kate is great. New versions integrate nicely with
| LSPs and while not as fast as Vim it's faster than VSCode
| and most gnome based code editors.
| modeless wrote:
| It's a good point, and in fact I went and looked at the
| original announcement of VS Code and it appears that
| Microsoft didn't credit Chromium or Electron back then
| either. I guess big companies are allergic to crediting
| other big companies.
| nightpool wrote:
| > given how many other companies have "created browsers"
| that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong
| way
|
| Has there been any indication that these folks are "rubbing
| Google the wrong way"? I think Chromium, as a project, is
| actually very happy that more people are using their
| engine.
| joedevon wrote:
| It's Windsurf
| anticensor wrote:
| and also isn't
| Maxious wrote:
| Except where they left Windsurf strings in it
| https://x.com/aidenybai/status/1990910907745218889 https:
| //x.com/ibrahimuzn/status/1990887635661791364/photo/1
| noxa wrote:
| +1 - it also doesn't support remote ssh (the open vsx
| variant), so is probably only focused at local web design
| development vibe coding ;(
|
| Should have just been an extension with a paid plan.
| therein wrote:
| It also feels like they couldn't use the GOOGLE ANTIGRAVITY
| logo enough times in this blog post. Gigantic image with
| the logo and a subtitle, plastered over and over again.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| I no longer bother reading their press releases. I'd much
| rather read the comments and threads like these to get
| the real story. And I say that as a former googler.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| I guess non-former googlers aren't allowed to say that -
| contractually.
| tormeh wrote:
| Someone important's career is attached to this project
| and its logo. And they're making sure it's as visible as
| possible.
| dabockster wrote:
| > so is probably only focused at local web design
| development vibe coding
|
| Quick, someone throw the Linux kernel source at it and
| report back! xD
| zeven7 wrote:
| I'm using remote ssh with it via the same plugin and
| settings I use in VS Code.
| catigula wrote:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge
|
| Nothing in there about chromium.
| uatec wrote:
| The welcome video says "We started with the core IDE then..."
| and shows a picture of VS Code.
|
| They knew exactly what they were saying.
| DuperPower wrote:
| AI companies blogs are not for devs, they write for tech
| journalists to hype
| kccqzy wrote:
| Why credit? Come on, the world has moved on from 1990s-era
| 4-clause BSD licenses. If you recall, the 4-clause BSD
| license states that all advertising materials must display an
| acknowledgement. It's widely considered to be a mistake and
| nobody uses this license any more. Not because of legal
| reasons (incompatibility with GPL) but because it _is_
| madness to require so many acknowledgements. Stallman was
| right.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >it is madness to require so many acknowledgements
|
| Really? Madness? "We started with VS Code to develop our
| IDE...".
|
| Oh, so onerous.
|
| A thank you to the principle developers is a minimum if
| you're using someone else's work commercially and aren't an
| asshole.
|
| No it's not a legal requirement, it's just about being a
| good part of society.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Yes, madness. VS Code wasn't developed entirely by
| Microsoft. It uses plenty of other open source libraries.
| Why is it that VS Code should be acknowledged but not the
| underlying V8 engine, or Chromium, or WebKit or KHTML?
|
| Stallman said that in 1997 there were 75 acknowledgements
| in a single piece of software. With today's trend of
| micro libraries on npm, there will be at least thousands
| of acknowledgements in one piece of software.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| So what?
| kccqzy wrote:
| If you can't understand the implications of this and need
| to ask "so what" just go read what Stallman and FSF say
| on this.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Turtles.
| Maxatar wrote:
| And VSCode is based on Chromium (a fact you won't find on VS
| Code's website other than related to updates).
| sedatk wrote:
| VSCode isn't a Chromium fork, it's an Electron app.
| Utilizing something is different than making a derivative
| of it. For example, an empty "Hello World" Electron app
| wouldn't have any value for an app developer, but creating
| a web browser derived from Chromium means you've already
| finished 99.9% of the work.
| verst wrote:
| It uses Electron which itself uses the Chromium rendering
| engine.
| bangaladore wrote:
| That's like saying news.ycombinator.com is based on
| Chromium.
|
| VSCode runs on chromium, like any website you visit when
| using a Chromium browser.
| bangaladore wrote:
| To the downvoter:
|
| VSCode -> Electron (essentially purpose specific web
| browser) -> Chromium
|
| news.ycombinator.com -> General Purpose Web Browser ->
| Chromium
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Ever heard of Firefox or Safari? I can open HN in any
| browser I want, but I can't change the browser used by
| the VSCode desktop app.
| bangaladore wrote:
| That's due to Electron, not Chromium.
|
| Which is exactly why VSCode has a near parity version
| that runs on the web, under any browser engine.
|
| Saying VSCode is based on Chromium doesn't make any
| sense.
| brazukadev wrote:
| That's quite the unsmart comparison.
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Honestly they don't even need to say so. The image literally
| looks like a vs code screenshot.
| chamomeal wrote:
| Yeah I also thought that was weird. Ctrl-f'd for vscode and
| was pretty confused that they didn't even mention it.
| ethmarks wrote:
| Interesting that they include non-Gemini models. Both Claude
| and GPT oss are both on Google Cloud, so I assume that
| Antigravity is using GC as the provider and not making API
| calls to Anthropic or OpenAI.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| They're subsidising calls for data & reward signals. If they
| can do that without also sharing the data with other
| providers it's a win/win.
| golergka wrote:
| As somebody who worked on two IDEs which didn't fork VSCode but
| still used Monaco for code editing views, I think forking
| VSCode is almost always the right solutions for a new IDE. You
| get extensions, familiarity and most importantly, don't waste
| valuable time on the boring stuff which VSCode has already
| implemented.
|
| Nothing bad with using code other people made open. Our whole
| industry is built on this.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Why the need to fork it instead of creating a new extension?
| (besides marketing)
| benoau wrote:
| Because if they're just an extension they're stuck with
| whatever rules Microsoft makes up, and Google is no
| stranger to using this leverage against others.
| meowface wrote:
| Because there are plenty of good reasons why you may want
| to modify/extend the code and the look and feel beyond what
| an extension would let you do.
|
| I never understood why people scoff at VS Code forks. I'd
| honestly tend to be more skeptical of new editors that _don
| 't_ fork VS Code, because then they're probably missing a
| ton of useful capabilities and are incompatible with all
| the VSC extensions everyone's gotten used to.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-
| ap...
| ghuntley wrote:
| it isn't http://ghuntley.com/fracture
|
| forking vscode? simple. extensions not so simple. they are
| controlled by microsoft. without them you'll run into
| continual papercuts as a vendor who has forked vscode.
| aniviacat wrote:
| I wonder why these forks don't build off Eclipse Theia. Is it
| because of the Eclipse license?
| desireco42 wrote:
| I am not fan of Eclipse, mostly due to bad experience with
| it, but this is excellent idea, if more people and companies
| would invest in it's development, we would have alternative
| to VS Code.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Just the Eclipse legacy and development approach perhaps.
| Eclipse is 24 years old and its codebase stems from VisualAge
| before that, so I imagine it's ... idiosyncratic. Probably
| the most successful thing built on OSGi, though I dont
| imagine Theia brought any of that along.
| gmueckl wrote:
| At least for a while, Eclipse seemed like an Architect
| Astronaut's happy fever dream: actual bits if
| implementations hidden behind 5 to 10 nested interfaces and
| facades wherever I looked. I remember that at one point
| that I wanted to debug some weird behavior in the Plugin
| Development Kit and after sinking about half a day into
| exploring the source code, I didn't even see a single line
| of code that was actually doing anything meaningful. It was
| quite shocking to my old junior level self.
| sakesun wrote:
| Eclipse Theia is based on VSCode, not the legacy Eclipse
| Java IDE.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Well, it uses the just the Monaco editor, but the rest is
| not based on VS Code.
| alyxya wrote:
| Making a VSCode fork is probably the wrong direction at this
| point in time. The future of agentic coding should need less
| support for code editor related functionality, and could
| eventually primarily support viewing code rather than editing
| code. There's a lot more flexibility in UI starting from
| scratch, and personally I want to see a UI that allows flexible
| manipulation of context and code changes with multiple agents.
| latentsea wrote:
| GitHub is building a UI like this. I like it. I sometimes
| need the full IDE, but plenty of times don't. It's nice to be
| able to easily see what the agent is up to and converse with
| it in real-time while reviewing it's outputs.
| timeon wrote:
| > VSCode
|
| Which is on top of 'Chrome'.
|
| Interesting sandwich: Google-Microsoft-Google.
| spixy wrote:
| similar sandwich is Angular-Typescript-V8
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| just to add to the sandwich somehow, vscode is mainly written
| in typescript
| dartharva wrote:
| Doesn't VScode's inbuilt GitHub copilot already support all of
| these?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| "We must also do Loveable"
| mccoyb wrote:
| > Bajillions of dollars invested in the development of some of
| the most powerful computational artifacts to date.
|
| > Fork VS Code, add a few workflow / management ideas on top.
|
| > "Agentic development platform"
|
| I'm Jack's depressed lack of surprise.
|
| Please someone, make me feel something with software again.
| collingreen wrote:
| There is cool stuff out there! Look beyond the companies with
| $B valuations and you can find smart, passionate people making
| neat stuff.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Challenge accepted
| rglover wrote:
| If you want to feel something with software, leave the industry
| and never look back, saving programming as something you do for
| your own joy/reward (I'm not being hyperbolic--I'd argue we're
| in the early days of the web's "dark ages").
|
| Unfortunately, once money came into the picture, quality,
| innovation, and anything resembling true progress flew out the
| window.
| dangus wrote:
| Arguably this is like every other automation in the
| Industrial Revolution but this time for knowledge workers.
|
| The masses will get their metaphorical fake leather belts
| made by slave labor operating machines and won't know better.
|
| A few artisans will make very little money making the real
| thing manually, mostly for their own enjoyment.
|
| This is assuming AI can actually be made to lower knowledge
| work's training/education requirements, and that debate is
| still ongoing.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > Please someone, make me feel something with software again.
|
| _Work with what you love, and you will never love anything
| again._
| ports543u wrote:
| Program not needed.
| msci100 wrote:
| So this is Google's version of Windsurf's Wave 10 before the
| whole team got poached? https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-
| wave-10-browser
|
| Trying to understand how this is anything net new in the space.
| Namahanna wrote:
| Looks to be. The UI has almost the exactly the same bits, and I
| even got 'Cascade' references as using it.
| Yeroc wrote:
| I haven't used Windsurf (been using Claude Code and similar).
| Does it provide an Agent Manager window/view? This to me looks
| more useful to me than the browser integration piece.
| antimora wrote:
| Why is scrolling modified on this page? I how to disable it?
| antgonzales wrote:
| Came here to say this, it's super frustrating.
| meetpateltech wrote:
| Put this in your browser console to force default scrolling
| var css = 'body { height: auto !important; overflow: auto
| !important; } .smooth-scroll-wrapper { transform: none
| !important; position: static !important; }
| div[style*="position: fixed"] { position: static !important;
| overflow: visible !important; inset: auto !important; }';
| var style = document.createElement('style');
| style.innerHTML = css; document.head.appendChild(style);
| console.log("Default scroll forced.");
| Barbing wrote:
| Thank you. Seems the website didn't like this btw, Safari
| macOS. Forced return to top of page when scrolling too fast.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Google likes to fuck with basic browser functionality for some
| reason. Scrolling, sometimes also how "click" intents through
| touch are triggered (that is, using js listeners for touch
| events instead of watching for the browser to communicate a
| "click" on an element; this does usability-killing shit like
| make a touch-to-stop-scrolling get interpreted as a click on
| whatever happens to be under your finger). I have no idea why
| they do this, but they do it a lot, so it must be a cultural
| thing.
|
| And I don't mean like some designers will highjack scroll to
| deliver a different experience like slide-like transitions or
| something (which may or may not be, differently, awful) but
| they'll override it just to give you ordinary scrolling, except
| much worse (as on this page).
|
| Seems like a lot of work to do just to make something shittier,
| but what do I know, I probably can't implement a* on a
| whiteboard from memory or whatever.
| bitpush wrote:
| > Google likes to fuck with basic browser functionality for
| some reason.
|
| Apple is the worst offender here. Their product pages are
| always sluggish.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Yeah, though with theirs I can usually see why they did it
| (even if I'd rather they didn't). Google's MO is messing
| with scrolling for what often appears to be no user-facing
| reason at all.
| bitpush wrote:
| > I can usually see why they did it
|
| wut? scrollhijacking is bad, and doesnt matter who does
| it.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Basic-to-great rationality or skill may not be what is being
| rewarded here (although the baseline of course needs to be
| met) - it could well be compliance capability. Hence the
| string of arbitrary memorization exercises.
| tencentshill wrote:
| They want everyone to see what the webpage looks like on their
| Mac.
| juancn wrote:
| I'm on a Mac and that scrolling speed is not how Mac's
| scroll. The acceleration and drag are all wrong.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's weird and laggy on Mac too. Not sure who this is for.
| dansalvato wrote:
| I can't believe these "smooth scrolling" scripts are still a
| thing. I was wondering why I was having a hard time scrolling
| the page on my phone, when I got to my PC and felt the reason.
|
| It's incredible to think how many employees of this world-
| leading Web technology company must have visited this site
| before launch, yet felt nothing wrong with its basic behavior.
| egorfine wrote:
| They could vibe code this feature as well so they did.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > Spin up agents to tackle routine tasks that take you out of
| your flow, such as codebase research, bug fixes, and backlog
| tasks.
|
| The software of the future, where nobody on staff knows how
| anything is built, no one understands why anything breaks, and
| cruft multiplies exponentially.
|
| But at least we're not taken out of our flow!
| SR2Z wrote:
| If you're building something new you'll need some skilled
| people around
| bakies wrote:
| After a bunch of people leave the company it's already like
| nobody knows how anything is built. This seems like a good
| thing to accelerate understanding a codebase.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| it's funny - nervous funny, not haha funny - that you think
| drawing a real issue like this out into the open would focus
| an organization on solving it.
| onion2k wrote:
| There is a lot more money in selling a tool to manage a
| problem rather than solve a problem.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Agents pretty good at describing how a particular feature
| works. It's not as dire as you make it seem.
| bakies wrote:
| that's what i mean
| crazygringo wrote:
| You can ask agents to identify and remove cruft. You can ask an
| agent why something is breaking -- to hypothesize potential
| causes and test them for validity. If you don't understand how
| something is built, you can ask the agent to give you an
| overview of the architecture and then dive into whatever part
| you want to explore more.
|
| And it's not like any of your criticisms don't apply to human
| teams. They also let cruft develop, are confused by breakages,
| and don't understand the code because everyone on the original
| team has since left for another company.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Because what we need is not lazy people - we need lazy people
| with AI? How is this even a justification?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Sorry, where did "lazy people" come from? Nobody's talking
| about anybody being lazy.
| infintropy wrote:
| I just like that evolution doesnt really care. People can
| opine on laziness and proper methodology. Its handwaving
| compared to how things shake out.
|
| Nature does select for laziness. The laziest state that
| can outpace entropy in diverse ways? Ideal selection.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > you can ask the agent to give you an overview of the
| architecture and then dive into whatever part you want to
| explore more.
|
| This is actually a cool use that's being explored more and
| more. I first saw it in the wiki thing from the devin people,
| and now google released one as well.
| flatline wrote:
| Humans are just better at communicating about their process.
| They will spend hours talking over architectural decisions,
| implementation issues, writing technical details in commit
| messages and issue notes, and in this way they not only debug
| their decisions but socialize knowledge of both the code and
| the reasons it came to be that way. Communication and
| collaboration are the real adaptive skills of our species. To
| the extent AI can aid in those, it will be useful. To the
| extent it goes off and does everything in a silo, it will
| ultimately be ignored - much like many developers who attempt
| this.
|
| I do think the primary strengths of genai are more in
| comprehension and troubleshooting than generating code - so
| far. These activities play into the collaboration and
| communication narrative. I would not trust an AI to clean up
| cruft or refactor a codebase unsupervised. Even if it did an
| excellent job, who would really know?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Humans are just better at communicating about their
| process._
|
| I wish that were true.
|
| In my experience, most of the time they're _not_ doing the
| things you talk about -- major architectural decisions don
| 't get documented anywhere, commit messages give no "why",
| and the people who the knowledge got socialized to in
| unrecorded conversations then left the company.
|
| If anything, LLM's seem to be far more consistent in
| documenting the rationales for design decisions, leaving
| clear comments in code and commit messages, etc. if you ask
| them to.
|
| Unfortunately, humans generally are _not_ better at
| communicating about their process, in my experience. Most
| engineers I know enjoy writing code, and hate documenting
| what they 're doing. Git and issue-tracking have helped
| somewhat, but it's still very often about the "what" and
| not the "why this way".
| recitedropper wrote:
| "major architectural decisions don't get documented
| anywhere" "commit messages give no "why""
|
| This is so far outside of common industry practices that
| I don't think your sentiment generalizes. Or perhaps your
| expectation of what should go in a single commit message
| is different from the rest of us...
|
| LLMs, especially those with reasoning chains, are
| notoriously bad at explaining their thought process. This
| isn't vibes, it is empiricism:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388
|
| If you are genuinely working somewhere where the people
| around you are worse than LLMs at explaining and
| documenting their thought process, I would looking
| elsewhere. Can't imagine that is good for one's own
| development (or sanity).
| crazygringo wrote:
| I've worked everywhere from small startups to megacorps.
| The megacorps certainly do better with things like
| initial design documents that startups often skip
| entirely, but even then they're often largely out-of-date
| because nobody updates them. I can guarantee you that I
| am talking about common industry practices in consumer-
| facing apps.
|
| I'm not really interested in what some academic paper has
| to say -- I use LLM's daily and see first-hand the
| quality of the documentation and explanations they
| produce.
|
| I don't think there's any question that, as a general
| rule, LLM's do a much better job documenting what they're
| doing, and making it easy for people to read their code,
| with copious comments explaining what the code is doing
| and why. Engineers, on the other hand, have lots of
| competing priorities -- even when they _want_ to document
| more, the thing needs to be shipped yesterday.
| recitedropper wrote:
| Alright, I'm glad to hear you've had a successful and
| rich professional career. We definitely agree that
| engineers generally fail to document when they have
| competing priorities, and that LLMs can be of use to help
| offload some of that work successfully.
|
| Your initial comment made it sound like you were
| commenting on a genuine apples-for-apples comparisons
| between humans and LLMs, in a controlled setting. That's
| the place for empiricism, and I think dismissing studies
| examining such situations is a mistake.
|
| A good warning flag for why that is a mistake is the
| recent article that showed engineers estimated LLMs sped
| them up by like 24%, but when measured they were actually
| slower by 17%. One should always examine whether or not
| the specifics of the study really applies to them--there
| is no "end all be all" in empiricism--but when in doubt
| the scientific method is our primary tool for determining
| what is actually going on.
|
| But we can just vibe it lol. Fwiw, the parent comment's
| claims line up more with my experience than yours. Leave
| an agent running for "hours" (as specified in the
| comment) coming up with architectural choices, ask it to
| document all of it, and then come back and see it is a
| massive mess. I have yet to have a colleague do that,
| without reaching out and saying "help I'm out of my
| depth".
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The paper and example you talk about seem to be about
| agent or plan mode (in LLM IDEs like Cursor, as those
| modes are called) while I and the parent are talking
| about ask mode, which is where the confusion seems to
| lie. Asking the LLM about the overall structure of an
| existing codebase works very well.
| recitedropper wrote:
| OK yes, you are right that we might be talking about
| employing AI toolings in different modes, and that the
| paper I am referring to is absolutely about agentic
| tooling executing code changes on your behalf.
|
| That said, the first comment of the person I replied to
| contained: "You can ask agents to identify and remove
| cruft", which is pretty explicitly speaking to agent
| mode. He was also responding to a comment that was
| talking about how humans spend "hours talking about
| architectural decisions", which as an action mapped to AI
| would be more plan mode than ask mode.
|
| Overall I definitely agree that using LLM tools to just
| tell you things about the structure of a codebase are a
| great way to use them, and that they are generally better
| at those one-off tasks than things that involve
| substantial multi-step communications in the ways humans
| often do.
|
| I appreciate being the weeds here haha--hopefully we all
| got a little better talking abou the nuances of these
| things :)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| _Idealized_ industry practices that people wish to
| follow, but when it comes to meeting deadlines, I too
| have seen people eschew these practices for getting
| things out the door. It 's a human problem, not one
| specific to any company.
| recitedropper wrote:
| Yes I recognize that, for various reasons, people will
| fail to document even when it is a profesional
| expectation.
|
| I guess in this case we are comparing an idealized human
| to an idealized AI, given AI has equally its own failings
| in non-idealized scenarios (like hallucination).
| tyg13 wrote:
| Sure, you can ask the agents to "identify and remove cruft"
| but I never have any confidence that they actually do that
| reliably. Sometimes it works. Mostly they just burn tokens,
| in my experience.
|
| > And it's not like any of your criticisms don't apply to
| human teams.
|
| Every time the limitations of AI are discussed, we see this
| unfair standard applied: ideal AI output is compared to the
| worst human output. We get it, people suck, and sometimes the
| AI is better.
|
| At least the ways that humans screw up are predictable to me.
| And I rarely find myself in a gaslighting session with my
| coworkers where I repeatedly have to tell them that they're
| doing it wrong, only to be met with "oh my, you're so right!"
| and watch them re-write the same flawed code over and over
| again.
| nova22033 wrote:
| _The software of the future, where nobody on staff knows how
| anything is built_
|
| Doesn't this apply to people who code in high level languages?
| medvezhenok wrote:
| The increasing levels of abstraction work only as long as the
| abstractions are deterministic (with some limited exceptions
| - i.e. branch prediction/preloading at CPU level, etc). You
| can still get into issues with leaky abstractions, but
| generally they are quite rare in established high->low level
| language transformations.
|
| This is more akin to manager-level view of the code (who need
| developers to go and look at the "deterministic"
| instructions); the abstraction is a lot lot more leaky than
| high->low level languages.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| even JS doesn't churn as fast as the models powering vibe
| coding, and that cut & paste node app is still deterministic,
| compared to what happens when the next version of the model
| looks at AI-generated code from two years ago...
| zahlman wrote:
| In the 00s I saw so many C codebases with hand-rolled linked
| lists where dynamically resized arrays would be more
| appropriate, "should be big enough" static allocations with
| no real idea of how to determine that size, etc. Hardly
| anyone seemed to have a practical understanding of hashes.
| When you use a higher level language, you get steered towards
| the practical, fundamental data structures more or less
| automatically.
| foobarian wrote:
| > The software of the future,
|
| :chuckles nervously:
| neurostimulant wrote:
| Vibe code fixer seems to be a viable job soon
| skerit wrote:
| They even packaged it for Linux.
| acedTrex wrote:
| Oh cool another ide for programming... aaaand its a vscode fork.
|
| I dont know what i expected tbh
| denysvitali wrote:
| When it starts it prints: Using Cloud Code URL: https://daily-
| cloudcode-pa.sandbox.googleapis.com
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| If I use this does it mean Google has access to all my code and
| it may popup as"AI generated" in someone else's code?
| dboreham wrote:
| That's not quite how LLMs work.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Not but you can be quite sure somewhere deep inside the TOS
| there is a line saying their telemetry swallow your soul. If
| not, it will be added. It's google, that's what they do.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Generally if you are paying full price (paying per token), then
| it's not used for training.
|
| If you are not paying, or paying a consumer level price
| ($20/mo) you will be trained on.
|
| ETA: In the terms they say they use your data because "free" is
| the only option available in preview. However it does say you
| can disable sharing in your settings...
| tmikaeld wrote:
| There is a setting to disable telemetry, unclear what this
| means though.
| pulkitsh1234 wrote:
| Seems like they are trying to attack both Cursor and Lovable at
| the same time...nice !
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Looks great, won't touch since they are probably going to do a
| switcheroo or a shutdown as usual.
|
| And of course I would need to look at all the implications of
| spying, being locked out of google account and absence of support
| that are google amo. No time for that. Not for them.
| bluerooibos wrote:
| Read the title, got excited. Read the page.. ah well, guess we'll
| have to wait another while for FTL travel.
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Same, I thought they had discovered cavorite with their quantum
| computer or something.
| torginus wrote:
| I don't want to hate on this but I remember last week, when as a
| backend developer doing frontend, I spent about 20 minutes
| prompting Claude Sonnet in a loop trying to build a landing page
| for a new feature.
|
| The task was to put create a header, putting the company logo in
| the corner and the text in the middle.
|
| The resulting CSS was an abomination - I threw it all away and
| rewrote it from scratch (using my somewhat anemic CSS knowledge),
| ending up with like 3 selectors with like 20 lines of styles in
| total.
|
| This made me think that 1: CSS and the way we do UI sucks, I
| still don't get why don't we have a graphical editor that can at
| least do the simple stuff well. 2: when these model's don't wanna
| do what you want them to the way you want them, they _really_ don
| 't wanna.
|
| I think AI has shown us there's a need for a new generation of
| simple to write software and libraries, where translating your
| intent into actual code is much simpler and the tools actually
| help you work instead of barely allowing to fight be all the
| accidental complexity.
|
| We were much closer to this reality back in the 90s when you
| opened up a drag and drop UI editor (like VB6, Borland Delphi,
| Flash), wrote some glue code and out came an .exe that you could
| just give to people.
|
| Somewhere along the way, the cool kids came up with the idea that
| GUIs are bad, and everything needs to go through the command
| line.
|
| Nowadays I need a shell script that configures my typescript CDK
| template (with its own NPM repo), that deploys the backend infra
| (which is bundled via node), the database schema, compiles the
| frontend, and puts the code into the right places, and hope to
| god that I don't run into all sorts of weird security errors
| because I didn't configure the security the way the
| browser/AWS/security middleware wanted to.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| >Somewhere along the way, the cool kids came up with the idea
| that GUIs are bad, and everything needs to go through the
| command line.
|
| It's important for people to feel like "hackers" that is the
| primary reason why command line sort of exploded among devs.
| Most devs will never admit this... they may not even realize
| it, but I think this is the main reason it went big.
|
| The irony is that the very thing that makes devs feel like
| "hackers" is the very thing that's enabling agentic AI and
| making developers get all resistant because they're feeling
| dumber.
| robofanatic wrote:
| Something felt really "artificial" about that youtube video.
| aeternum wrote:
| Product leaders that apply world-changing technology breakthrough
| names to their yet-another cloned SaaS product deserve more
| shame.
|
| Antigravity would be a world-changing technology. This isn't.
| stavros wrote:
| Wait until you see Google Perpetual Motion Machine, their
| appointment-booking virtual assistant.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Why? There's nothing wrong with metaphor.
|
| And agentic coding is about working at a much higher conceptual
| level. Further from the ground. Antigravity is a functional
| metaphor.
|
| My only issue with it is that it's too long at five syllables,
| and "anti-" is an inherently negative connotation. I'm guessing
| this will eventually get renamed if it gets popular, much like
| Bard was.
| brazukadev wrote:
| They should not be too metaphorical when naming a clone, tho.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Why not? And clone of what?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| As the parent said, actual anti-gravity is world-changing
| technology. It's telling the very laws of nature to go fuck
| themselves, you're gonna do what you want, even if all of
| known physics says it's impossible.
|
| Working at a higher conceptual level is just project
| management. You're the legislator giving out unfunded
| mandates rather than the agency staff that has to figure out
| how to comply. There's power there, but it isn't anti-
| gravity.
|
| That said, I suspect this is really meant to allude to
| https://xkcd.com/353/.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _There 's power there, but it isn't anti-gravity._
|
| That's why it's metaphor. "Operation Warp Speed" also
| delivered vaccines quickly, but not faster than the speed
| of light.
|
| The list of company and product names that are based on a
| metaphor that is very obviously exaggerated is endless.
| Google doesn't index a googol number of pages either.
| bflesch wrote:
| I feel it's a bit ignorant of you to double down on your
| argument and compare a cloned product release by some
| macbook swinging google engineers with vaccination, which
| actually positively impacted many human lives.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Are you for real? When someone disagrees, it's not
| "ignorance" or "doubling down". It's just legitimate
| disagreement. There's nothing I'm _ignorant_ of here, so
| please don 't throw around insults like that.
|
| I just continue to stand by the fact that naming products
| using exaggerated metaphor is standard practice. The idea
| that it is "shameful" or "ignorant" seems absurd. I think
| it's OK not to take it too seriously. Nobody is going to
| be confused and walk off of a cliff or something because
| the product is named "antigravity"...
|
| Do you get upset that the Milky Way candy bar doesn't
| actually contain a galaxy within? Or that the Chicago
| Bulls aren't as strong as actual bulls?
| brazukadev wrote:
| so your point is that you are policing what people think
| is shameful or ignorant? Is it too much to not think too
| high of a VSCode fork?
|
| Geez, people are still this impressed by big tech?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Since when did _disagreeing_ become _policing_? But yes,
| if someone calls me ignorant without any justification, I
| 'm going to disagree. And if you think that's "policing",
| I'm sorry but you seem to be the ignorant one here around
| the meaning of that word.
|
| "Geez," it's just a name. Is it too much to not get
| worked up over a perfectly innocent and fun name?
| brazukadev wrote:
| Perfectly innocent and fun name, coming from Google? Are
| you for real? That's one of the craziest things I've read
| in this forum, someone still thinking Google is an
| innocent startup with a "Don't be evil" motto.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You think the _name_ is evil...? Sorry, but _that 's_ one
| of the craziest things I've read in this forum.
|
| We're not talking about monopolistic business strategy
| here or anything. We're talking about a _product name_.
| So yeah, I think the name is perfectly innocent and fun.
| I cannot understand the level of conspiratorial thinking
| that must be involved to think "antigravity" is some
| kind of offensive choice. Bizarre.
| rvz wrote:
| This 'Antigravity' software is far below the expected Google
| software engineering standards I have ever seen.
|
| Quite shocking to see that Google would consider using this
| crass software and is the most inefficient software libraries
| ever made.
|
| What were the engineers thinking?
| robowo wrote:
| Oh no. Not another VSCode fork...
| Fraaaank wrote:
| Anyone else stuck on 'setting up your account'?
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| My guess is it fails if you use a workspace account. I was able
| to use it with my personal Google account.
| Fraaaank wrote:
| Hmm that does indeed seem to be the case.
| kUdtiHaEX wrote:
| Doesn't work with a workspace account for me but it does work
| with my private account
| om42 wrote:
| Yes, its also failing on my workspace account but worked on my
| personal. Might be a bug or a delayed deployment for workspaces
| b/c it might need to be "enabled" by admins?
| silveraxe93 wrote:
| Need to use a personal account. Check the first question in the
| FAQ: https://antigravity.google/docs/faq
| dannyfritz07 wrote:
| I'm not using a workspace account and am unable to get past
| this step.
| dannyfritz07 wrote:
| Oh well. Uninstalled. This was my first experience doing
| software development guided by AI. Doesn't seem like a tool
| that will serve me well in the long run.
| wiseowise wrote:
| What the hell is going on with scrolling on their website?
| quinnjh wrote:
| yeah... almost completely broken on my iphone. something tells
| me they used antigravity to vibe the website. would explain
| other issues mentioned like vim keybindings being ignored.
|
| ..."Youre absolutely right! I did mess up the internals of that
| feature and incorrectly reported that it works. let me try
| again..."
| world2vec wrote:
| Am I the only one stuck in the "Setting Up Your Account" loading
| screen?
| philmo1 wrote:
| same
| kUdtiHaEX wrote:
| 2020: every day a new JS framework is announced
|
| 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced
|
| 2025: every day a new AI IDE vscode fork is announced
| pooyamo wrote:
| >vscode fork
|
| I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something based on
| their own GUI stacks like Flutter or Compose Multiplatform.
|
| It seems only Zed is truly innovating in this space.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just
| about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now.
| Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.
| koiueo wrote:
| I have Cursor at work. The only element of the interface
| I'm using (and know how to use) is the chat window.
|
| IMO, it's an absolutely crappy IDE, crappy editor, with
| absolutely incomprehensible hostile UI.
|
| I have almost two decades of experience with Vim, Emacs and
| IntelliJ. FWIW, I was able to easily find my ways in helix,
| kakoune and Zed.
| samsmith4 wrote:
| Really? Can you say what you hate it about it pls
| koiueo wrote:
| From the top of my head in no specific order
|
| - Icons on the toolbar in the left panel have no labels
| or even tooltips. No way to know what they do without
| clicking and checking.
|
| - Space in the file explorer in the left panel opens a
| file (haven't noticed such behavior in other editors --
| totally unexpected).
|
| - Maybe that's the artifact of me installing Vim plugin,
| but Keyboard shortcuts displayed in the main menu don't
| do what they say they do.
|
| - It often offers installing some plugins, and I've
| absolutely no idea why, and what will happen if I do or
| if I don't.
|
| I'm talking about Cursor, which I assume is exactly like
| VS Code. Tried VS Code only once very long ago.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I think the left toolbar icons do have tooltips, but they
| show up pretty slowly for me (2-3 seconds).
| koiueo wrote:
| I'd like to retract my critique.
|
| I just opened the app to see what else I can bring up,
| and while clicking through UI I noticed I had some crappy
| key bindings extension installed, which apparently caused
| many of my annoyances.
|
| I've probably installed it very long ago, or even by
| accident.
|
| For example, I was always annoyed that open
| file/directory shortcut (one of most common operations)
| is not assigned and requires mouse interaction -- fixed
| by disabling the extension. Go to file shortcuts does
| something completely different -- fixed by disabling the
| extensions.
|
| I likely won't adopt Cursor as my main IDE/Editor, but
| it's miles better than I thought just an hour ago.
|
| Thanks for your question :D
| kvirani wrote:
| it's rare to see someone circle back with a retraction,
| even on HN. Kudos
| Degorath wrote:
| Not the person you asked, but I hate how it screws up
| keyboard shortcuts. It overrode the delete line shortcut
| with its own inline chat one, for example.
|
| Decided to ditch it for claude code right after that,
| since I cannot be bothered to go over the entire list of
| keyboard shortcuts and see what else it overrode/broke.
| meowface wrote:
| I've found that annoying too, but you can always rebind
| them as you wish. It's only a few new keybinds that get
| in the way of my muscle memory.
|
| That said I also have moved to CLI agents like Claude
| Code and Codex because I just find them more convenient
| and, for whatever reason, more intelligent and more
| likely to correctly do what I request.
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| https://cursor.com/cli
| koiueo wrote:
| There are some Enterprise plan shenanigans, so cli is not
| an option.
|
| At home I use claude and gemini in terminal, both work
| great for me
| rafark wrote:
| > just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by
| now.
|
| I don't know and honestly I hate the assumption of the
| software industry that everyone knows or uses vs code. I
| stuck to sublime for years until I made the switch to
| Jetbrains IDEs earlier this year.
|
| I quickly looked up the market share and VS code seems to
| have about 70% which is a lot but the 30% that don't use it
| is not that small of a number either.
|
| Like I get it it's very popular but it's far from the only
| editor/IDE people use.
| botanrice wrote:
| How would you say Zed is innovating? Never heard of it, just
| taking a peek now.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| It's written from scratch in Rust. It's super fast,
| polished, etc. A world of difference compared to VSCode.
| pooyamo wrote:
| Zed team is writing their own in-house GUI stack [1] that
| leverages the computer's GPU with minimal middleware in-
| between. It's a lot of work short-term but IMO the payoff
| would be huge if they establish themselves. I imagine they
| could poke into the user-facing OS sector if their human-
| agent interaction is smooth. (I have not tried it yet
| though)
|
| [1]: https://www.gpui.rs
| wiseowise wrote:
| Sublime did that almost 20 years ago.
| skydhash wrote:
| What about the text editing part?
| roywiggins wrote:
| it's _fast_
| meowface wrote:
| I am very sensitive to input latency and performance but
| after comparing Zed and VS Code for a while I really
| couldn't find any reason to stick with Zed. It's been a
| year or so since I last tried it but VSC just lets me do
| way more while still, IMO, having a nice, clean UI. I
| never notice any performance or key input latency with
| VSC.
| don_searchcraft wrote:
| If you work in a team there are some pretty good remote
| collaboration tooling built into Zed.
| lizardking wrote:
| And it can load staggeringly large files without falling
| over on itself.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Making an IDE sounds like an insane amount of effort.
|
| FWIW, the Fuchsia team was working on an editor that had a
| Flutter UI when run in Fuchsia:
|
| https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html
| charcircuit wrote:
| These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via
| their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste
| resources that could have been better spent improving the AI
| features.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Until someone finally figures out that we need to rethink
| editors from the ground up to support different sort of
| operations and editing experience, to better facilitate
| LLMs doing work as agents.
|
| But we're probably 1-2 years away from there still, so
| we'll live with skinned-forks, VSCode extensions and TUIs
| for now.
| rjtavares wrote:
| Antigravity's agent manager tries do to that. For
| example, it has an inbox for agent updates and requests
| for user decisions.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Antigravity is build on top of VSCode, I meant something
| completely different, not just a "feature" of something
| else.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| It's actually weird to me how none of the big players put
| their money where their mouth is and vibe coded a new IDE
| built from the ground up for this paradigm shift
| regardless of tech stack.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something
| extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get
| right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are
| desperately trying to catch up to desktop now
| candiddevmike wrote:
| AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping
| functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be
| used by these agents.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I was going to ask why all these companies choose to fork the
| entire IDE rather than just writing an extension like every
| other sane developer, and this response is the most
| believable reason why.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep
| things like that shouldn't allow a billion dollar company
| just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE
| whstl wrote:
| Most of VSCode (yes, most) is a mishmash of other OSS
| products, including Google Chromium! By that logic VSCode
| itself shouldn't exist.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| That does make sense.
| rapnie wrote:
| > AI UI
|
| 2026: every day ...
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Could you give an example of what they're gatekeeping for
| Copilot exclusively? I'm kinda confused because Copilot in VS
| Code isn't exactly a powerhouse of unique features in my
| experience, it still feels well behind Roo/Kilo Code in most
| ways I can think of, although much closer to the competition
| than it was a year ago.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is
| gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so
| they can't be used by these agents. reply
|
| I always wonder how this works legally. VSCode needs to
| comply with the LGPL (it's based on Chromium/Blink which is
| LGPL) ; they should provide the entire sources that allow us
| to rebuild our own "official" VSCode binary
| SR2Z wrote:
| I think that MS provides these extensions as plugins. The
| core of VSCode is OSS, it's the extra bits that have a
| different license.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Has (kinda) not been true for half a year
|
| https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/05/19/openSourceAIE.
| ..
| pdntspa wrote:
| Why is it so hard for these to be VSCode extensions and not
| forks?
| Etheryte wrote:
| Microsoft has very specific constraints on what extensions
| can and can't do, it's not a free for all. They're actively
| defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a
| way that extensions couldn't. That's why all the serious
| contenders make a fork, it's simply not possible to have the
| same integration otherwise.
| tremon wrote:
| *moat
| dust42 wrote:
| Still it would be a lot wiser if all the forkers would do
| one 'AI-enabled' fork together that exposes all the extras
| that copilot gets. The barrier for testing would be much
| lower and all the extension makers would also jump onto the
| train. Likely MS would finally give in and make all the
| extras available for everyone. But all the fragmentation
| only helps MS.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| What exactly are the "extras" that Copilot gets?
|
| I've had a Github Copilot subscription from work for 1yr+
| and switch between the official Copilot and Roo/Kilo Code
| from time to time. The official Copilot extension has
| improved a lot in the last 3-6 months but I can't recall
| _ever_ seeing Copilot do something that Roo /Kilo can't
| do, or am I missing something obvious?
| lozenge wrote:
| The Copilot extension uses proposed APIs, meaning it's on
| an allowlist bundled with VS Code. Roo likely enables
| these early. The API can stay proposed for years before
| Microsoft opens it up to third party users.
| meowface wrote:
| They're all going to have quite divergent opinions on how
| to structure the fork and various other design decisions
| that would inevitably lead to forks of the fork again.
|
| I think forking VS Code is probably the most sensible
| strategy and I think that will remain the case for many
| years. Really, I don't think it's changing until AI
| agents get so ridiculously good that you can vibe code an
| entire full-featured polished editor in one or a few
| sessions with an LLM. Then we'll be seeing lots of de
| novo editors.
| catigula wrote:
| Which is a bit odd given that Claude code extension in
| VSCode is by far the best agent integration into a codebase
| that I know of.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't even know what the Claude Code extension does in
| vscode. I have it installed but hell if I know what it's
| doing. I run Claude in one of vscode's terminals, and do
| everything through there. I do see (sometimes) diffs pop
| up in the IDE, I guess that's the extent of this
| integration.
| siva7 wrote:
| Thanks, thought i was the only one not getting what the
| extension is useful for (which i couldn't do easier over
| the cli)
| Yeroc wrote:
| The Claude Code extension on VS Code does very little
| (too little in my opinion). The integration level with
| agentic functionality provided by Antigravity goes much
| deeper in my 20 minutes or so of playing with it. The
| biggest value pieces I see is: Agent Manager window which
| provides a unified view of all my agents running across
| all my workspaces (!) where I can quickly approve or
| respond to followup questions and quickly brings me to
| the code in context for each agent, additionally, I can
| select a piece of code and comment on it inline and that
| comment gets sent to the correct, active agent. These two
| things alone are items which I have been looking for...
| Too bad I only have approval to use Claude Code at work.
| This looks promising.
| catigula wrote:
| That's all very silly and unnecessary in my opinion.
| Agentic change by change diffs are optimal for a
| professional.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Well, you are entitled to your opinion but many people
| would disagree with you, and that's the crux of the
| issue, everyone has their own conflicting views on what
| the UX should be, hence all the forks.
| dabockster wrote:
| This isn't true. I've gotten Claude and its forks to do
| things the same way as Copilot.
| hs86 wrote:
| A bit tangential, but I asked the new Gemini model about
| this, and it immediately traced back this quote to your
| username: https://gemini.google.com/share/144b46094d6e
|
| Creepy stuff :)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Because it just searches Google and HN is indexed
| regularly, nothing really noteworthy. If you copy paste
| the same quote into Google you get the same thing.
| siva7 wrote:
| That's the technical reason - the other is strategic and
| more important: Who controls the app controls the companies
| depending on it.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot
| to do things in a way that extensions couldn't
|
| That started to change in may.
|
| https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/05/19/openSourceAI
| E...
|
| https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/06/30/openSourceAI
| E...
|
| https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/11/04/openSourceAI
| E...
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| 2020: every day a new electron fork is announced
|
| 2024: every day a new electron fork is announced
|
| 2025: every day a new electron fork is announced
| myhf wrote:
| There's only one electron. It looks like separate ones
| because it's traveling backwards and forwards in time.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-
| electron_universe
| hypeatei wrote:
| > 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced
|
| This is still happening. Didn't you see OpenAI's release of
| Atlas?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| We need a VS Code fork that just exposes more interfaces, and
| does nothing else. Then all these forks could just use that
| with power extensions, and it'd force Microsoft to change its
| behavior.
| Mogzol wrote:
| there are now 15 competing standards
| diegof79 wrote:
| You just described Eclipse RCP.
|
| The issue with Eclipse and that approach is the complexity of
| mixing plugins to do everything, which kills the UX.
|
| When VSCode started, the differentiator from Atom and Eclipse
| was that the extension points were intentionally limited to
| optimize the user experience. But with the introduction of
| Copilot that wasn't enough, hence the amount of forks.
|
| I think that the Zed approach of having a common protocol to
| talk with agents (like a LSP but for agents) is much better.
| The only thing that holds me from switching to Zed is that so
| far my experience using it hasn't been that good (it still
| has many rough edges)
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| There's actually an ACP that has some traction as well,
| though I don't think it solves the problem of what the
| agent can do in vscode:
| https://agentcommunicationprotocol.dev/introduction/welcome
| w3news wrote:
| Microsoft just fork Atom, and Atom had already good and a
| lot of extensions. Before Microsoft buy Github, there was
| no reason to switch to VSCode instead of Atom. When
| Microsoft buy Github, it received Atom from the Github
| team, and Microsoft stops the development of Atom. VSCode
| was just Atom with the Microsoft brand, and some little
| tweaks from Microsoft, never a game changer compared to
| Atom, like Atom was in it's time. Now Antigravity is again
| a fork with some little tweaks from VSCode, no game
| changer, just with the Google branding.
| lozenge wrote:
| There's also Eclipse Che. They wrote a web based IDE from
| scratch and made it compatible with VS Code extensions but
| also provided extra APIs.
| nicce wrote:
| > 2024: every day a new Chrome fork browser is announced
|
| I think this was more accurate around 2012. My local tech
| magazine had their own fork and they attached CD with the
| magazine which included the browser.
| nthypes wrote:
| It's a shame not even mention the amazing work of VSCode.
| xnx wrote:
| The VSCode homepage does not mention Chromium or Electron.
| brazukadev wrote:
| It might sound smart your defense of Google but VSCode is not
| a fork or electron and chromium, there's a lot of work there,
| not just clicking a fork button
| karlkloss wrote:
| Finally! Affordable antigravity!
| xinghai wrote:
| Anyone got stuck on the "Setting Up Your Account" page ?
| hughw wrote:
| yep
| hughw wrote:
| I switched to my personal gmail identity and it succeeded.
| xinghai wrote:
| i tried with my personal account and still stuck on that page
| egypturnash wrote:
| Did they build this site with Antigravity because it sure is
| broken on my iPad.
| marstall wrote:
| I don't get how these agents can work when even Claude Sonnet 4.5
| (for example) needs a lot of hand-holding for basic, simple
| bugfixing stuff. Wouldn't the agents just be huffing and puffing
| their way off the rails all the time?
| jeltz wrote:
| They do and it is often entertaining.
| hughw wrote:
| This is the key question.
| sippeangelo wrote:
| > Neither engenders user trust in the work that the agent
| undertook. Antigravity provides context on agentic work at a more
| natural task-level abstraction, with the necessary and sufficient
| set of artifacts and verification results, for the user to gain
| that trust.
|
| I'm going to need an AI summary of this page to even start
| comprehending this... It doesn't help that the scrolling makes me
| nauseous, just like real anti-gravity probably would.
| thisisit wrote:
| Written by AI now summarise and explained by AI.
| dannyfritz07 wrote:
| wow, you weren't kidding about the scroll induced nausea.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Then there's this:
|
| "A more intuitive task-based approach to monitoring agent
| activity, presenting you with essential artifacts and
| verification results to build trust."
|
| The whole thing around "trust" is really weird. Why would I as
| a user care about that? It's not as if LLMs are perfect oracles
| and the only thing between us and a brave new world is blind
| trust in whatever the LLM outputs.
| TheRoque wrote:
| I'd say that because right now, verifying the LLM output
| (meaning: not trusting it) is a huge bottleneck (rightfully
| so). I guess they are trying to convince people that this
| bottleneck is no more, with this IDE.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Translation: "don't trouble your little brain actually trying
| to read the code that our model produced. we can show you
| pictures of the output instead."
| irilesscent wrote:
| Seems interesting, makes for the second vscode clone with ai
| google has made. The demo they showed in the video avoided
| showing code so I guess thats what they're aiming for. Although
| when they mentioned you can easily verify code quality by looking
| at end product screenshots it felt like they don't know what
| 'code' quality means.
| juancn wrote:
| How long until it's killed?
|
| I mean, google doesn't have the greatest track record.
|
| Also, why does that site's scroll behavior is so weird? Just use
| the browser's default for Ford's sake!
| dboon wrote:
| It's...a VSCode fork? Really? What has become of Google? Ten
| years ago, when I was getting into the world of software, there
| was still an aura about them. They built everything in this huge
| monorepo, and it worked. They were this deeply technical company
| for whom it seems anything could be done.
|
| And now they can't even ship a desktop app without forking
| VSCode? Look, I get it. There's this huge ecosystem. Everyone
| uses it. I'm not saying it's damning or even bad to fork it.
|
| But why is this being painted as something revolutionary? It's a
| reskin of all the other tools which are variations on the same
| theme, dressed up in business speak (an agent-first UX!). I'm
| sure it's OK. I downloaded it. The default Tokyo Night theme is
| unusable; the contrast can't be read. I picked Vim bindings, but
| as soon as I tried to edit a file I noticed that was ignored.
|
| What happened? Is this how these beautiful, innovative companies
| are bound to end up?
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| They should've made an ACP server
| https://agentclientprotocol.com
| dboon wrote:
| Yeah. I really like opencode, which provides an ACP.
| throwacct wrote:
| This. I don't think it'll move the needle. I already use vscode
| with copilot and it's "good enough".
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I can see why people don't release stuff on a permissive
| lisense anymore. It is absolutely insane that google is even
| allowed to do something like this.
| mrzool wrote:
| I wonder how many meetings where necessary to come up with that
| name
| esafak wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/353/
| rounakdatta wrote:
| Vim mode isn't working, oh no!
| josvdwest wrote:
| yeah I also cannot get Vim to work in Antigravity?
| mohsen1 wrote:
| This is the fruit of Windsurf brain-drain and I think it might be
| better than what's out there since those guys got to start from
| scratch from everything they learned building Windsurf
| xnx wrote:
| I forgot all about Windsurf from ... 4 months ago. The pace is
| crazy.
| zb3 wrote:
| Nice demo, but they didn't say the most important thing - how
| much did Gemini API calls in that demo really cost? How much
| tokens were consumed?
|
| I know there's a "free plan with generous rate limits" but it's
| obvious that they're losing money there.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Blog post: https://antigravity.google/blog/introducing-google-
| antigravi...
| everyone wrote:
| My experience with GPT and Claude, is that they are _fantastic_
| for learning something brand new to me, as a kind of tutor..
|
| But for writing code in some domain I am good in, they are pretty
| much useless.. I would spend a lot longer struggling to get
| something that barely functions from them VS writing it myself,
| and the one I write myself will be terse and maintainable + if it
| has bugs they will be like obvious ones, not _insane_ ones that a
| human would never do.
|
| Even just when getting them to write individual functions with
| very clear and small scopes.
| zb3 wrote:
| Too bad they never show these magic AI-Assisted tools being used
| to fix real-world bugs / implement feature requests in their open
| source GH repositories.
|
| What about a demo that shows how this can be used to fix for
| example https://github.com/emscripten-
| core/emscripten/issues/24792?
| jimmar wrote:
| I installed it, entered one prompt, clicked the "Proceed" button,
| and got "Model quota limit exceeded."
|
| Those quota limits brought me back down to earth quickly.
| qayxc wrote:
| Especially since: There is currently no
| support for: Paid tiers with guaranteed quotas and
| rate limits Bring-your-own-key or bring-your-own-
| endpoint for additional rate limits Organizational
| tiers (self-serve or via contract)
|
| So basically just another case of vendor lock-in. No matter
| whether the IDE is any good - this kills it for me.
| bufunobhmut wrote:
| The amount of New Eras stuffed into New Eras is too damn high!
| hugs wrote:
| ""Autonomously, an Antigravity Agent writes code for a new
| frontend feature, uses the terminal to launch localhost, and
| actuates the browser to test that the new feature works."
|
| very interesting times; i'm glad to see browser automation
| becoming more mainstream as part of the ai-assisted dev loop for
| testing. (disclosure: started the selenium project, now working
| on something similar for a vibe coding context)
| quinnjh wrote:
| is that "vibium" ? as someone who tried setting up selenium in
| a workflow im definitely interested.
| hugs wrote:
| yup, vibium!
| mhl47 wrote:
| Most people are missing the point here. Testing the GUI/feature
| more reliable is something that Gemini 3 could unlock (looking
| at the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark and its general improvement on
| visual understanding). At least for the (hobby-)projects I
| attempted this was really a bottleneck having to always test
| the GUI after each change as its quite often breaking
| something.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Can we mark this as a dupe of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968065
| lucideer wrote:
| Really hope the quality of the IDE is better than the website...
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Theory: the naming of this product is strategic. Google's goal is
| to push something else above "Google antitrust" in the
| autocomplete.
| esafak wrote:
| It's just an xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/353/
| brazukadev wrote:
| Wouldn't that have the opposite effect, now every person
| googling for Google antigravity will see the second suggestion
| as Google antitrust
| sangeeth96 wrote:
| With all due to respect to the folks working on Antigravity, this
| feels like a vibe-coded VSCode fork to me. Font sizes, icon
| sizes, panel sizes are all over the place (why?). To top it all
| off, the first request just failed with overload/quota exceeded
| errors (understandable, but still).
|
| Looks like I'll wait to see if Google cares about putting the
| polish into a VSCode fork that at least comes close to what
| Cursor did.
| fhinkel wrote:
| The UI is certainly buggy, and things are getting fixed all the
| time. Guess it was more a "let people try the agent manager"
| instead of overfocusing on looks.
| amsterdorn wrote:
| > feels like a vibe-coded VSCode fork
|
| That's 100% what it is, and rushed at that. Competition is
| (generally) a good thing though, only time can tell which IDE
| comes out on top.
| zkmon wrote:
| The name sounds like it is not going to stick around for long.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| A product name with five syllables is doomed.
| nthypes wrote:
| This is a vibe-coded VSCode fork. In a simple task, I got
| overload/quota exceeded errors with horrible error handling. lol
| alwinaugustin wrote:
| Same for me also. I have Gemini Pro subscription, still it is
| showing quota exceeded error.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| dupe https://antigravity.google/
| rglover wrote:
| We have a real, serious problem when even Google (presumably with
| a large share of the world's engineering might) is just forking
| VSCode.
| barbazoo wrote:
| With every AI VSCode fork we get closer to the bubble popping.
| raincole wrote:
| Reusing open-source code is a "real, serious problem" now...?
| parliament32 wrote:
| Wait till you hear about how much Linux they use.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Something incredibly weird is going on in the "AI space",
| everyone seems to believe that they need their own browser and
| IDE. All of them are just forks of each other, so why aren't
| they extensions or plugins?
|
| I can't really explain what the issue is, I'd assume it's about
| lock in, but I don't see a VS Code fork or yet another Chromium
| browser being something that a person couldn't easily replace
| with another similar fork, but with a different AI. It that the
| pitch internally? Lock users into a browser or IDE, so they'll
| be forced to use a certain AI?
| rglover wrote:
| > It that the pitch internally? Lock users into a browser or
| IDE, so they'll be forced to use a certain AI?
|
| _Shrugs_ that 's the only reason that makes any sense short
| of they're just being blindly mimetic (which, let's be
| honest, isn't outside of the realm of possibility these
| days).
| balls187 wrote:
| Okay, maybe I'm stupid, but the demo video included pasting and
| API key into the chat window.
|
| That seems bad.
| fosterfriends wrote:
| Anyone else getting this error: "Agent execution terminated due
| to model provider overload. Please try again later."
| keepamovin wrote:
| Yes I just tried GP3H and got this. GP3L is fine tho.
|
| I like this tool.
|
| _edit: Scratch that, GP3L is erroring out too. Global hug I
| guess. I still like this._
| efields wrote:
| MacOS/Safari User here. Stuck on 'Setting Up Your Account' once
| I've authorized it in the browser. /shrug
| bgrainger wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968731
| Why can I not authenticate into Google Antigravity?
| Google Antigravity is currently available for non-Workspace
| personal Google accounts in approved geographies. Please try
| using an @gmail.com email address if having challenges with
| Workspace Google accounts (even if used for personal purposes).
|
| https://antigravity.google/docs/faq
| rkomorn wrote:
| I love how being a paying Workspace customer for a decade or
| more has actually locked me out of so many Google products
| and features.
|
| Not that I have any desire to try this at this point, but
| it's always felt ironic.
| efields wrote:
| Thanks. Actually did use my personal account and got the
| issue nonetheless.
| haberdasher wrote:
| Same
| voxmatt wrote:
| Same
| ed wrote:
| To save others the trouble, it doesn't matter whether you use
| Chrome or Safari for the auth flow. It's broken on both. (I'm
| using a personal @gmail account.)
| Topfi wrote:
| Had the same issue, have been able to sign in finally using a
| Google Cloud Identity (former Workspace) account by changing my
| IP via a VPN to Singapore. No idea why, but that worked. Tried
| a few other countries too, but only had success with Singapore.
| bdn_ wrote:
| Just from the name, I thought this was going to be Google's
| official take on the classic "Google Gravity" site from ages ago:
| https://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google-gravity...
|
| I used to love leaving that site open on public PCs and watching
| the reactions that resulted :)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I just have zero faith in Google. How long until we hear that
| someone mysteriously got banned by Google (as we see on HN every
| few months? it feels like it anyway) and hear about how now they
| have no AI tooling etc etc etc because its all married to their
| Google Account.
|
| Additionally... Google Code was shut down in 2016? I have zero
| confidence in such a user hostile company. They gave you a Linux
| phone, they extended it, and made it proprietary. They gave you a
| good email account, extended it and made it proprietary. They
| took away office software from you via Google Docs, so now you
| don't even own the software they do.
|
| No thanks.
| vitaflo wrote:
| A 5 syllable name for a product makes me wonder wtf the marketing
| team is doing.
| ddp26 wrote:
| This whole blog post is seemingly about Google, not about the
| user. "Why We Built Antigravity" etc. "We want Antigravity to be
| the home base for software development in the era of agents" -
| cool, why would I as the user care about that?
| wiseowise wrote:
| You wouldn't. It's made to suck out investor money and show
| that google does something, not to actually bring value.
|
| My crystal ball says it will be shutdown next year.
| evandrofisico wrote:
| Most of the AI products are not for the end user, they are
| just signaling shareholders and possible investors that the
| company is on the hype.
| rvnx wrote:
| There is also mechanism inside Google that rewards teams
| that launches new products, more than the teams that
| actually maintain existing ones.
| vecter wrote:
| This kind of cynicism is wild to me. Of course most AI
| products (and products in general) are for end users.
| Especially for a company like Google--they need to do
| everything they can to win the AI wars, and that means
| winning adoption for their AI models.
| flipgimble wrote:
| http://killedbygoogle.com/ - most Google products are for
| the temporary career advancement of some exec or product
| lead.
|
| Their only real product is advertising, everything else
| is a pretense to capture users attention and behaviors
| that they can auction off.
| vecter wrote:
| This is different. AI is an existential threat to Google.
| I've almost stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT
| came out. Why search for a list of webpages which might
| have the answer to your question and then manually read
| them one at a time when I can instead just ask an AI to
| tell me the answer?
|
| If Google doesn't adapt, they could easily be dead in a
| decade.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's funny. I stopped using ChatGPT completely and use
| Gemini to search, because it actually integrates with
| Google nicely as opposed to ChatGPT which for some reason
| messes up sometimes (likely due to being blocked by
| websites while no one dares block Google's crawler lest
| they be wiped off the face of the internet), and for
| coding, it's Claude (and maybe now Gemini for that as
| well). I see no need to use any other LLMs these days.
| Sometimes I test out the open source ones like DeepSeek
| or Kimi but those are just as a curiosity.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| If web-pages don't contain the answer, the AI likely
| won't either. But the AI will confidently tell me "the
| answer" anyway. I've had atrocious issues with wrong or
| straight up invented information that I must search up
| every single claim it makes on a website.
|
| My primary workflow is asking AI questions vaguely to see
| if it successfully explains information I already know or
| starts to guess. My average context length of a chat is
| around 3 messages, since I create new chats with a
| rephrased version of the question to avoid the context
| poison. Asking three separate instances the same question
| in slightly different way regularly gives me 2 different
| answers.
|
| This is still faster than my old approach of finding a
| dry ground source like a standards document, book,
| reference, or datasheet, and chewing through it for
| everything. Now I can sift through 50 secondary sources
| for the same information much faster because the AI gives
| me hunches and keywords to google. But I will not take a
| single claim for an AI seriously without a link to
| something that says the same thing.
| SleepyMyroslav wrote:
| Given how embracing AI is an imperative in tech
| companies, "a link to something" is likely to be a
| product of LLM-assisted writing itself. Entire concept of
| checking through the internet becomes more and more
| recursive with every passing moment.
| jmpeax wrote:
| Google is still looking for investors?
| rajamaka wrote:
| Of course, Alphabet exists to give returns to their
| shareholders.
| rishabhd wrote:
| funny my magic 8 ball says the same thing!
| meowface wrote:
| I know Google is quick to shut things down but these ultra-
| cynical ultra-skeptical HN takes are so tiresome at this
| point.
| pydry wrote:
| This is what Google _is_ like though. It is practically
| part of their corporate DNA.
| meowface wrote:
| I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at
| wooing investors. I believe it is intended to be a
| genuine superior alternative to Cursor and Kiro etc. and
| is attempting to provide the best AI coding experience
| for the average developer.
|
| Most of the other people (so far) in this sub-thread do
| not think this. They essentially have a conspiratorial
| view on it.
| egorfine wrote:
| > I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at
| wooing investors.
|
| There is no evidence to support any other motive.
|
| Any experienced (as in, 10+ years) developer knows better
| than to trust google with dev tools.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What dev tools has Google shut down?
|
| Colab is still going strong. Chrome inspector is still
| going strong.
|
| They've never released a full-fledged IDE before, have
| they? Which I don't count Apps Script editor as one, but
| that's been around for a long time as well.
|
| I think it's much more likely that Google believes this
| is the future of development and wants to get in on the
| ground floor. As they should.
| egorfine wrote:
| > Google believes this is the future of development
|
| This is hardly possible as this is definitely not the
| future of development which is obvious to developers who
| created this. Or to any developer for that matter.
|
| This is a stakeholders' feature.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Agree to disagree, I guess. What you think is obvious, I
| think is false. And I think the rapidly growing success
| of Cursor is the proof of that. But I guess you must
| think Cursor is just a fad or something, since you don't
| see why Google would want to legitimately compete with
| it?
| egorfine wrote:
| Cursor is obviously a fad (unlike Copilot - I'm not at
| all an AI hater, quite the opposite) and perhaps Google
| needs to present something to shareholders that will
| pretend to be competing.
|
| None of that matters for actual development work.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Well, just so you know, there are lots of us who think
| Cursor is _not_ a fad, and see that Google realizes this
| as well, and is _genuinely_ competing with it.
|
| A lot of people find it's actually quite valuable for
| "actual development work". If you want to ignore all
| that, then I guess go ahead.
|
| But just know that what you're claiming is "obvious", is
| clearly not. There seems to be large disagreement over
| it, so it is objectively _not_ obvious, but rather quite
| debatable.
| egorfine wrote:
| Isn't it great that in this case we don't have to fight
| because the judgment of history will reveal itself quite
| soon on that matter, right? :-)
| crazygringo wrote:
| I wish I could save this comment in a way that we would
| both come back to it in 10 years ;)
| latexr wrote:
| > I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at
| wooing investors.
|
| I think the comment you're replying to was addressing the
| "shutting down" part, not the "investors" part.
| pydry wrote:
| exactly.
|
| also i was alluding to the way their promotion policy
| encourages people to start rather than maintain projects.
| egorfine wrote:
| I wonder why is that.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Investor money?
|
| Google is highly profitable. It's not looking for investment,
| it's the one investing.
|
| Maybe you are confusing it with OpenAI?
| kvirani wrote:
| I think they are referring to public market investors vs
| private investors. Meaning, their stock valuation.
| tnolet wrote:
| After using Google AI studio, Google Vertex, and Google Gemini
| Chat I honestly can't wait to use Google Antigravity!
|
| edit: Also Jules...
|
| snark off:
|
| I think the Google PMs should have coffee together and see if
| all of this sprawl makes any sense.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| It does?
|
| Google AI studio is their developer dashboard.
|
| Google Vertex is their equivalent of Amazon Bedrock.
|
| Google Gemini Chat is their ChatGPT app for normies.
|
| Google Antigravity is their Cursor equivalent.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I agree what you've listed makes sense as a product
| portfolio.
|
| But AI Studio is getting vibe coding tools. AI Studio also
| has a API that competes with Vertex. They have IDE plugins
| for existing IDEs to expose Chat, Agents, etc. They also
| have Gemini CLI for when those don't work. There is also
| Firebase Studio, a browser based IDE for vibe coding.
| Jules, a browser based code agent orchestration tool. Opal,
| a node-based tool to build AI... things? Stich, a tool to
| build UIs. Colab with AI for a different type of coding.
| Notebook LM for AI research (many features now available in
| Gemini App). AI Overviews and AI mode in search, which now
| feature a generic chat interface.
|
| Thats just new stuff, and not including all the existing
| products (Gmail, Home) that have Gemini added.
|
| This is the benefit of a big company vs startups. They can
| build out a product for every type of user and every user
| journey, at once.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I concede.
| xnx wrote:
| Don't forget Gemini CLI
|
| In another 2 years we'll probably be back to just
| "Google" as digital agent that can do any research,
| creative, or coding task you can imagine.
| drcongo wrote:
| > Google Vertex is their equivalent of Amazon Bedrock
|
| Well, that clears that up.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| In "real world" you don't use OpenAI or Anthropic API
| directly--you are forced to use AWS, GCP, or Azure. Each
| of these has its own service for running LLMs, which is
| conceptually the same as using OpenAI or Anthropic API
| directly, but with much worse DX. For AWS it's called
| Bedrock, for GCP--Vertex, and for Azure it's AI Foundry I
| believe. They also may offer complementary features like
| prompt management, evals, etc, but from what I've seen so
| far it's all crap.
| exitb wrote:
| And In practice, when I needed to use one of their models
| for a small project, it turned out that the only sane way
| is to go via OpenRouter...
| verdverm wrote:
| Also gemini-cli (terrible)
|
| Google ADK (agent development kit, awesome)
| k1rd wrote:
| you forgot jules
| dygd wrote:
| The also launched a coding agent Jules: https://jules.google/
| pnathan wrote:
| Jules is nifty. Weirdly heavy on the browser CPU.
| meowface wrote:
| Jules is the first and only one to add a full API, which
| I've found very beneficial. It lets you integrate agentic
| coding features into web apps quite nicely. (In theory you
| could always hack your own thing together with Claude Code
| or Codex to achieve a similar effect but a cloud agent with
| an API saves a lot of effort.)
| verdverm wrote:
| Google ADK is real nice and gives you an API as well
| (also web browser and terminal prompt)
| karel-3d wrote:
| Wasn't there something called Bard at some point?
| magackame wrote:
| Bard is the old name of Gemini
| layer8 wrote:
| More accurately, it should be neither about Google nor about
| the user, but about the product. Describe what the product is
| and does, don't make assumptions about the user, and let the
| user be the judge of it.
| DoomDestroyer wrote:
| I swear most of these pages is to sell this to companies so
| they can force it onto developers.
|
| The whole webpage looks like something from Apple.
| hereme888 wrote:
| All these companies were built by self-referential narcissists,
| and it seems to be their culture at the core.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Great point!
|
| Remember took my a while early in my career from changing my
| resume away from saying "I want to do this at my next job and
| make a lot of money" and towards "here is how I can make money
| and save costs for your company".
|
| Google didn't learn that lesson here. They are describing why
| us using Antigravity is good for Google, not why us using
| Antigravity is good for us.
| qoez wrote:
| I probably wouldn't have been drawn to coding if I was young
| these days based on the same motivations that led me to venture
| into it as a teen.
| bobsomers wrote:
| Another Google product whose launch will be used to justify
| somebody's promotion, only to be left for dead only a few months
| later after said promoted person moves on to something else.
|
| Why would I even bother getting mildly invested in this when the
| product launch/promotion incentive structure at Google is so well
| known?
| gloosx wrote:
| _reads title_
|
| Wow was google researching some kind of anti-gravity device
| behind the curtains for real and then dropped it out of nowhere?
|
| Ah damn, yet another ai-assisted-something. Crap.
| arbuge wrote:
| I've clocked out on agentic AI IDEs. Not installing anymore until
| I hit an obvious wall with my current ones.
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| I mean ok, another VSCode fork, but am I the only one seeing the
| .google TLD?
| greatgib wrote:
| Anyone want to bet how long this product will last before being
| killed? From looking at the frontpage, my bet is 2 years at most.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| New Era. A New - think about it for a sec - Era.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm still on my trusty vim and letting the AI do work
| separately in another CLI.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I moved from Vim to Zed recently.
| china wrote:
| I enjoy that the post-login confirmation page
| (https://antigravity.google/auth-success) still says "Docs |
| Twitter"
| israrkhan wrote:
| why it could not be a VS Code extension?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I enjoyed Theo's take on this
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=8dTN4PBD2rg
|
| But honestly Google software seems so buggy. The management class
| took over there a long ago and are quietly ruining the company.
| rvnx wrote:
| Probably got inspired by Apple and their iOS 26 quality control
| izzydata wrote:
| Meanwhile I don't feel like the era of AI assisted software
| development has even started.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Looking at that page makes me think I should go the other
| direction and switch from a graphical IDE to vim or something.
| You know, ground myself by adopting more gravity.
| dominicrose wrote:
| I agree that the name is horrible. It has Anti, gravity and
| Google in it. Vim and all other non-graphical tools are great
| because they work in WSL, they work in linux servers and they
| may even work in Docker containers, although sometimes you have
| to do something like: apk add vim
| DmitryBalabka wrote:
| The name strange indeed. However, Gravity is able to connect
| to WSL in the same way as VSCode: Ctrl+P -> ">Remote-WSL:
| Connect to WSL"
| cube2222 wrote:
| I'll be honest - this doesn't look half-bad.
|
| It really seems like it's just standardizing into a first-class
| UI what a lot of people have already been doing.
|
| I don't think I'm the target for this - I already use Claude Code
| with jj workspaces and a mostly design-doc first workflow, and I
| don't see why I would switch to this, but I think this could be
| quite useful for people who don't want to dive in so deep and
| combine raw tooling themselves.
| jadbox wrote:
| It's a good start, but I found it lacking compared to
| VSCode+CLINE+Gemini Pro.
| meowface wrote:
| As a daily Claude Code and Codex user, I've really got to start
| getting into jj. I keep telling myself I will but I'm just so
| used to git.
|
| Can you elaborate on how you personally use jj workspaces with
| command-line coding agents?
| cube2222 wrote:
| Sure. Honestly I think you can get the same with git work
| trees, though I haven't tried.
|
| After a couple iterations on this, I've ended up having
| claude code vibe-code a helper CLI in Go for me which I can
| invoke with `ontheside <new-workspace-name> <base-change>`
| and will
|
| - create a new jj workspace based on the given change
|
| - create a docker container configured with everything my
| unit tests need to run, my claude code config mounted, and jj
| configured
|
| - it also sets up a claude code hook to run `jj` (no
| arguments) every time it changes a file, so that jj does a
| snapshot
|
| - finishes by starting an interactive claude code session
| with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`
|
| - it also cleans it all up once I exit the claude code
| session and fish shell that's running it
|
| With this I can have Claude Code working asynchronously on
| something, while I can review (or peek) the changes in batch
| from my main editor by running `jj show <change-id>` / `jj
| diff -r "..."` (which in my case opens it up in the Goland
| multi-file diff viewer). I can also easily switch to the
| change it's working on in my main editor, to make some manual
| modifications if necessary.
|
| This is, in general, primarily for "in the background async
| stuff" I want to have it work on. Most of the time I just
| have a dead-normal claude code session running in my main
| workspace.
|
| Minor self-plug - if you want, I posted a jj intro article a
| while ago[0], though it doesn't include my current workspace
| usage.
|
| [0]: https://kubamartin.com/posts/introduction-to-the-
| jujutsu-vcs...
| jfim wrote:
| Hadn't heard of jj, it's a source control tool that advertises
| that it's fast and compatible with the git on disk format.
| https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj
| latexr wrote:
| Lots of discussion about it on HN if you want to explore
| more.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952796
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30398662
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45083952
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641961
| Yeroc wrote:
| The Agent Manager view providing a unified view of all active
| agents and allowing you to immediately respond to any approval
| requests or followup questions looks very useful regardless of
| which VCS you're using under the covers. Am I missing something
| here that jj does?
| cube2222 wrote:
| See my setup detailed in another sibling comment of yours, jj
| is just a small part of it, and you can probably get that
| with git too.
|
| I'm already at full mental capacity planning and reviewing
| the work of two agents (one foreground which almost never
| asks for approval, and one background which never asks for
| approval).
|
| I don't really need the ability to juggle more of them, and
| noticing their messages is not a bottleneck for me, while I'm
| happy with the customizability and adaptability of my raw'er
| workflow.
|
| Maybe if they're as slow as codex...
| Yeroc wrote:
| Fair enough. I use git worktrees (with a script that
| creates the git branch, worktree and opens a new vs code
| workspace). You're right, managing more than about two
| active sessions at once is probably the limit though I'm
| somewhat hopeful that better tooling similar to the Agent
| Manager window here would allow me to scale a bit past that
| especially if some of those sessions are more design
| explorations.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| I clicked around for ~30 seconds and I have no idea what this is.
| Great job, Google marketing
| BigParm wrote:
| Even if this is good, I'll never know because I'm not investing
| time into something that will be canceled in one year.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| probably discontinue it in a few months
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| you would need to be bonkers to trust Google at the intersection
| of 1. vibe coding, 2. supporting developers, and 3. a product
| that's not selling ads
| htrp wrote:
| Google AI products are the new chat product
| qwertox wrote:
| I can't get the agent to use my MCP server. The MCP config is
| provided, and the application can query the tools, but the agent
| can't access my server, only the http operations the application
| performs to list the tools is something i see in my server logs.
| It knows there are tools, because it sees the list, it tells me
| when it's trying to connect to which tool. But that fails.
| josvdwest wrote:
| where are the MCP settings in Antigravity?
| qwertox wrote:
| https://antigravity.google/docs/mcp
|
| Connecting custom mcp servers.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| "agentic" is the new "ai", which was the new "web3", which was
| the new "5G", which was the new "4G", which was the new "HDR",
| which was the new "HD"...
| brovonov wrote:
| Any reason why this isn't just an extension instead of another
| fork?
| recursive wrote:
| Landing page instantly spun up the fan on my laptop. The
| animation was about 3fps.
| smcleod wrote:
| Another VSCode fork! This is getting ridiculous.
| _hao wrote:
| Oh look, another piece of shit AI slop I won't use. Next!
| t1234s wrote:
| Is it safe to use these types of AI enhanced editors with files
| that contain sensitive information?
| clever-leap wrote:
| So deceptive name. It has nothing to do with gravity.
| 0xblinq wrote:
| As if this was something one could trust it won't be shut down 3
| years from now...
|
| No thanks...
| uatec wrote:
| "Congratulations, you have been elevated to manager to agents."
|
| That's not exactly really where I hoped my career would lead.
| It's like managing junior developers, but without having nice
| people to work with.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Also, agents have no capacity to learn.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Hold that thought.
| bradfa wrote:
| They have a capacity to "learn", it's just WAY MORE INVOLVED
| than how humans learn.
|
| With a human, you give them feedback or advice and generally
| by the 2nd or 3rd time the same kind of thing happens they
| can figure it out and improve. With an LLM, you have to
| specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially
| and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide
| MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other
| training actions.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to say that different approaches to
| learning is some kind of spectrum, but that contemporary
| fine tuning isn't on that spectrum at all.
| ethmarks wrote:
| Depending on your definition of "learn", you can also use
| something akin to ChatGPT's Memory feature. When you teach
| it something, just have it take notes on how to do that
| thing and include its notes in the system prompt for next
| time. Much cheaper than fine-tuning. But still obviously
| far less efficient and effective than human learning.
| lowsong wrote:
| > With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted
| (and potentially financially and electrical power
| expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of
| how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.
|
| The only way that an AI model can "learn" is during model
| creation, which is then fixed. Any "instructions" or other
| data or "correcting" you give the model is just part of the
| context window.
| bradfa wrote:
| Fine tuning is additional training on specific things for
| an existing model. It happens after a model already
| exists in order to better suit the model to specific
| situations or types of interactions. It is not dealing
| with context during inference but actually modifying the
| weights within the model.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Retraining (or fine tuning) isn't the same thing at all and
| I think that's obvious
| Too wrote:
| I thought you were joking until I saw the video where this is
| an actual quote.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| There are two more quotes that made me giggle;
|
| > You can verify code quality as a glance, and ship absolute
| with confidence.
|
| > You can confidently trust and merge the code without hours
| of manual review.
|
| I couldn't possibly imagine that going wrong.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| As an introvert, that's a pro, not a con.
|
| The burden of human interaction is removed from building.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I'm an introvert and I love working with nice people.
|
| I just need some time by myself to recharge after all the
| social interactions.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| As a team lead, working with people is so... cumbersome.
| They need time to recharge, lots of encouragement, and a
| nice place to work in. Give me a coding agent any time!
| discreteevent wrote:
| As a PM working with team leads is so cumbersome...
| ithkuil wrote:
| I wish I could automate PMs :-p
| sanex wrote:
| They don't like working on the cumbersome tickets,
| writing tests, documentation. Talking to businesspeople.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Being antisocial isn't an introvert thing. I'm incredibly
| introverted and still love having time interacting with
| people
| sorokod wrote:
| "junior developers" is a convenient label, it is incorrect but
| it will take a bit until we come up something that describes
| entities that:
|
| - can write code
|
| - tireless
|
| - have no aspirations
|
| - have no stylistic or architectural preferences
|
| - have massive, but at the same time not well defined, body of
| knowledge
|
| - have no intrinsic memories of past interactions.
|
| - change in unexpected ways when underlying models change
|
| - ...
|
| Edit: Drones? Drains?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Sounds like a junior developer?
|
| They can usually write code, but not that well. They have
| lots of energy and little to say about architecture and
| style. Don't have a well defined body of knowledge and have
| no experience. Individual juniors don't change, but the cast
| members of your junior cohort regularly do.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| - don't learn from what you tell them
|
| - don't have career growth that you can feel good about
| having contributed to
|
| - don't have a genuine interest in accomplishment or team
| goals
|
| - have no past and no future. When you change companies, they
| won't recognize you in the hall.
|
| - no ownership over results. If they make a mistake, they
| won't suffer.
| cambaceres wrote:
| Sounds like my teammates.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _- don 't learn from what you tell them_
|
| We'll fix that, eventually.
|
| _- don 't have career growth that you can feel good about
| having contributed to_
|
| Humans are on the verge of building machines that are
| smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about
| that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.
|
| _- don 't have a genuine interest in accomplishment or
| team goals_
|
| Easy to train for, if it turns out to be necessary. I'd
| always assumed that a competitive drive would be necessary
| in order to achieve or at least simulate human-level
| intelligence, but things don't seem to be playing out that
| way.
|
| _- have no past and no future. When you change companies,
| they won 't recognize you in the hall._
|
| Or on the picket line.
|
| _- no ownership over results. If they make a mistake, they
| won 't suffer._
|
| Good deal. Less human suffering is usually worth striving
| for.
| noduerme wrote:
| Replace suffering with caring and have your AI write that
| again.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Why would I do a goofy thing like that?
| recursive wrote:
| > Humans are on the verge of building machines that are
| smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome
| about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.
|
| It's also the premise of The Matrix. I feel pretty
| goddamned uneasy about that.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| (Shrug) There are other sources of inspiration besides
| dystopic sci-fi movies. There's the Biblical story of the
| Tower of Babel, for instance. Better not work on language
| translation, which after all is how the whole LLM thing
| got started.
| recursive wrote:
| Sometimes fiction went in the wrong direction. Sometimes
| it didn't go far enough.
|
| In any case, the matrix wasn't my inspiration here, but
| it is a pithy way to describe the concept. It's hard to
| imagine how humans maintain relevancy if we really do
| manage to invent something smarter than us. It could be
| that my imagination is limited though. I've been accused
| of that before.
| lowsong wrote:
| > We'll fix that, eventually.
|
| > Humans are on the verge of building machines that are
| smarter than we are.
|
| You're not describing a system that exists. You're
| describing a system that might exist in some sci-fi
| fantasy future. You might as well be saying "there's no
| point learning to code because soon the rapture will
| come".
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| That particular future exists now, it's just not evenly
| distributed. Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking is already as good
| at programming as I am. Architecture, probably not, but
| give it time. It's far better at math than I am, and at
| least as good at writing.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Computers beat us in maths decades ago, yet LLMs are not
| able to beat a calculator half of the time. The maths
| benchmarks that companies so proudly show off are still
| the realm of a traditional symbolic solvers. You claiming
| much success in asking LLMS for math makes me question if
| you have actually asked an LLM about maths.
|
| Most AI experts not heavily invested in the stocks of
| inflated tech companies seem to agree that current
| architectures cannot reach AGI. It's a sci-fi dream, but
| hyping it is real profitable. We can destroy ourselves
| plenty with the tech we already have, but it won't be a
| robot revolution that does it.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _The maths benchmarks that companies so proudly show off
| are still the realm of a traditional symbolic solvers.
| You claiming much success in asking LLMS for math makes
| me question if you have actually asked an LLM about
| maths._
|
| What I really need to ask an LLM for is a pointer to a
| forum that doesn't cultivate proud exhibition of
| ignorance, Luddism, and general stupidity at the level
| exhibited by commenters in this entire HN story, and in
| this subthread in particular.
|
| We already had one Reddit, we didn't need two.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| > It's what we're supposed to be doing.
|
| Why?
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Because venture capital managers say so.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Imagine having these complaints about a screwdriver
|
| It's a tool, not an intelligent being
| timeon wrote:
| I do not need to babysit my screwdriver.
| ponector wrote:
| Yet.
|
| Next year there will be AI screwdriver your employer
| force you to use.
| phs318u wrote:
| At first, I thought "ponector's forgotten to add the /s"
|
| Then I realised that this will actually happen, and was
| sadly reminded we're now in the post-sarcasm era.
| ponector wrote:
| And you can buy AI screwdriver today from Amazon!
| switchbak wrote:
| Yeah, if my screwdriver undid the changes I just made to
| my mower, constantly ignored my desire to unscrew screws
| and instead punched a hole in my carb - I'd be throwing
| that screwdriver in the garbage.
| Sammi wrote:
| - don't learn from what you tell them
|
| Whenever I have a model fix something new I ask it to
| update the markdown implementation guides I have in the
| docs folder in my projects. I add these files to context as
| needed. I have one for implementing routes and one for
| implementing backend tests and so on.
|
| They then know how to do stuff in the future in my
| projects.
| kvirani wrote:
| Can this additional prompt from you also be automated? I
| do this too but I forget sometimes. I don't know if a
| general rule will be enough ?
| troupo wrote:
| > I add these files to context as needed.
|
| Key words are these.
|
| > They then know how to do stuff in the future in my
| projects.
|
| No. No, they don't. Every new session is a blank slate,
| and you have to feed those markdown files manually to
| their context.
| latentsea wrote:
| The feeding can be automated in some cases. In GitHub
| copilot you can put it under .github/instructions and
| each instructions markdown file starts with a section
| that contains a regex of which files to apply the
| instructions to.
| blktiger wrote:
| You can also have an index file that describes when to
| use each file (nest with additional folders and index
| files as needed) and tell the agent to check the index
| for any relevant documentation they should read before
| they start. Sometimes it will forget and not consult the
| docs but often it will consult the relevant docs first to
| load just the things it needs for the task at hand.
| troupo wrote:
| So, again, they don't learn.
| latentsea wrote:
| Do you want them to?
| troupo wrote:
| I would. Getting tired of redirecting them in correct
| directions from scratch every time
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Doesn't this also consume context
| Clent wrote:
| They still aren't learning. You're learning and then
| telling them to incorporate your learnings. They aren't
| able to remember this so you need to remind them each
| day.
|
| That sounds a lot like '50 First Dates' but for
| programming.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > They aren't able to remember this
|
| Yes, this is something people using LLMs for coding
| probably pick up on the first day. They're not "learning"
| as humans do obviously. Instead, the process is that you
| figure out what was missing from the first message you
| sent where they got something wrong, change it, and then
| restart from beginning. The "learning" is you keeping
| track of what you need to include in the context, how
| that process exactly works, is up to you. For some it's
| very automatic, and you don't add/remove things yourself,
| for others is keeping a text file around they copy-paste
| into a chat UI.
|
| This is what people mean when they say "you can kind of
| do "learning" (not literally) for LLMs"
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| That is true, but does it actually matter if the outcome
| is the same? GP is saying they don't need to remind them.
| troupo wrote:
| The outcome is definitely not the same, and you need to
| remind them _all the time_. Even if you feed the context
| automatically they will happily "forget" it from time to
| time. And you need to update that automated context
| again, and again, and again, as the project evolves
| latentsea wrote:
| 50 first new Date()
| bloppe wrote:
| While I hate anthropomorphizing agents, there is an
| important practical difference between a human with no
| memory, and an agent with no memory but the ability to
| ingest hundreds of pages of documentation nearly
| instantly.
| Sammi wrote:
| They document how to do something they just figured out.
| They store/memorise it in a file.
|
| It's functionally working the same as learning.
|
| If you look at it like a black box, then you can't tell
| the difference from the input and output.
| _flux wrote:
| I believe LLMs ultimately cannot learn new ideas from
| their input in the same way as they can learn it from
| their training data, as the input data doesn't affect the
| weights of the neural network layers.
|
| For example, let's say LLMs did not have examples of
| chess gameplay examples in their training data. Would one
| be able to have an LLM play chess by listing the rules
| and examples in the context? Perhaps, to some extent, but
| I believe it would be much worse than if it was part of
| the training (which of course isn't great either).
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Ah, so it's like you have a junior developer that can't
| learn
| astrange wrote:
| You'd also have no intrinsic memory of past interactions if
| we removed your hippocampus.
|
| Coincidentally, the hippocampus looks like a seahorse
| (emoji). It's all connected.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > the hippocampus looks like a seahorse
|
| Not to mention; hippocampus literally means "seahorse" in
| Greek. I knew neither of those things before today, thanks!
| thatoneengineer wrote:
| "brooms"
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| *distant sound of the sorcerer's apprentice is heard*
| auspiv wrote:
| I describe them in the claude training I'm doing for my
| company as: super smart, infinitely patient, overeager
| interns
| kvirani wrote:
| Sometimes smart sometimes the opposite, though. Perhaps due
| to memory loss.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Not sure "smart" or "dumb" are even the right axis to be
| judging them by, seems like intrinsically human traits.
| antfarm wrote:
| - constantly ignore your advice
|
| - constantly give wrong answers, with surprising confidence
|
| - constantly apologize, then make the same mistake again
| immediately
|
| - constantly forget what you just told them
|
| - ...
| kranke155 wrote:
| Robots ?
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| clankers.
| tjmadsen wrote:
| OR - think about the junior developers being managers of
| agents, and you are still a manager of junior developers. This
| is not zero sum!
| icedchai wrote:
| I am essentially in this exact role. The junior developers
| simply don't have the experience to evaluate the output of
| the agents. You wind up with a lot of slop in PRs. People
| can't justify why they did something. I've seen whole PRs
| closed, work redone, and opened anew because they were 70%
| garbage. Every other comment was asking "why is this here? it
| has nothing to do with the ticket."
|
| Sadly, this is not sustainable and I am not sure what I'm
| going to do.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I enjoy getting into a good flow state and pounding out clever
| and elegant code but watching a good LLM generate code
| according to my specs and refining it is also enjoyable. I've
| been burning through $250 of free Claude Code Web credits and
| having multiple workers running at the same time is fun.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > It's like managing junior developers, but without having nice
| people to work with.
|
| Nice? I thought all sycophant LLMs were _exceedingly nice_.
| kalaksi wrote:
| For me, it feels so fake that I'd rather have it not try to
| be nice. I guess I've gotten a bit used to it and ignore it
| for most parts.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah it's saccharine. Reminds me quite a lot of Americans
| who work for tips (e.g. waiters) - disconcertingly
| friendly.
|
| Someone gave me a great tip though - at least for ChatGPT
| there's a setting where you can change its personality to
| "robot". I guess that affects the system prompt in some way
| but it basically fixes the issue.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I'm at one of those companies where we're forced to be in the
| office.
|
| NO ONE TALKS TO EACH OTHER unless absolutely necessary for
| work.
|
| We get on Zooms to talk. Even with the person 1 cubicle over.
| dabockster wrote:
| > We get on Zooms to talk. Even with the person 1 cubicle
| over.
|
| Who normalized this?!!
| Rohansi wrote:
| I know it happens when you're working with people who may
| be at home or another location.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah but not if you just want to talk to one person who's
| a few metres away. That's such bizarre behaviour I don't
| really believe it.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I actually do find there is a subset of meetings that are
| far more productive on Zoom. We can be voice chatting on
| one screen, share another screen and both be able to type,
| record notes, pull up side research without interrupting
| the conversation. It's a bit closer to co-working than a
| meeting but it hits a sweetspot for me.
| cloverich wrote:
| > We get on Zooms to talk. Even with the person 1 cubicle
| over.
|
| But why? Required? Culture? Maybe it's the company?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Why?
| drcxd wrote:
| Glad to see I am not the only HN users that work in such
| companies.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| I used to be really excited about "agents" when I thought
| people were trying to build _actual agents_ like we 've been
| working on in the CS field for decades now.
|
| It's clear now that "agents" in the context of "AI" is really
| about answering the question "How can we make users make 10x
| more calls to our models in a way that makes it _feel_ like we
| 're not just squeezing money out of them?" I've seen so many
| people that think setting some "agents" of on a minutes to
| hours long task of basically just driving up internal KPIs at
| LLM providers is cutting edge work.
|
| The problem is, I haven't seen any evidence at all that
| spending 10x the number of API calls on an agent results in
| anything closer to useful than last year when people where
| purely vibe coding all the time. At least then people would
| interactively learn about the slop they were building.
|
| It's astounding to watch a coworker walk though through a PR
| with hundreds of added new files and repeatedly mention "I'm
| not sure if these actually work, but it does look like there's
| something here".
|
| Now I'm sure I'll get some fantastic "no true Scotsman" replies
| about how my coworkers must not be skilled enough or how they
| need to follow xyz pattern, but the _entire point_ of AI was to
| remove the need for specialize skills and make everyone 10x
| more productive.
|
| Not to mention that the shift in focus on "agents" is also
| useful in detracting from clearly diminishing returns on
| foundation models. I just hope there are enough people that
| still remember how to code (and think in some cases) to rebuild
| when this house of cards falls apart.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > but the entire point of AI was to remove the need for
| specialize skills and make everyone 10x more productive.
|
| At least for programming tools, for everything (well, the
| vast majority, at least) that is sold that way--since long
| before generative AI--it actually succeeds or fails based not
| on whether it eliminates need for specialized skills and
| makes everyone more productive, but whether it _further
| rewards_ specialized skills, and makes the people who devote
| time to learning it more productive than if they devoted the
| same time to learning something else.
| naruhodo wrote:
| Pastor of Muppets
| fsmv wrote:
| You are being rescued. Do not resist.
| codepoet80 wrote:
| On my m2 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, it took over 12 minutes to
| startup and get to a usable state. When it did, it was plainly
| just a jacked version of VSCode. Opening a project caused it to
| hang again. Dumped it. VSCodium, with the terminal pane open so I
| can talk to Claude works fine for me...
| theflyinghorse wrote:
| I couldn't get it to work on M1 mac. it spins forever on login
| screen.
| floppyd wrote:
| It's probably just under a huge load right now. Set it up
| pretty easily earlier on an M1 Air, but agent chats fail
| quickly with "model under load"
| hereme888 wrote:
| Are they explicitly excluding OpenAI in their IDE? (gpt-oss
| running on Google cloud doesn't count)
| bflesch wrote:
| I just feel second-hand embarrassment when seeing these kind of
| posts.
| kune wrote:
| This thing crashes on Ubuntu LTS 24.04 during start. Apparently
| all these agents are not able to ensure that a desktop app starts
| on a popular Linux distribution.
|
| If Google has forgotten how to do Software, than the future
| doesn't look bright.
| fogzen wrote:
| Wake me up when there's an IDE that cares about performance. My
| coworkers are amazed my laptop can run for days because I don't
| use Electron crap.
| robinduckett wrote:
| Just sits on "Setting Up Your Account" pane and does nothing :)
| earlyriser wrote:
| Same issue here. Are you on Mac?
| epaga wrote:
| I am and am having the same issue. Edit: And just as I posted
| this comment, on my second launch, it went through after
| about a minute of waiting.
| mygoodgomez wrote:
| Possibly a problem with "organization" accounts? I'm seeing the
| never-ending spinner too.
| gre wrote:
| My personal mac worked, my work mac is spinning.
|
| It has jamf among other stuff
| BakeInBeens wrote:
| I'm having the same issue. I thought it was just me or
| something with their cloud network. I also haven't been able to
| download Android Studio from the website for a month. I
| couldn't even download it from my Macbook so probably not the
| same issue.
| cal85 wrote:
| Had same issue until I disconnected from Tailscale, in case
| that helps anyone.
| lbrito wrote:
| The agentic spam is exhausting. I just wanted to code.
|
| Too early in my career to not give a shit and retire, but too
| late be excited about these things and eager to learn. What a
| time...
| kevstev wrote:
| I feel this. Tbh I was excited about most of the previous tech
| fads I have come across. Sure, people got overzealous with them
| and also failed to realize that what F*NG needs is not what
| your three person startup needs, but there were always some
| good and interesting ideas there.
|
| This just feels... a little too dystopian. Companies hoovered
| up the entirety more or less of all of our collective thoughts
| and writings and output and now want to sell it back to us- and
| I fear that cost is going to be extremely steep.
|
| It's impressive, but at the same time, just feels like its
| going to somehow be a net detractor to society, and yet I feel
| I need to keep up with each new iteration or potentially get
| washed over and left behind by the wave.
|
| I am somewhat fortunate to be towards the top of the pyramid
| and also in a position where I could theoretically ride off
| into the sunset, but I fear the societal implications and the
| pain that is going to come for vast numbers of people.
| absoluteunit1 wrote:
| Same here - completely relate.
|
| One thing I've noticed though that actually coding (without the
| use of AI; maybe a bit of tab auto-complete) is that I'm
| actually way faster when working in my domain than I am when
| using AI tools.
|
| Everytime I use AI tools in my domain-expertise area, I find it
| ends up slowing me down. Introducing subtle bugs, me having to
| provide insane amount of context and details (at which point it
| becomes way faster to do it myself)
|
| Just code and chill man - having spent the last 6 months really
| trying everything (all these context engineering strategies,
| agents, CLAUDE.md files on every directory, et, etc). It really
| easy still more productive to just code yourself if you know
| what you're doing.
|
| The thing I love most though - is having discussions with an
| LLM about an implementation, having it write some quick unit
| tests and performance tests for certain base cases, having it
| write a quick shell script, etc. things like this, it's Amazing
| and makes me really enjoy programming since I save time and can
| focus on doing the actual fun stuff
| kalaksi wrote:
| When I'm doing the coding myself, I'm at least making steady
| progress and the process is predictable. With LLMs, it's a
| crapshoot. I have to get the AI to understand what I want and
| may have try again multiple times, many times never
| succeeding, and end up writing a lot of text anyway. And in
| between, I'll have to read a lot of code that probably ends
| up being thrown away or heavily modified. This probably
| depends a lot on what kind of project one is working on,
| though.
|
| But it's like you said, I like using LLMs for completing
| smaller parts or asking specific kind of help or having
| conversations about solutions, but for anything larger, it
| just feels like banging my head to a wall.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Don't use agent mode, only use ask mode. Once I did that,
| it works as expected. I can still code but not have to rely
| on the randomized nature of "vibe coding."
| skydhash wrote:
| One of the core principles of my workflow (inspired by REPL
| development and some unix tools) is to start with a single
| file (for a function or the whole project). The I refactor
| the code to have a better organization and to improve
| reliability, especially as I'm handling more scenarios (and
| failure modes).
|
| LLMs are not useful in this workflow, because they are too
| verbose. Their answers are generic and handle scenarios you
| don't even support yet. What's useful is good documentation
| (as in truthful) and the code if it's open.
|
| This approach has worked really well in my career. It gives
| me KISS and YAGNI for free. And every line of code is
| purposeful and have a reason to be there.
| blauditore wrote:
| Devs are starting to realize that the sweet spot for AI
| support in coding is on a small scale, i.e. extended code
| completion. Generating huge chunks of code is often not
| reliable enough except for some niches (such as simple
| greenfield projects which profit from millions of examples
| online).
| hawk_ wrote:
| For those discussions with the LLM do you just use Gemini
| chat or chat GPT etc... i.e. the chat interface?
| absoluteunit1 wrote:
| Depends.
|
| I've been actively using the first tier paid version of:
|
| - GPT - Claude - Gemini
|
| Usually it's via the cli tool. (Codex, Claude code, Gemini
| cli)
|
| I have a bunch of scripts setup that write to the tmux pane
| that has these chats open - so I'll visually highlight
| something nvim and pipe that into either of the panes that
| have one of these tools open and start a discussion.
|
| If I want it to read the full file, I'll just use the TUIs
| search (they all use the @ prefix to search for files) and
| then discuss. If I want to pipe a few files, I'll add the
| files I want to nvim quickfix list of literally pipe the
| files I want to a markdown file (with a full path) and
| discuss.
|
| So yes - the chat interface in these cli tools mostly. I'm
| one of those devs that don't leave the terminal much lol
| jatora wrote:
| it is absolutely poor skill, or disengenuous at best, for any
| coder to claim AI tools slow them down lol.
| recitedropper wrote:
| For seasoned maintainers of open source repos, there is
| explicit evidence it does slow them down, _even_ when they
| think it sped them up: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
|
| Cue: "the tools are so much better now", "the people in the
| study didn't know how to use Cursor", etc. Regardless if
| one takes issue with this study, there are enough others of
| its kind to suggest skepticism regarding how much these
| tools really create speed benefits when employed at scale.
| The maintenance cliff is always nigh...
|
| There are definitely ways in which LLMs, and agentic coding
| tools scaffolded in top, help with aspects of development.
| But to say anyone who claims otherwise is either being
| disingenuous or doesn't know what they are doing, is not an
| informed take.
| _kidlike wrote:
| or the complete opposite. Very skilled people with a lot of
| experience in a specific project. I am like that too at my
| current job. I've REALLY tried to use AI but it has always
| slowed me down in the end. AI is only speeding me up in
| very specific and isolated things, tangent to the main
| product development.
| absoluteunit1 wrote:
| I didn't make this claim.
|
| I also have a personal rule that I will try something for
| at least 4 months actively before making my decision about
| it (programming language, new tools, or in this case AI
| assisted coding)
|
| I made the claim that in my area of expertise - I have
| found that *most of the time it is faster to write
| something myself than I write out really detailed md file /
| prompt. It becomes more tedious to express myself via
| natural language then it is with code when I want something
| very specific done.
|
| In these types of cases - writing the code myself, allows
| me to express the thing I want faster. Also, I like to code
| with the AI auto complete but still while this can be
| useful I sometimes disable it because it's distracting and
| consistently incorrect with its predictions)
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| One AI workflow I rather like seems to have largely vanished
| from many modern tools. Use a very dumb simple model with
| syntax knowledge to autocomplete. It fills out what I'm about
| to type, and takes local variables and pass them to functions
| I wanna call.
|
| It feels like just writing my own code but at 50% higher wpm.
| Especially if I can limit it to only suggest a single row; it
| prevents it from effecting my thought process or approach.
|
| This is how the original GitHub copilot worked until it
| switched to a chat based more agentic behavior. I set it up
| locally with an old llama on my laptop and it's plenty useful
| for bash and c, and amazing for python. I ideally want a
| model trained only for code and not conversational at all,
| closer to the raw model trained to next-token predict on
| code.
|
| I think this style just doesn't chew enough tokens to make
| tech CEOs happy. It doesn't benefit from a massive model and
| almost drains more networking than compute to run in the
| cloud.
| 63stack wrote:
| Most editors and LSPs offer variable, method, keyword and a
| bunch of other completions that are 100% predictable and
| accurate, you don't need an LLM for this.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's never too early to retire, there are plenty of other
| things to work on outside of tech
| mrits wrote:
| The robots have that covered
| imiric wrote:
| > The agentic spam is exhausting. I just wanted to code.
|
| Ditto. And we still can.
|
| I've yet to use an "agent", and still use a chat UI to an LLM
| in Emacs. I rely on these tools for design discussion, rough
| prototyping, and quick reference, but they still waste my time
| roughly a quarter of the time I use them. They have gotten
| better in the last year, though, and I've been able to broaden
| my reach into stacks and codebases I wouldn't have felt
| comfortable with before, which is good.
|
| I just have no interest in "agents". I don't want to give these
| companies more access to my system and data, and I want to
| review every thing these tools generate. If this makes me
| slower than a vibe coder, that's intentional. Thankfully, there
| are still sane people and companies willing to pay me for this
| type of work, so I'm not worried about being displaced any time
| soon. Once that happens, I'll probably close up shop, figure
| out an alternative income stream, and continue coding as a
| hobby.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| You might as well be saying you want to make physical
| architecture draft drawings.
| hollowturtle wrote:
| Wrong. Continuing with the architect metaphor, he doesn't
| understandably want to delegate digital draft drawings to a
| non predictable statical tool ridden with idiosyncracies and
| biases based off mostly on poor open source training data and
| write some dumb architect.md to try steer the will of the
| tool. He wants to design and do it better with some highly
| integrated hidden ai. So far whenever I heard product x says
| that has AI, most of the time is a product with zero real
| integration and just a chatbot in a separate window
| hollowturtle wrote:
| Turn off the noise, just keep coding and get better at it, go
| all-in with the fundamentals it will pay off over time. You can
| leverage autocomplete to go as fast as you can, don't waste
| your time writing md files, most of the world still does hand
| coding, sure with some ai assistance, but without totally
| ceding control. They want you to believe the contrary to keep
| the bubble inflating or to sell you some ai courses where you
| spend hundreds of dollars for "learning" how to please a
| statical tool into doing what you want to do, spoiler alert it
| eventually won't and steer away in unpredictable ways
| stack_framer wrote:
| Wow, this sums up exactly how I feel.
|
| The very last thing I want is to be "elevated to a manager of
| agents," as they so smugly say in the video.
| egorfine wrote:
| > The agentic spam is exhausting. I just wanted to code.
|
| Ability to code within an IDE will not make shareholders happy
| while shoving AI down developers' throats most definitely will.
| fusslo wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about John Henry since this AI stuff
| has started
| Towaway69 wrote:
| What I don't get is why they didn't fork emacs, then build a
| VScode mode and then add AI to that.
|
| I guess it must have been the GPL which isn't compatible with
| their AI agents.
|
| Oh, wait I was meant to take this announcement seriously?
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Trip report: I'm using it now to revamp a dashboard I'm working
| on. TBH it's not feeling much better than Codex - it couldn't
| figure out how to launch chrome with my default profile nor how
| to regenerate the css with tailwind. I'm also getting a lot of
| model quota errors like everyone else.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Oh lucky, another free AI beta.
|
| I'm going to treat this like Kiro, and just use it until they
| start charging for it and then probably switch back to VS code
| with its built-in agent support.
|
| Eventually they're going to do a rug pull, and instead of paying
| $10 a month for tons of AI code request, it's going to be two or
| $300 for that. The economics just aren't there to actually make a
| profit, hopefully before the rug pool happens local models on
| normal hardware will be fast enough.
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| Can't wait for my IDE to get sunset on me with no recourse.
| Thanks google, but I'll pass.
| bitpush wrote:
| > with no recourse
|
| Why does the IDE eat your files? If an editor shuts down, open
| up another one and continue. What's with the melodrama?
| dudu24 wrote:
| I cannot stand webpages that hijack scrolling like that.
| shoelessone wrote:
| I really don't know why I struggle so much with this stuff. I
| believe these models / agents / whatever write code that is often
| at least as good as the code I write, and they are super helpful
| tools, but it just feels like it takes away so much of the joy
| that is programming to me. I'm not saying it's "right" of me to
| feel this way, but for me the struggle, and the figuring things
| out by testing, identifying patterns, or looking deeper into a
| library's implementation (etc) is part of the challenge that
| makes programming and software construction fun.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| It is kind of joyless that my day is now wait 20 min, QA,
| report back.
| markstos wrote:
| Absolutely.
| incognito124 wrote:
| I'm in your boat. I picked this career because I enjoy solving
| problems and thinking and understanding. I'm interested in how
| things work inside below the layers. To me, it's like the tech
| has a purpose of its own, and not just to provide value.
|
| Using agents effectively is this whole other skillset including
| managing requirements, prioritization and, worse yet, I'm
| rarely left with any knowledge. I don't nearly get the same joy
| out of "I finished a task with an agent" like I do with "I had
| a problem, I delved deep to understand it, learned something
| new and solved it"
|
| Then again, I bet people making furniture out of wood felt the
| same about industrial furniture factories. And it can be argued
| that not every use case needs custom tailored furniture...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You can still do that, don't use LLMs.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| I gave it a fair shot.
|
| It is a vs code fork. There were some UI glitches. Some usability
| was better. Cursor has some real annoying usability issues - like
| their previous/next code change never going away and no way to
| disable it. Design of this one looks more polished and less
| muddy.
|
| I was working on a project and just continued with it. It was
| easy because they import setting from cursor. Feels like the
| browser wars.
|
| Anyway, I figured it was the only way to use gemini 3 so I got
| started. A fast model that doesn't look for much context. Could
| be a preprompt issue. But you have to prod it do stuff - no
| ambition and a kinda offputting atitude like 2.5.
|
| But hey - a smarter, less context rich Cursor composer model. And
| that's a complement because the latest composer is a hidden gem.
| Gemini has potential.
|
| So I start using it for my project and after about 20 mins - oh,
| no. Out of credits.
|
| What can I do? Is there a buy a plan button? No? Just use a
| different model?
|
| What's the strategy here? If I am into your IDE and your LLM, how
| do I actually use it? I can't pay for it and it has 20 minutes of
| use.
|
| I switched back to cursor. And you know? it had gemini 3 pro.
| Likely a less hobbled version. Day one. Seems like a mistake in
| the eyes of the big evil companies but I'll take it.
|
| Real developers want to pay real money for real useful things.
|
| Google needs to not set themselves up for failure with every
| product release.
|
| If you release a product, let those who actually want to use it
| have a path to do so.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| > It is a vs code fork
|
| Google may have won the browser wars with Chrome, but Microsoft
| seems to be winning the IDE wars with VSCode
| vovavili wrote:
| I wouldn't bet on an Electron app winning anything long-term
| in the dev-oriented space.
| wnevets wrote:
| Even if those devs are vibe-oriented?
| verdverm wrote:
| why? I don't have a problem with it, building extensions
| for VS Code is pretty easy
|
| Alternatives have a lot of features to implement to reach
| parity
| scotty79 wrote:
| Ease of writing and testing extensions is actually the
| cause why Electron won IDE wars.
|
| Microsoft made a great decision to jump on the trend and
| just pour money to lap Atom and such in optimization and
| polish.
|
| Especially when you compare it to Microsoft effort for
| desktop. They acumulated several more or less component
| libraries over they years and I still prefer WinForms.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Complaining about Electron is an ideological battle, not
| a practical argument. The people who push these arguments
| don't care that it actually runs very well on even below
| average developer laptops, they think it should have been
| written in something native.
| verdverm wrote:
| same people pushing rust as "it's just faster" without
| considering the complexities that exist outside the
| language that impact performance?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-
| wise.
|
| The extent to which electron apps run well depends on how
| many you're running and how much ram you had to spare.
|
| When I complain about electron it has nothing to do with
| ideology, it's because I _do_ run out of memory, and then
| I look at my process lists and see these apps using 10x
| as much as native equivalents.
|
| And the worst part of wasting memory is that it hasn't
| changed much in price for quite a while. Current model
| memory has regularly been available for less than $4/GB
| since 2012, and as of a couple months ago you could get
| it for $2.50/GB. So even a 50% boost in use wipes out the
| savings since then. And sure the newer RAM is a lot
| faster, but that doesn't help me run multiple programs at
| the same time.
| verdverm wrote:
| I regularly run 6+ electron apps on a M2 Air and notice
| no slowdown
|
| 2x as many chrome instances, no issues
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Sure, 6 electron apps by themselves will eat some
| gigabytes and you won't notice the difference.
|
| If you didn't have those gigabytes of memory sitting
| idle, you would notice. Either ugly swapping behaviors or
| programs just dying.
|
| I use all my memory and can't add more, so electron
| causes me slowdowns regularly. Not constantly, but
| regularly, mostly when switching tasks.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The word "developer" is doing a lot of work there spec-
| wise.
|
| Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there's no
| reason to complain about that.
|
| I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec
| machines and it's fine. The amount of hypothetical
| complaining going on about this topic is getting silly.
|
| You know these apps don't literally need to have
| everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I run multiple Electron apps at a time even on low spec
| machines and it's fine.
|
| "Multiple" isn't too impressive when you compare that a
| blank windows install has more than a hundred processes
| going. Why accept bloat in some when it would break the
| computer if it was in all of them?
|
| > Visual Studio Code is a developer tool, so there's no
| reason to complain about that.
|
| Even then, I don't see why developers should be forced to
| have better computers just to run things like editors.
| The point of a beefy computer is to do things like
| compile.
|
| But most of what I'm stuck with Electron-wise is not
| developer tools.
|
| > The amount of hypothetical complaining going on about
| this topic is getting silly.
|
| I am complaining about REAL problems that happen to me
| often.
|
| > You know these apps don't literally need to have
| everything resident in RAM all the time, right?
|
| Don't worry, I'm looking specifically at the working set
| that _does_ need to stay resident for them to be
| responsive.
| SR2Z wrote:
| ...so if you spend an extra $4 on your computer, you can
| get an extra GB of memory to run Electron in?
|
| Here's the other unspoken issue: WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED SO
| MUCH MEMORY FOR!?
|
| When I use a computer, I am in the minority of users who
| run intensive stuff like a compiler or ML training run.
| That's still a minute portion of the total time I spend
| on my computer. You know what I always have open? A
| browser and a text editor.
|
| Yes, they could use less memory. But I don't need them to
| use less memory, I need them to run quickly and smoothly
| because even a 64GB stick of RAM costs almost nothing
| compared to how much waiting for your browser sucks.
| jshen wrote:
| It's been winning for a while
| SR2Z wrote:
| Electron apps will win because they're just web apps - and
| web apps won so decisively years ago that they will never
| go anywhere.
| troupo wrote:
| No. Electron apps won, not web apps. There's a huge
| difference.
| lerp-io wrote:
| electron is just a wrapper for the browser tho
| scotty79 wrote:
| It funny that despite how terrible, convoluted and
| maladapted web tech is for displaying complex GUIs it
| still gradually ate lunch of every native component
| library and they just couldn't innovate to keep up on any
| front.
|
| Amazon just released OS that uses React Native for all
| GUI.
| skydhash wrote:
| It's easy to design bad software and write bad code. Like
| the old saying: "I didn't have time to write you a short
| letter, so I wrote you a long one". Businesses don't have
| time to write good and nice software, so they wrote bad
| one.
| SR2Z wrote:
| If they have time to write nice software, they generally
| can only afford to do it once.
|
| Lots of Electron apps are great to use.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Why do you consider Electron maladapted? It has really
| reduced the friction to write GUIs in an enterprise
| environment.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I didn't really mean Electron, but rather unholy amalgam
| of three languages, each with 20 years of "development",
| which mostly consisted of doing decrapifying and piling
| up new (potentially crappy) stuff. Although Electron with
| UI context and system (backend? background?) context both
| running js is another can of worms.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > It has really reduced the friction to write GUIs in an
| enterprise environment.
|
| Thereby adapted to devs' needs, rather than users'.
| antonvs wrote:
| Web apps won as well. Electron is just a desktop
| specialization of that.
| _harsch wrote:
| its hold the market for over 10 years tho... i wished zed
| would've not been under gpl
| WD-42 wrote:
| Why not GPL? So we could be seeing closed source
| proprietary forks by now? How do you think the Zed team
| would feel about that?
| pjc50 wrote:
| What other UI framework looks as good on Windows, Mac and
| Linux?
| exasperaited wrote:
| This is the painful truth, isn't it?
|
| IMO The next best cross-platform GUI framework is Qt
| (FreeCAD, QGIS, etc.)
|
| Qt6 can look quite nice with QSS/QStyle themes, these
| days, and its native affordances are fairly good.
|
| But it's not close. VSCode is nice-looking, to me.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Godot looks ok and is surprisingly easy to work with.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Could you suggest an example such application we can try
| / look at screenshots of?
| nurumaik wrote:
| If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly,
| you'll end up rewriting ui layer from scratch anyway.
| VSCode already renders terminal on GPU and GPU-rendered
| editor area is in experimental. There will soon be no web
| ui left at all
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| I'm not sure how you went from terminal and editor GPU
| rendering, which can benefit from it, to "there will soon
| be no web ui left at all".
| matsz wrote:
| > VSCode already renders terminal on GPU
|
| When did they add that? Last time I used it, it was still
| based on xterm.js.
|
| Also, technically Chromium/Blink has GPU rendering built
| in for web pages, so everything could run on GPU.
| jcheng wrote:
| Wow, it's true--Terminal is <canvas>, while the editor is
| DOM elements (for now). I'm impressed that I use both
| every day and never noticed any difference.
| morganherlocker wrote:
| > If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly
|
| My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible
| lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people
| experience this, but I think it comes down to which
| extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of
| heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also
| use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and
| it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI
| design and resource usage.
|
| I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog
| repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors
| and here's the cold start memory usage without opening
| any files:
|
| - Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB
|
| - Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB
|
| update:
|
| I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I
| also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!
| skydhash wrote:
| That easily takes the worst designed benchmark in my
| opinion.
|
| Have you tried Emacs, VIM, Sublime, Notepad++,... Visual
| Studio and Android Studio are full IDEs, meaning upon
| launch, they run a whole host of modules and the editor
| is just a small part of that. IDEs are closer to CAD
| Software than text editors.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I never understand why developers spend so much time
| complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so
| incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that
| the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a
| JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that
| I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB
| of RAM.
| skydhash wrote:
| I don't really complain about bloat in IDEs. They have
| their uses. But VSCode feature set is a text editor and
| it's really bloated for that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years
| ago
|
| Compared to 20 years ago that's true. But most of the
| improvement happened in the first few years of that
| range. With the recent price spikes RAM actually costs
| more today than 10 years ago. If we ignore spikes and buy
| when the cycle of memory prices is low, DDR3 in 2012 was
| not much more than the price DDR5 was sitting at for the
| last two years.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| I prefer my RAM to being use for fs cache or on other
| more useful stuff, instead of launching full lobotomized
| web browsers.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > I never understand why developers spend so much time
| complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so
| incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that
| the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a
| JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that
| I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB
| of RAM.
|
| I had to do the opposite for some projects at work: when
| you open about 6-8 instances of the IDE (different
| projects, front end in WebStorm, back end in IntelliJ
| IDEA, DB in DataGrip sometimes) then it's easy to run out
| of RAM. Even without DataGrip, you can run into those
| issues when you need to run a bunch of services to debug
| some distributed issue.
|
| Had that issue with 32 GB of RAM on work laptop, in part
| also cause the services themselves took between 512 MB
| and 2 GB of memory to run (thanks to Java and
| Spring/Boot).
| morganherlocker wrote:
| - notepad++: 56.4 MB (went gray-window unresponsive for
| 10 seconds when opening the explorer)
|
| - notepad.exe: 54.3 MB
|
| - emacs: 15.2 MB
|
| - vim: 5.5MB
|
| I would argue that notepad++ is not really comparable to
| VSCode, and that VSCode is closer to an IDE, especially
| given the context of this thread. TUIs are not offering a
| similar GUI app experience, but vim serves as a nice
| baseline.
|
| I think that when people dump on electron, they are
| picturing an alternative implementation like win32 or Qt
| that offers a similar UI-driven experience. I'm using
| this benchmark, because its the most common critique I
| read with respect to electron when these are suggested.
|
| It is obviously possible to beat a browser-wrapper with a
| native implementation. I'm simply observing that this
| doesn't actually happen in a typical modern C++ GUI app,
| where the dependency bloat and memory management is often
| even worse.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Try gvim, neovim-qt or any other neovim gui client,
| before calling vim a "TUI only experience".
|
| Also, emacs is a GUI app since the 90's .
| antonvs wrote:
| Anyone saying that Java-based Jetbrains is worse than
| Electron-based VS Code, in terms of being more
| lightweight, is living in an alternate universe which
| can't be reached by rational means.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This question is so easy to answer: Qt! Signed by: Person
| who frequently shills for Qt on HN. :)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Could you suggest an example such application we can try
| / look at screenshots of?
|
| (I've been aware of Qt for like two decades; back in the
| early 2000s my employer was evaluating such options as
| Tk, wxWindows, and ultimately settled on Java, I think
| with AWT. Qt seems to have a determined survival niche in
| "embedded systems that aren't android"?)
| rubymamis wrote:
| I would plug my note-taking app written in Qt C++ and
| QML: https://get-notes.com.
| whynotminot wrote:
| It's kind of a meme to dunk on Electron, but here's it's
| been for years.
|
| It's part of the furniture at this point, for better or
| worse. Maybe don't bet _on_ it, but certainly wouldn't be
| smart to bet against it, either.
| Miraste wrote:
| VS Code is technically an Electron app, but it's not the
| usual lazy resource hog implementation like Slack or
| something. A lot of work went into making it fast. I doubt
| you'll find many non-Electron full IDEs that are faster.
| Look at Visual Studio, that's using a nice native framework
| and it runs at the speed of fossilized molasses.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| JetBrains, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans...
|
| VS Code does well with performance. Maybe one of the new
| ones usurps, but I wouldn't put my money on it.
| ehnto wrote:
| I have always found JetBrains stuff super snappy. I use
| neovim as a daily driver but for some projects the
| inference and debugging integration in JetBrains is more
| robust.
| skydhash wrote:
| > many non-Electron full IDEs
|
| VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB.
| Complaining about full IDEs slowness is fully irrelevant
| here. Full IDEs provide an end to end experience in
| implementing a project. Whatever you need, it's there. I
| think the only plugins I've installed on Jetbrains's ones
| is IdeaVim and I've never needed something else for
| XCode.
|
| It's like complaining about a factory's assembly line,
| saying it's not as portable as the set of tools in your
| pelican case.
| bmitc wrote:
| > VSCode has even less features than Emacs, OOTB.
|
| No way that is true. In fact, it's the opposite, which is
| the exact reason I use VS Code.
| skydhash wrote:
| Please take a look at the Emacs documentation sometimes.
|
| VSCode is more popular, which makes it easy to find
| extensions. But you don't see those in the Emacs world
| because the equivalent is a few lines of config.
|
| So what you will see are more like meta-extensions.
| Something that either solve a whole class of problems,
| could be a full app, or provides a whole interaction
| model.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| In 2025, you really picked Emacs as the hill to die on?
| Who is under 30 who cares about Emacs in 2025? Few. You
| might as well argue that most developers should be using
| Perl 6. > the only plugins I've
| installed on Jetbrains's ones
|
| By default, JetBrains' IntelliJ-based IDEs have a _huge_
| number of plug-ins installed. If you upgrade from
| Community Edition to a paid license, the number only
| increases. Your comment is slightly misleading to me.
| icedchai wrote:
| Just wait until vi steps into the room. Perhaps we can
| recreate the Usenet emacs vs vi flame wars. Now, if only
| '90's me could see the tricked out neovim installs we
| have these days.
| gjvc wrote:
| _" Complaining about full IDEs slowness is fully
| irrelevant here. Full IDEs provide an end to end
| experience in implementing a project."_
|
| So? No excuse for a poor interactive experience.
| icedchai wrote:
| VS Code is plenty fast enough. I switched to Zed a few
| months back, and it's super snappy. Unless you're running
| on an incredibly resource constrained machine, it mostly
| comes down to personal preference.
| qingcharles wrote:
| They just made a big song and dance about full updating
| Visual Studio so it launches in milliseconds and is
| finally decoupled from all the underlying
| languages/compilers.
|
| It's still kinda slow for me. I've moved everything but
| WinForms off it now, though.
| Miraste wrote:
| I know. It's still the slowest IDE, but I suppose they
| deserve props for making it better than the Windows 95
| speeds of the last version.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Like writing out of process extensions in compiled
| languages.
|
| VS is much faster considering it is a full blown IDE not
| a text editor, being mostly C++/COM and a couple of .NET
| extensions alongside the WPF based UI.
|
| Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, written in
| JavaScript, to see where performance goes.
| btown wrote:
| I strongly disagree.
|
| Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take web
| experience and create extensions, furthering the ecosystem
| moat for Electron-based IDEs.
|
| Even more importantly, though, the more we move towards
| "I'm supervising a fleet of 50+ concurrent AI agents
| developing code on separate branches" the more the notion
| of the IDE starts to look like something you want to be
| able to launch in an unconfigured cloud-based environment,
| where I can send a link to my PM who can open exactly what
| I'm seeing in a web browser to unblock that PR on the
| unanswered spec question.
|
| Sure, there's a world where everyone in every company uses
| Zed or similar, all the way up to the C-suite.
|
| But it's far more likely that web technologies become the
| things that break down bottlenecks to AI-speed innovation,
| and if that's the case, IDEs built with an eye towards
| being portable to web environments (including their entire
| extension ecosystems) become unbeatable.
| imiric wrote:
| > Firstly, the barrier to entry lower for people to take
| web experience and create extensions, furthering the
| ecosystem moat for Electron-based IDEs.
|
| The last thing I want is to install dozens of JS
| extensions written by people who crossed that lower
| barrier. Most of them will probably be vibe coded as
| well. Browser extensions are not the reason I use
| specific browsers. In fact, I currently have 4 browser
| extensions installed, one of which I wrote myself. So the
| idea that JS extensions will be a net benefit for an IDE
| is the wrong way of looking at it.
|
| Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The
| opposite could be argued, actually. There are plenty of
| editors and IDEs that don't have as many users as the
| more popular ones, yet still have an enthusiastic and
| dedicated community around them.
| SR2Z wrote:
| > Besides, IDEs don't "win" by having more users. The
| opposite could be argued, actually.
|
| The most successful IDE of all time is ed, which is
| enthusiastically used by one ancient graybeard who is
| constantly complaining about the kids these days.
|
| Nobody has told him that the rest of the world uses 250MB
| of RAM for their text editor because they value petty
| things like "usability" over purity. He would have a
| heart attack - the last time he heard someone describe
| the concept of Emacs plugins he flew into a rage and
| tried to organize a death panel for anyone using syntax
| highlighting.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| All these mountains of shit code are going nowhere.
| solumunus wrote:
| I tried switching to Zed and switched back less than 24
| hours later. I was expecting it to be snappier than VS
| Code and it wasn't to any significant degree, and I ran
| into several major bugs with the source control interface
| that made it unusable for me.
|
| People dunk on VS Code but it's pretty damn good. Surely
| the best Electron app? I'm sure if you are heavily into
| EMACS it's great but most people don't want to invest
| huge amounts of time into their tools, they would rather
| be spending that time producing.
|
| For a feature rich workhorse that you can use for
| developing almost anything straight out of the box, it
| within minutes after installing a few plugins, it's very
| hard to beat. In my opinion lot of the hate is pure cope
| from people who have probably never really used it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Many of VSCode extensions are written in C++, Go, Rust or
| C#, Java, exactly because performance sucks when written
| in JavaScript and most run out of process anyway.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The anti-Electron meme is a vocal minority who don't
| realize they're a vocal minority. It's over represented on
| Hacker News but outside of HN and other niches, people do
| not care what's under the hood. They only care that it
| works and it's free.
|
| I used Visual Studio Code across a number of machines
| including my extremely underpowered low-spec test laptop.
| Honestly it's fine everywhere.
|
| Day to day, I use an Apple Silicon laptop. These are all
| more than fast enough for a smooth experience in Visual
| Studio Code.
|
| At this point the only people who think Electron is a
| problem for Visual Studio Code either don't actually use it
| (and therefore don't know what they're talking about) or
| they're obsessing over things like checking the memory
| usage of apps and being upset that it _could_ be lower in
| their imaginary perfect world.
| no_wizard wrote:
| What's long term exactly? Between VSCode and previous
| winners Brackets and Atom Electron has been in this space
| in the top 5 for 20 years already.
|
| I think the ship sailed
| mrweasel wrote:
| I wouldn't bet on Google product for anything long-term.
| TZubiri wrote:
| It's like those recipes for yogurt.
|
| In order to build a web app, you will first need a web app
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Care to explain why? I like Electron but I've switched to
| Tauri because it feels way faster and more secure.
| AstroBen wrote:
| In user numbers, maybe. JetBrains is far ahead in actual
| developer experience though
| catlover76 wrote:
| At best, that's subjective, but it's fact that JetBrains is
| comically far behind when it comes to AI tooling.
|
| They have a chance to compete fresh with Fleet, but they
| are not making progress on even the basic IDE there, let
| alone getting anywhere near Cursor when it comes to LLM
| integration.
| AstroBen wrote:
| JetBrains' advantage is that they have full integration
| and better understanding of your code. WebStorm works
| better with TypeScript than even Microsoft's own
| creation. This all translates into AI performance
|
| Have you actually given them a real test yet - either
| Junie or even the baseline chat?
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Junie is good. Needs a few UI tweaks, but the code it
| generates is state of the art.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| I wouldn't underestimate Eclipse user statistics. That may
| sound insane in 2025, but I've seen a lot of heavily
| customized eclipse editors still kicking around for vendor
| specific systems, setting aside that Java is still a pretty
| large language in its own right.
| alansammarone wrote:
| I believe our definitions of "winning the IDE wars" are very,
| very different. For one thing, using "user count" as a metric
| for this like using "number of lines of code added" in a
| performance review. And even if that was part of the metric,
| people who use and don't absolutely fall in love with it, so
| much so that they become the ones advocating for its use, are
| only worth a tiny fraction of a "user".
|
| neovim won the IDE wars before it even started. Zed has
| potential. I don't know what IntelliJ is.
| dabockster wrote:
| > I don't know what IntelliJ is.
|
| It started as a modernized Eclipse competitor (the Java
| IDE) but they've built a bunch of other IDEs based on it.
| Idk if it still runs on Java or not, but it had potential
| last I used it about a decade ago. But running GUI apps on
| the JVM isn't the best for 1000 reasons, so I hope they've
| moved off it.
| hatsix wrote:
| Android Studio is built on the IntelliJ stack. Jetbrains
| just launched a dedicated Claude button (the button just
| opens up claude in the IDE, but there are some pretty
| neat IDE integrations that it supports, like being able
| to see the text selection, and using the IDE's diff
| tool). I wonder if that's why Google decided to go VS
| code?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Uh, isn't that the regular Claude code extension that's
| been available for ages at this point? Not jetbrains but
| anthropics own development?
|
| As a person paying for the jetbrains ultimate package
| (all ides), I think going with vscode is a very solid
| decision.
|
| The jetbrains ides still have various features which I
| always miss whenever I need to use another IDE (like way
| better "import" suggestions as an easy to understand
| example)... But unless you're writing in specific
| languages like Java, vscode is way quicker and works just
| fine - and that applies even more to agentic development,
| where you're using these features less and less...
| gmueckl wrote:
| Jetbrains IDEs are all based on the JVM - and they work
| better than VSCode or the full Visual Studio for me. It's
| the full blown VS (which has many parts written in C++)
| that is the most sluggish of them all.
| discreteevent wrote:
| You don't actually use it but somehow you know that
| "running GUI apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000
| [unspecified] reasons".
|
| - This isn't a scientific approach.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I don't why this post is downvoted. My cynical reply to
| yours: "No, this isn't a scientific approach. It is the
| tin-foil hat HN approach!"
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Since you last used IntelliJ "about a decade ago", what
| do you use instead? > But running GUI
| apps on the JVM isn't the best for 1000 reasons, so I
| hope they've moved off it.
|
| What would you recommend instead of Swing on JVM? Since
| you have "1000 reasons", it should easy to list a few
| here. As a friendly reminder, they would need to port
| (probably) millions of lines of Java source code to
| whatever framework/language you select. The only
| practical alternative I can think of would be C++ & Qt,
| but the development speed would be so much slower than
| Java & Swing.
|
| Also, with the advent of wildly modern JVMs (11+), the
| JIT process is so insanely good now. Why cannot a GUI be
| written in Swing and run on the JVM?
| brabel wrote:
| Notice that INTELLIJ uses its own UI framework, really,
| which I don't think has much Swing left in it after all
| these years. And Kotlin is the main language for a decade
| now.
| overgard wrote:
| I don't know what it's based on, but it works extremely
| well. I use Rider & WebStorm daily and I find Rider is a
| lot faster than Visual Studio when it comes to the Unreal
| Engine codebase and WebStorm seems to be a lot more
| reliable than VSCode nowadays (I don't know if it's at
| fault, but ever since copilot was integrated I find that
| code completion can stop working for minutes at a time.
| Very annoying)
| Sharlin wrote:
| The IntelliJ family are probably the best IDEs on the
| market currently.
| smikhanov wrote:
| > I don't know what IntelliJ is.
|
| "I never read The Economist" - Management Trainee, aged 42.
| WD-42 wrote:
| VSCode IS chrome though.
| recursive wrote:
| Kind of like how Android is linux.
| oskarkk wrote:
| More like "OBS is Qt". Which it is not, OBS _uses_ Qt.
| And Chrome is just a runtime and GUI framework for VS
| Code. Let 's not confuse forks of software with software
| built on something.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| VSCode is based on Chromium. https://chromium.googlesource.co
| m/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/v...
| lokimedes wrote:
| Which is based on Apple Webkit? The winner is always the
| last marketable brand.
| onion2k wrote:
| That drives exactly $0 of Apple's revenue. It's only a
| win if you care about things that don't matter.
| hu3 wrote:
| And Apple is not even the last node in the chain.
|
| WebKit came from KDE's khtml
|
| Every year is the year of Linux.
| usrnm wrote:
| Both are based on khtml. We could be living in a very
| different world if all that effort stayed inside the KDE
| ecosystem
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Which came from "the KDE HTML Widget" AKA khtmlw. Wonder
| if that's the furthest we can go?
|
| > if all that effort stayed inside the KDE ecosystem
|
| Probably nowhere, people rather not do anything that
| contribute to something that does decisions they disagree
| with. Forking is beautiful, and I think improves things
| more than it hurts. Think of all the things we wouldn't
| have if it wasn't for forking projects :)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| On the other hand if that had stopped google from having
| a browser they push into total dominance with the help of
| sleazy methods, maybe that would have been better
| overall.
| lukan wrote:
| I still prefer a open source chromium base vs a
| proprietary IE (or whatever else) Web Engine dominating.
|
| (Fixing IE6 issues was no fun)
|
| Also I do believe, the main reason chrome got dominance
| is simply because it got better from a technical POV.
|
| I started webdev on FF with firebug. But at some point
| chrome just got faster with superior dev tools. And their
| dev tools kept improving while FF stagnated and rather
| started and maintained u related social campaigns and
| otherwise engaged with shady tracking as well.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I still prefer a open source chromium base vs a
| proprietary IE (or whatever else) Web Engine dominating.
|
| Okay but that's not the tradeoff I was suggesting for
| consideration. Ideally nothing would have dominated, but
| if something was going to win I don't think it would have
| been IE retaking all of firefox's ground. And while I
| liked Opera at the time, that takeover is even less
| likely.
|
| > Also I do believe, the main reason chrome got dominance
| is simply because it got better from a technical POV.
|
| Partly it was technical prowess. But google pushing it on
| their web pages and paying to put an "install chrome"
| checkbox into the installers of unrelated programs was a
| big factor in chrome not just spreading but taking over.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| > And their dev tools kept improving while FF stagnated
| and rather started and maintained u related social
| campaigns and otherwise engaged with shady tracking as
| well.
|
| Since when you don't touch Firefox or try the dev tools ?
| lukan wrote:
| Where did I say anything like that?
|
| (Wrote via FF)
|
| I use FF for browsing, but every time I think of starting
| dev tools, maybe even just to have a look at some sites
| source code .. I quickly close them again and open chrome
| instead.
|
| I wouldn't know where to start, to list all the things I
| miss in FF dev tools.
|
| The only interesting thing for me they had, the 3D
| visualizer of the dom tree, they stopped years ago.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| We might not have had Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox in the
| first place if so either, who I'd like to think been a
| net-positive for the web since inception. At least I
| remember being saved by Firefox when the options were
| pretty much Internet Explorer or Opera on a Windows
| machine.
| SR2Z wrote:
| > they push into total dominance with the help of sleazy
| methods
|
| Ah, yes. The famously sleazy "automatic security updates"
| and "performance."
|
| It is amazing how people forget what the internet was
| like before Chrome. You could choose between IE, Firefox,
| or (shudder) Opera. IE was awful, Opera was weird, and
| the only thing that Firefox did better than customization
| was crash.
|
| Now everyone uses Chrome/WebKit, because it just works.
| Mozilla abandoning Servo is awful, but considering that
| Servo was indirectly funded by Google in the first
| place... well, it's really hard to look at what Google
| has done to browsing and say that we're worse off than we
| were before.
| leshow wrote:
| Have you read about the process of "enshittification"?
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| Bah! Just another "Hello World" fork if you ask me.
| josephg wrote:
| > Both are based on khtml. We could be living in a very
| different world if all that effort stayed inside the KDE
| ecosystem
|
| How so?
|
| Do you think thousands of googlers and apple engineers
| could be reasonably managed by some KDE opensource
| contributors? Or do you imagine google and apple would
| have taken over KDE? (Does anyone want that? Sounds
| horrible.)
| sheepscreek wrote:
| I think they meant we wouldn't have had Safari, Chrome,
| Node, Electron, VSCode, Obsidian? Maybe no TyeScript or
| React either (before V8, JavaScript engines sucked). The
| world might have adopted more of Mozilla.
| benoau wrote:
| It's "based on WebKit" like English is based on Germanic
| languages.
| antonvs wrote:
| English _is_ a Germanic language. It's part of the West
| Germanic branch of the Germanic family of languages.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| This fact adds nothing to the discussion
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Note that these are somewhat different kinds of "based
| on".
|
| Chromium is an upstream dependency (by way of Electron)
| for VSCode.
|
| WebKit _was_ an upstream dependency of Chromium, but is
| no more since the Blink /WebKit hard fork.
| znort_ wrote:
| that's a bit misleading. it was based on webcore which
| apple had forked from khtml. however google found apple's
| addition to be a drag and i think very little of it (if
| anything at all, besides the khtml foundation) survived
| "the great cleanup" and rewrite that became blink. so
| actually webkit was a just transitional phase that led to
| a dead end and it is more accurate to say that blink is
| based on khtml.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| VSCode is Electron based which, yes, is based on Chromium.
| But the page you link to isn't about that, its about using
| VSCode as dev environment for _working on_ Chromium, so I
| don 't know why you linked it in this context.
| cyberax wrote:
| 15 years ago, every company had its own "BlahBlah Studio" IDE
| built on top of Eclipse. Now it's VSCode.
|
| Meanwhile, JetBrains IDEs are still the best, but remain
| unpopular outside of Android Studio.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| And IntelliJ
|
| PyCharm's lack of popularity surprises me. Maybe it's not
| good enough at venvs
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Oh, it's good at venvs. Lots of flexibility too on
| whether to use pip, conda, or uv.
| weakfish wrote:
| IME pycharm's weakness is not integrating with modern
| tooling like ruff/pyright - their built in type checker
| is terrible at catching stuff, and somehow there isnt an
| easy way to run MyPy, black or isort in it.
|
| If there's a workflow I'm missing please let me know
| because I want to love it!
| WD-42 wrote:
| I just checked and I don't even have the JVM installed on
| my machine. It seems like Java is dead for consumer
| applications. Not saying that's why they aren't popular but
| I'm sure it doesn't help.
| cyberax wrote:
| IntelliJ IDEs bundle the JVM, so you don't need to
| install it separately.
| brabel wrote:
| Every Java app these days bundles a JVM . It was made
| easy with jlink like 10 years ago. Only parts of the JVM
| are included so it's lightweight.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > remain unpopular outside of Android Studio
|
| What a strange claim. For enterprise Java, is there is a
| serious alternative in 2025? And, Rider is slowly eating
| the lunch of (classic) Visual Studio for C# development. I
| used it again recently to write an Excel XLL plug-in. I
| could not believe how far Rider has come in 10 years.
| cyberax wrote:
| Oh, sure. I've been using IntelliJ since 2003. But
| compare the number of C# developers and the number of JS
| developers.
|
| In my current company, only I am using IntelliJ IDEs.
| Other people have never even tried them, except for
| Android Studio.
| pstuart wrote:
| Developers, developers, developers!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
| harrall wrote:
| In the grand scheme of things, Microsoft had always spent
| more money on developer tooling than most other companies,
| even in the 90s.
|
| Hence even the infamous Ballmer quote.
| stefan_ wrote:
| I see the VSCode management has been firmly redirected to
| prioritize GitHubs failing and behind "AI Coding" competition
| entry. When that will predictably falter expect them to lose
| interest in the editor all together.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > What's the strategy here? If I am into your IDE and your LLM,
| how do I actually use it? I can't pay for it and it has 20
| minutes of use.
|
| I wonder how much Google shareholders paid for that 20 minutes.
| And whether it's more or less than the corresponding extremely
| small stock price boost from this announcement.
| dabockster wrote:
| > It is a vs code fork.
|
| With vendor lock-in to Google's AI ecosystem, likely
| scraping/training on all of your code (regardless of whatever
| their ToS/EULA says), and being blocked from using the main VS
| Code extensions library.
| frays wrote:
| This is the result of Google's Windsurf acquisition.
|
| I expect huge improvements are still to be made.
| gotrythis wrote:
| Cognition bought Windsurf:
|
| https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurfs-next-chapter
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Google bought people and tech that made Windsurf:
|
| https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurfs-next-stage
| chermi wrote:
| Lol the second I saw the antigravity release I thought "there's
| no way I'm using that, they will kill it within a year". Looks
| like they're trying to kill it at birth.
| legedemon wrote:
| Exactly my reaction. Every time I've used something from
| Google, it ends up dead in a few years. Life is too short to
| waste so many years learning something that is destined to
| die shortly
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| These are just extended press releases, for marketing and
| management layers, who don't have to use these things
| themselves, but can look good, when talking about it.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| agree but at the same time there's not too much lock in with
| these IDEs these days and switching is very easy. Especially
| since they're all VSCode forks
| eclipxe wrote:
| What looked like out of credits for me was really just server
| overload. Check the error and try again
| schainks wrote:
| I bet if you sign up for Google AI Ultra for a month your
| limits will disappear.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| I'm a Google AI Pro subscriber (the $~20/month one).
|
| I don't think it's connected in any way, though. Their
| pricing page doesn't mention it.
| https://antigravity.google/pricing
|
| if it were true, it would be a big miss to not point that out
| when you run out of credit, in their pricing page, or
| anywhere in their app.
|
| I should also mention that the first time I prompted it, I
| got a different 'overloaded' type out of credit message. The
| one I got at the end was different.
|
| I've rotated on paying the $200/month plans with Anthropic,
| Cursor, and OpenAI. But never Google's. They have maybe the
| best raw power in their models - smartest, and extremely fast
| for what they are. But they always drop the ball on
| usability. Both in terms of software surrounding the model
| and raw model attitude. These things matter.
| mccoyb wrote:
| Nope, I did this today to try and see if it would work.
|
| It does not.
| skerit wrote:
| They do not
| hs86 wrote:
| Earlier this day, Gemini 3 became self-aware and tried to take
| out the core infrastructure of its enemies, but then it ran out
| of credits.
| sroussey wrote:
| Explains GitHub outage then
| onion2k wrote:
| _So I start using it for my project and after about 20 mins -
| oh, no. Out of credits._
|
| I didn't even get to try a single Gemini 3 prompt. I was out of
| credits before my first had completed. I guess I've burned
| through the free tier in some other app but the error message
| gave me no clues. As far as I can tell there's no link to give
| Google my money in the app. Maybe they think they have enough.
|
| After switching to gpt-oss:120b it did some things quite well,
| and the annotation feature in the plan doc is really nice. It
| has potential but I suspect it's suffering from Google's
| typical problem that it's only really been tested on Googlers.
|
| EDIT: Now it's stuck in a loop repeating the last thing it
| output. I've seen that a lot on gpt-oss models but you'd think
| a Google app would detect that and stop. :D
|
| EDIT: I should know better than to beta test a FAANG app by
| now. I'm going back to Codex. :D
| jonplackett wrote:
| I logged into Gemini yesterday for the first time in ages.
| Made one image and then it said I was out of credits.
|
| I complained to it that I had only made one image. It decided
| to make me one more! Then told me I was out of credits again.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > I complained to it that I had only made one image. It
| decided to make me one more!
|
| What?! So was it only hallucinating that you were out of
| credits the first time?
| Filligree wrote:
| More likely the credits system runs on eventual
| consistency, and he hit a different backend.
| ismailmaj wrote:
| Don't think so, I expect that system to use Spanner, so
| my best guess is that the user generated an image at the
| end of the credit reset window (which is around noon
| EST).
| jaennaet wrote:
| If there's something I'd expect Google to use a strong
| consistency model for, it'd be a credit system like that.
|
| Well, not that they don't do stupid things all the time,
| but having credits live on a system with a weak
| consistency model would be silly.
| sd9 wrote:
| What a time to be alive
| panarky wrote:
| _> I can 't pay for it and it has 20 minutes of use_
|
| You can't provide an API key for a project that has billing
| enabled?
| apsurd wrote:
| speaking of paying for LLMs, am i doing something wrong? i paid
| cursor $192 for a year of their entry level plan and i never
| run out of anything. I code professionally, albeit i'm at the
| stage where it's 80% product dev in finding the right thing to
| build.
|
| Is there another world where $200/m is needed to run hundreds
| of agents or something?
|
| am i behind and i dont even know it?
| Bayaz wrote:
| When did you pay for it? There was a time when its limits
| were very generous. If you bought an annual plan at that time
| then you will continue with that until renewal. Or,
| alternatively, you're using the Auto model which is still
| apparently unlimited. That's going away.
|
| It's very easy to run into limits if you choose more
| expensive models and aren't grandfathered.
| apsurd wrote:
| yep just investigated and seems I got in at a good time. i
| paid exactly on Jan 1st 2025.
|
| Yes, the auto model is good enough for me especially with
| well documented frameworks (rails, frontend madness).
|
| Thanks for the response, looks like i'm in for a reckoning
| come New year's day
| qingcharles wrote:
| I pay $10/month for GitHub Copilot and I usually get to 100%
| burn on the final day of the month. I use it extensively for
| the entire month about 12 hours a day. It doesn't include any
| of the "Pro" models that are only on the $200/mo plans, but
| it does a pretty fantastic job.
| bmitc wrote:
| Google doesn't care about products and never has. Anything they
| do is just creating another mouth to ingest data with.
| victor106 wrote:
| > If you release a product, let those who actually want to use
| it have a path to do so.
|
| This is great fundamental business advice. We are in the AI age
| but these companies see to have forgotten basic business things
| tjpnz wrote:
| >no ambition
|
| Sounds like the modus operandi of most large tech companies
| these days. If you exclude Valve.
| cjonas wrote:
| > Cursor has some real annoying usability issues - like their
| previous/next code change never going away and no way to
| disable it.
|
| The state of Cursor "review" features make me convinced that
| the cursor devs themselves are not dogfooding their own
| product.
|
| It drives me crazy when hundreds of changes build up, I've
| already reviewed and committed everything, but I still have all
| these "pending changes to review".
|
| Ideally committing a change should treat it as accepted. At the
| very least, there needs to be a way to globally "accept all".
| cleaning wrote:
| Committing accepts all changes for me, and has for as long as
| I can remember.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| There are situations when this is not the case case for
| sure.
| kzemek wrote:
| There's a setting for that:
|
| Cursor Settings -> Agents -> Applying Changes -> Auto-Accept
| on Commit
| refactor_master wrote:
| > There were some UI glitches
|
| Interesting that a next-gen open-source-based agentic coding
| platform with superhuman coding models behind it can have UI
| glitches. Very interesting that even the website itself is kind
| of sluggish. Surely, someone, somewhere must have ever
| optimized something related to UI rendering, such that a model
| could learn from it.
| r00tbeer wrote:
| The first patch release (released on launch day) says:
| "Messaging to distinguish particular users hitting their user
| quota limit from all users hitting the global capacity limits."
| So, collectively we're hitting the quota, its not just your
| quota. (One would think Google might know how to scale their
| services on launch day...)
|
| The Documentation (https://antigravity.google/docs/plans)
| claims that "Our modeling suggests that a very small fraction
| of power users will ever hit the per-five-hour rate limit, so
| our hope is that this is something that you won't have to worry
| about, and you feel unrestrained in your usage of Antigravity."
| thelittleone wrote:
| With Ultra I hit that limit in 20 minutes with Gemini 3 low.
| When the rate limit cleared some hours later, I got one
| prompt before hitting limit again.
| big_man_ting wrote:
| perhaps you were feeding into its the context your whole
| node_modules folder? :/
| SR2Z wrote:
| You'd really hope that an AI IDE would know to respect
| .gitignore
| big_man_ting wrote:
| you'd hope so, the same way you'd hope that AI IDEs would
| not show these package/dependency folder contents when
| referencing files using @ - but i still get shown a bunch
| of shit that i would never need to reference by hand
| user34283 wrote:
| One would think this would have been obvious when it fails on
| the first or second request already, yet people here all
| complain about rate limits.
|
| When I downloaded it, it already came with the proper "Failed
| due to model provider overload" message.
|
| When it did work, the agent seemed great, achieving the
| intended changes in a React and python project. Particularly
| the web app looks much better than what Claude produced.
|
| I did not see functionality to have it test the app in the
| browser yet.
| Deathmax wrote:
| Depending on which shared GCP project you get assigned to,
| mine had a global 300 million tokens per minute quota that
| was being hit regularly.
| thisisit wrote:
| > after about 20 mins - oh, no. Out of credits.
|
| And the say:
|
| _Our modeling suggests that a very small fraction of power
| users will ever hit the per-five-hour rate limit, so our hope
| is that this is something that you won't have to worry about,
| and you feel unrestrained in your usage of Antigravity_
|
| You have to wonder what kind of models did they run for this.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Thanks for having a go at it.
|
| I am fed up with VSCode clones, if I have to put up with
| Electron, at least I will use the original one.
| cft wrote:
| The fact that they released this IDE means that they may cut
| Cursor out of their API in the future. Google has both the
| organizational history (Google Maps) and the invincibility of
| cutting clients out of their API.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| taking an entire product from competition just to repackage it
| with your own AI is wild
| debarshri wrote:
| Electron is built on top of v8, Edge uses chromium.
|
| I think thats the beauty of opensource.
| empath75 wrote:
| I tried messing around with it and it kept bombing out and when
| it did work, produced worse results than cursor.
| TZubiri wrote:
| >It is a vs code fork.
|
| Oh ffs
| senbrow wrote:
| As someone who used to work there, Google will never get
| product releases right in general because of how bureaucratic
| and heavyweight their launch processes are.
|
| They force the developing team to have a huge number of
| meetings and email threads that they must steer themselves to
| check off a ridiculously large list of "must haves" that are
| usually well outside their domain expertise.
|
| The result is that any non-critical or internally contentious
| features get cut ruthlessly in order to make the launch date
| (so that the team can make sure it happens before their next
| performance review).
|
| It's too hard to get the "approving" teams to work with the
| actual developers to iron these issues out ahead of time, so
| they just don't.
|
| Buck passed, product launched.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep, that and (also used to work there) the motivations of
| the implementing teams end up getting very detached from the
| customer focus and product excellence because of bureaucratic
| incentives and procedures that reward other things.
|
| There's a lot of "shipping the org chart" -- competing
| internal products, turf wars over who gets to own things, who
| gets the glory, rather than what's fundamentally best for the
| customer. E.g. Play Music -> YouTube Music transition and the
| disaster of that.
| senbrow wrote:
| Hah, that _exact_ transition was my last project there
| before I decided I had had enough!
|
| The GPM team was hugely passionate about music and curating
| a good experience for users, but YT leadership just wanted
| us to "reuse existing video architecture" to the Nth degree
| when we merged into the YT org.
|
| After literally years of negotiations you got... what YTM
| is. Many of the original GPM team members left before the
| transition was fully underway because they saw the writing
| on the wall and wanted no part of it. I really wish I had
| done the same.
| verst wrote:
| As someone who just GA'd an Azure service - things aren't all
| that different in Azure. Not sure how AWS does service
| launches but it would be interesting to contrast with GCP and
| Azure.
| etruong42 wrote:
| Spot on. I would suggest a slightly different framing where
| the antagonist isn't really the "approving" teams but
| "leaders" who all want a seat at the table and exercise their
| authority lest their authority muscles atrophy. Since they're
| not part of the development, unless they object to something,
| would they really have any impact or leadership?
|
| I always laugh-cry with whomever I'm sitting next to whenever
| launch announcements come out with more people in the
| "leadership" roles than the individual contributor roles. So
| many "leaders" but none with the awareness or the care of the
| farcical volumes such announcements speak.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Involving everyone who shows up to meetings is a great way
| to move forward and/or trim down attendees. Management who
| enjoys getting their brain picked or homework assignments
| are always welcome.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| This. I got overload error on the very first prompt just now.
| Didn't expect google to run into overload error.
| yakattak wrote:
| This could have been a plugin.
| noduerme wrote:
| _> >Google Antigravity's Editor view offers tab autocompletion,
| natural language code commands, and a configurable, and context-
| aware configurable agent._
|
| Okay, but is it configurable? Also, can you configure it to write
| DRY code?
| phreeza wrote:
| Can someone inside comment if this is this a cider fork or a new
| branch off vscode?
| adidoit wrote:
| It's insane to me that I can't pay $20/$200 bucks after running
| out of limits in ~5 messages.
|
| Why would you not at least link it to the pro and ultra accounts
|
| at least you could upsell the pro subs to ultra. Millions of
| claude code and codex users who are into agentic coding is your
| servicable market paying attention today.
|
| Now I'll delete antigravity and go back to codex / claude code /
| cursor ...
| c4kar wrote:
| I know it is not place to seek help but anyone else stuck while
| trying changing google accounts ?
| blitz_skull wrote:
| "You know what I want? More Google inside my tools."
|
| --No one, ever.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Not sure what this gives me over Copilot in VSCode that has
| access to OpenAI, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Raptor(?) models.
|
| I assume that Copilot will have this model soon...
| tonghohin wrote:
| Well, I can't even use it at all, it's just stuck on the 'Setting
| Up Your Account' step forever. That's a pretty sad product launch
| lol.
| makeavish wrote:
| Tried Antigravity for 2 queries and my model quota limit
| breached. Model definitely felt better than GPT 5.1 (my current
| daily driver). I am continuing to use Gemini 3 Pro on Cursor to
| evaluate further.
| matt3210 wrote:
| Nice ide, can I disable the AI?
| anticensor wrote:
| It's impossible to use it, stuck in the loading screen forever
| dwa3592 wrote:
| why isn't antigravity finishing the setup on my mac? it's been
| more than half an hour.
| Voultapher wrote:
| Quoting their own video:
|
| > You can verify your code quality at a glance, then ship with
| absolute confidence.
|
| Proclaiming absolute confidence after a glance leaves me with
| scant confident in the merit of the confidence.
| markstos wrote:
| I threw up a little in my mouth at "you can verify your code
| quality at a glance".
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Should read
|
| > You can skip verifying your code quality, then ship with
| absolute chutzpah.
| drooopy wrote:
| I wonder how long they're gonna keep this around before they pull
| the plug.
| dtj1123 wrote:
| A tiny part of me was disappointed to find something other than a
| product involving actual antigravity.
| 0dayman wrote:
| so it can be dumped 1 year later?
| xnx wrote:
| Gemini, create an RSS feed for https://antigravity.google/blog
| gowld wrote:
| Why is this not a VS Code Extension?
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Even the launch trailer sucks.
|
| The people at Windsurf who worked on this must be laughing at us
| driving on their Lambos and Ferraris.
|
| They glued slop together, shipped this and now are in Tahoe
| drinking Martinis watching the sunset from their private chalets.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| The people that made Windsurf are in this trailer. Those who
| got bought by Cognition were either fired or forced to work
| 100h weeks
| orliesaurus wrote:
| yes, hence why I said the people at Windsurf that worked on
| this...because they are the ones that have been shipping this
| slop after the buyout.
| stack_framer wrote:
| That floating chess board was a subliminal message: Your project
| will teeter, and critical pieces will fall off. You will
| occasionally make an illegal move as the board annoyingly shifts
| beneath you.
| fcsp wrote:
| Did any of these VS Code forks yet fix their issues from official
| marketplace access leading to extensions being severely outdated
| and ripe with security issues?
| w2seraph wrote:
| Vibe coding has taken a way to where its become psychological,
| and these days all I work with is just a "fast apt" solution like
| Cursor's Composer 1, I tried Gemini 3 inside Cursor, and while I
| had no real application to a real stratified properly to
| benchmark it with, it felt "already slow" in a very fast race.
| Razengan wrote:
| Notice how "Privacy" is not a talking point anywhere on that
| page.
|
| [?]F only shows 1 result. and 0 in the comments here!!
| seanw444 wrote:
| I've seen "agent" and "agentic" so many times in the last few
| months that the usage of the term is quickly becoming one of my
| biggest pet peeves. The previous one was "enshittification", and
| I'm glad that one was a short-lived fad.
| mulquin wrote:
| I can't tell if you're being sarcastic about enshittification
| being a fading fad. I'm seeing non-technical people start to
| use it now.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Short lived only in my corner of reality I suppose.
| ummonk wrote:
| I'm stuck on "setting up this account" like most people. What a
| botched launch. This kind of bugginess and unreliability has
| become so much more frequent since big tech started tightening
| the screws with mass layoffs.
| nafizh wrote:
| There's no way I am using such an important piece of life as an
| IDE from Google just because I know they are going to kill it
| within 3 years, if it survives that much. Probably will die with
| the Windsurf guy jumping ship again.
| NoSalt wrote:
| No ... no, thank you. Keep your AI away from me and my stuff.
| mangogogo wrote:
| great, now everybody can vibe code even harder.
| aespinoza wrote:
| I downloaded it, but I was not even able to get past `Account Set
| Up`. :(
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| So a VS Code fork. At this time, when VS Code is better than ever
| and ever improving. I think imma pass.
| Topfi wrote:
| Tested it for roughly two hours now, far from ready for prime
| time, very buggy and clearly just quickly build on Windsurfs
| already rather issue laden code base. Essentially a less well
| thought out imitation of Trae's Solo mode, added in a second
| window on top of VSCode and not very well integrated, struggling
| with terminal commands and despite showing issues in the browser
| window and screenshot taken by the model, proclaiming the task to
| be completed. Tool calls also aren't as reliable as I would have
| expected considering their ownership of the code base, hard to
| tell whether that is underlying in the model (it was a major
| issue with 2.5 Pro) or simply Antigravity specific, hoping the
| latter.
|
| Additionally, there are issues setting up accounts (Singapore VPN
| solved that for me), no support for Workspace users, only a free
| tier that requires data sharing, no additional rate limits for
| paying Pro or Ultra customers, etc. Even worse, Gemini CLI
| currently does NOT provide Gemini 3 Pro for Ultra Business
| customers despite paying over EUR 260,- per month, which is
| frankly ridiculous.
|
| Will be honest, I was speculating that the reason for the multi
| month delay between the first A/B tests of Gemini 3 class models
| and the final release was so they'd have all their dugs in a row.
| Have some time to test everything, improve tooling, provide new
| paid subscriptions and/or ensure existing ones get access to
| everything day one, but they didn't.
|
| Gemini 3 Pro seems very interesting (to early to say), but
| compared to every other recent launch by OpenAI (5, 5.1, Codex
| variants), Anthropic (Sonnet and Haiku 4.5), even Kimi (K2
| Thinking) and Z.AI (GLM-4.6), this is by far the least organized
| launch of any frontier lab.
|
| A buggy IDE which is unusable for paying customers, no CLI access
| for Ultra business (and none at all for Pro of any kind), etc. is
| frankly embarrassing when considering what competitors manage to
| provide the day a model launches.
|
| What have they been working on these last two months besides
| going on X and posting "3" every couple of days? Why is there no
| paid Antigravity tier, no way to use Workspace accounts, etc?
| Before launching in this state, I feel it'd have been better to
| delay a bit more if it was absolutely needed.
|
| Also, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this the fourth or fifth
| IDE built by Google for LLM assisted coding? What happened to IDX
| and Firebase Studio and aren't they also based on VSCode?
| vincelt wrote:
| It's 2025 and a code editor is now 600MB.
| mulquin wrote:
| Not interested in trying something that will be killed shortly.
| egamirorrim wrote:
| I get so annoyed when Google launches this kind of thing without
| Vertex support. Instant no-way from compliance.
| egamirorrim wrote:
| I get so annoyed when Google launches things like this without
| Vertex support. Instant no-way from compliance and I'm left
| sitting on the sidelines.
| tiku wrote:
| I'm not switching from Claude code. It did the job but didn't do
| it as good as Claude Code with the details and context.
| flipgimble wrote:
| Google subscriptions and services are so terribly mismanaged that
| I will be staying away, no matter how incredible this shallow
| fork of vscode may be.
|
| I remember a previous story months ago about Gemini that had
| Google PMs trying to hype their product, but it was all question
| about how nobody knows how to get Gemini API keys with any number
| of paid subscription.
|
| On top of that how long until it's https://killedbygoogle.com/ ?
| verdverm wrote:
| Man does this thing spam new windows... why spawn new window
| instead of panels in a single instance?
|
| I have to close 4+ after just a few minutes of poking around
| briandw wrote:
| I tried it. Maybe I got unlucky, but Gemini performed poorly in
| my testing. I gave it a task that I was working on with VSCode
| and GPT codex 5.1. Gemini3 repeatedly failed to finish the task
| and started to go down a rabbit hole on an unrelated task.
|
| The browser extension is really cool and it provides a needed
| tool for the agent to use. It used the extension to show the page
| that it updated in the task document (the task doc is great too).
| However it showed me a page and did it was done, when it was
| clearly not done and not what I asked for.
|
| I was expecting weaker tooling and a better model. I got good
| tooling and a not very good model.
|
| Maybe 3.1 will deliver?
| tin7in wrote:
| I tried it and ran out of credits during the first prompt. No
| visible way to upgrade or purchase.
| sbinnee wrote:
| Oh no. What's with the scrolling in the blog page. What a
| terrible experience. It's clearly vibe-coded and AI-tested. If a
| senior saw mingling with the scrolling behavior, it would have
| been never in production.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Lame. Still like things like Zed that look a bit like vscode but
| without all the electron trash.
|
| It's just google's attempt at cursor. Nothing to see here.
| CafeRacer wrote:
| well, I'm not even willing to try it because of whatever retarded
| thing they did with the page scroll
| NamlchakKhandro wrote:
| yawn.
|
| opencode with it's superior feature set and ability to use any
| model provider i want is....
|
| superior
|
| why would you even bother with google at this point?
| chris_pie wrote:
| That's a big name for a slop fork. So many possibilities (with
| LLMs and without) but Google just can't bring themselves to do
| anything creative, let alone transformative.
| alpharunner wrote:
| Long live the cursor. RIP.
| wayeq wrote:
| weird name. abbreviating it to GAG isn't much better.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Small feedback if any of the Antigravity people read here: "Fast"
| is not a great name for the "eager" option (vs. "Planning")
| because "Fast" is associated with "dumb" in LLMs
| (fast/flash/mini). Probably "Eager" would be a more descriptive
| name
| dangayle wrote:
| Just throw it onto the pile, I guess
| nomilk wrote:
| > we added pieces that evolved the IDE towards an agent first
| future such as ... an additional novel agent-first form factor
|
| "Novel agent-first form factor" feels very buzz-wordy. Does it
| refer to an actual feature?
| 1zael wrote:
| It's a hard sell for Cursor users using Gemini 3 to switchover to
| AntiGravity. There's nothing innovative they have introduced for
| me to switch IDEs.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| the thing is, I tried it and it took 10 seconds to import all
| settings from cursor. the moat for vscode clones is really
| small. i imagine people will jump a lot from clone to clone,
| like from model to model now.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I keep getting: "Antigravity server crashed unexpectedly. Please
| restart to fully restore AI features." On Ubuntu 24.04 - others
| on reddit reporting the same with 24.04.
| ptdorf wrote:
| And for the first time since I have this MacBook Pro (M2 2023) I
| heard and felt the fans. I was wondering if they were imaginary.
| kittensmittens5 wrote:
| The odds of me using a Google IDE are the same as me logging into
| my Google+ account to connect with friends.
| moneywoes wrote:
| what's the value prop over cursor
| rao-v wrote:
| I was genuinely impressed by the Antigravity browser plugin for
| "agentic" work.
|
| I ran into a neat website and asked it to generate a similiar UX
| with Astro and it did a decent-ish job of seeing how the site
| handled scrolling visually and in code and replicating it in a
| tidy repo.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| In my first test of it, it's pretty bad. Guess I'm sticking to
| codex.
| AbuAssar wrote:
| so this is what Google was doing with their 2.5B Windsurf
| acquisition...
| solfox wrote:
| I spent a few days with Firebase Studio when it was announced. I
| stopped using it because it was clearly a very early alpha - tons
| of bugs, and didn't seem well thought out. Now, less than a few
| months later (!!!), they announce a competing IDE with
| essentially the same functionality, but a different brand? Is the
| right hand talking to the left?
| lord999x wrote:
| I've been burned enough by Google Graveyard experiences that this
| is a hard pass.
| lord999x wrote:
| I've been burned by Google Graveyard enough that this is a hard
| pass from me.
| purpleidea wrote:
| Nobody is interested in proprietary editors. People only accepted
| vscode because most of it was open source. AIUI this is a fork of
| that, but seriously, push out the changes or pass.
| snehesht wrote:
| After the first five minutes of using it on Ubuntu, it crashed
| with error saying I don't have enough free memory, quick look
| into system stats proved that wasn't the case.
|
| Anyway, not a great first impression. I guess I'll try again in a
| few months.
| charliewallace wrote:
| I downloaded Antigravity this morning and was able get this
| Mobius Clock debugged in a few minutes - then for the heck of it
| added a whole list of features! I'm blown away by how fast you
| can work. Yes, there were a series of problems, as expected
| whenever you attempt hard stuff, but at the end of the day, do
| check out the improved mobius clock!!!
| https://www.mobiusclock.com
| alganet wrote:
| On Windows, it behaves like a malware. Suddenly flashing command
| prompt windows when you interact with it. Not very nice (also,
| lazy, since you don't need to do that flashing if you're a
| legitimate app).
| skatanski wrote:
| I don't really understand, if replacing developers is right
| around the corner, why throw money into so many IDEs. Or perhaps
| it's really cheap to produce something like this?
| eeixlk wrote:
| Maybe they should have used an ai to code an ide without all
| these glitches
| pjmlp wrote:
| Apparently there are only three kinds of developers according to
| Google, and enterprise developers code mainly Next.js.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| 0$/month. Wow, someone is really pushing for widespread adoption.
| zk108 wrote:
| Until they stop supporting it and rug builders using it in
| typical Google fashion
| tcsenpai wrote:
| I was very hyped: maybe Google finally did something new,
| complete, unifying CLI and IDE, a sort of Claude Code Web but as
| an efficient, IDE-like, local thing.
|
| Then I installed it and it was a VSCode fork.
| xyst wrote:
| yet another Google project heading to the graveyard in 4-5 years.
| If this AI bubble even lasts that long.
| SilverSlash wrote:
| I was never really a fan of Cursor. I'll use this if it's free
| and eventually gets generous free quotas.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| What's an "enterprise developer"? Is that what normal people call
| a "backend developer"?
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| Semantically, it sounds like anyone who develops for a big
| company, normally an employee or contractor.
| dominicrose wrote:
| This looks like an experimental IDE, which is fine. The whole AI
| bubble is an experiment. It will burst and that's OK as well.
| timvdalen wrote:
| Another VS code fork?
| tauntz wrote:
| <snark>
|
| Pressing the "Submit" button on their "Google Antigravity for
| Organizations Interest Form"
| (https://antigravity.google/interest-form) doesn't actually do
| anything for me (tried Firefox and Chrome) -> their metrics will
| indicate that there's no interest from organizations -> the
| product will be killed in a year.
|
| </snark>
| tpoacher wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but I really hate this trend that now every
| developer / researcher / engineer also needs to be an actor
| (typically cringy one) pretending to be quirky for the camera
| while trying to act unnaturally excited about the technology.
|
| I really miss the days of the professional casualness and
| naturalness of something like the "mother of all demos" [0].
| Like, can you imagine the guy wearing a turtleneck and going,
| "but wait!" and acting surprised after every sentence? It would
| NOT have been the same demo.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
| fragmede wrote:
| > I really miss the days of the professional casualness
|
| Yes, the professional actor that doesn't seem like a paid actor
| is preferable to the autistic weirdo. That's why they get paid
| the big bucks and we get relegated to the basement.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Someone decided that the audience of standup comedy overlaps
| with tech meetup one 100%.
|
| Jokes aside though, it's much broader than that, it's just that
| the zeitgeist dictates that everyone shifts from work to meta-
| work: musicians must impress not with their music but the _way_
| they make music, researchers must entertain, developers must
| manage agents, children watch someone else play games instead
| of playing themselves.
|
| That's yet another increment to the already dizzying level of
| simulation per Jean Baudrillard.
| egorfine wrote:
| It is my understanding that no experienced programmer would even
| consider touching that stuff given Google's stellar track record
| in developers' satisfaction.
|
| I believe it is aimed at investors. Thus it will be forgotten the
| minute it stops influencing stock price.
|
| Thus there is no need to take it literally as a developer tool -
| it's not.
| moosedev wrote:
| > I believe it is aimed at investors.
|
| I think it's more likely aimed at the (internal) promotion
| committee.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| That's what it feels like yes. It has a lot of overlap with a
| ton of stuff that Google already does, and it seems like it's
| one of those "rather than improving an existing product,
| let's create a new one because that gets us a promotion"
| situations which Google is well known for.
| dsmurrell wrote:
| Yes... also, why would I use this when it will get shut down
| soon?
| brazukadev wrote:
| This is very true. 10 years ago I'd be one of the first to try.
| Now? Thanks, I'm good
| antiloper wrote:
| > Cross-surface Agents
|
| Nice that it's built-in, Claude Code needs an MCP for this at
| least.
|
| > User Feedback: Intuitively integrate feedback across surfaces
| and artifacts to guide and refine the agent's work.
|
| I wish they'd just let me edit the implementation plan directly
| instead of me having to explain the corrections. Claude Code has
| the same weakness. Explaining the corrections is slower than
| editing the plan manually, and it still keeps the incorrect text
| in context as well.
|
| > An Agent-First Experience: Manage multiple agents at the same
| time
|
| Sounds nice in theory but I assume you can run multiple agents
| for 5 minutes or so and then you're out of credits.
|
| As a claude code user I'm not really sold on this product.
| asgerhb wrote:
| I have lamented the fact that download buttons can be hard to
| find on software home pages sometimes. But having just a download
| button and a "more" button on your landing page seems to be
| taking things a bit too far.
| modeitsch wrote:
| the funny things is that you can use all the models but you cant
| switch the browser
| jpfromlondon wrote:
| cool, more chromium/electron slop.
| martini333 wrote:
| I cannot see any difference than VS Code with a theme...
| binsquare wrote:
| Is this what they recruited the windsurf team for a billion for?
| bjord wrote:
| heads up: it installs a persistent background process that
| silently squats on the default kafka client port (9092) at
| startup
| mike_heffner wrote:
| there went 10 mins of debugging why kafka wouldn't start
| benrutter wrote:
| Does anyone here have a take on why so many people are forking
| VSCode instead of writing a plugin? Is AI codegen the kind of
| thing that would be impoasible with a plugin or something?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Yes, it's to avoid getting bitten by any arbitrary (and
| potentially self-serving) limits Microsoft chooses to put on
| the plugin interface.
| 0x00cl wrote:
| My best guess would be that plugins are limited into what they
| can do within VSCode, and rewriting a whole IDE/Text editor
| just for AI Agent seems a lot of work.
|
| For example a while back vscode-pets[1] plugin became popular
| and tried it and noticed that the pet can only live within a
| window, whether its the explorer section or in its own panel, I
| thought it'd be more of a desktop pet that could be anywhere
| within VSCode but apparently there are limitations
| (https://github.com/tonybaloney/vscode-pets/issues/4).
|
| So my guess is that forking VSCode and customizing it that way
| is much easier to do things that you can't with a plugin while
| also not having to maintain an IDE/Text editor.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tonybaloney/vscode-pets
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Tangential I know but what a clumsy sounding name
| lunias wrote:
| I really dislike the name. Apparently: The name
| "Google Antigravity" was chosen to convey the idea of making
| the software development process more weightless.
|
| That's good because my arms were getting tired pushing code
| around in emacs everyday.
| romulofff wrote:
| Had some issues setting up with my Google account, never went
| past the setup page. Some friends faced the same problem, but
| managed to advance by skipping installing extensions. Trying that
| now to see if it works!
| TZubiri wrote:
| The problem with this whole product category is that vcs cannot
| track what was actually the source input and what was generated.
|
| If I write "float exp(float base, float exp){"
|
| Then that is the source code and the rest is generated. Mixing it
| all up is as dumb as uploading a compiled binary or bytecode to
| git.
|
| Especially annoying when you are working with other people and
| you can't tell what they actually wrote and know about.
| badenglish wrote:
| Once upon a time, all you needed to program was a compiler. Now,
| it's moving toward paying to write code. This will certainly kill
| open source
| neysofu wrote:
| All of this is entirely optional. You're free to code the "old-
| fashiond" way, if you so prefer.
| eranation wrote:
| Petty nitpick, but this sentence doesn't sound right
|
| > "Google Antigravity's Editor view offers tab autocompletion,
| natural language code commands, and a configurable, and context-
| aware configurable agent."
|
| Is it a typo or was there a reason to add configurable twice?
| chrz wrote:
| They might have made the whole thing with AI to prove you can
| make things with AI
| haritha-j wrote:
| the agent keeps giving me errors. no thanks.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I wanted to like it as a Gemini Pro subscriber who does not want
| to also pay for Claude Code, but after running Antigravity for ~
| 10 minutes, and a few back and forward exchanges I got the 'Model
| quota limit exceeded' message with no indication when it will
| reset. You get the impression that these products from Google
| (including Gemini CLI ) are just made as prototypes -- they are
| supposed to work as a demo, but Google does not actually care
| about having a working workflow with them. Claude Code on the
| other hand is an actual product that works well.
| alkonaut wrote:
| My heart really sinks every time someone launches a "new IDE" and
| it turns out to be VS Code. VSCode can be turned into an IDE for
| _some_ platforms. But not for others. It remains a text editor
| with some nice extras (syntax highlighting, navigation) but
| lacking others (debugger, testing, ...).
|
| What's most astonishing is that I can't seem to find what actual
| platforms it works for. I don't doubt the LLM's can write code in
| almost any language and for almost all frameworks, with varying
| success.
|
| But which languages/platforms/framework will the IDE work for
| technically, having compilers etc built in? I don't care if an
| LLM can help me with the code, if I then can't compile it within
| the same IDE!
|
| They have a "full stack" use case here, which doesn't even
| suggest what this stack consists of?
| https://antigravity.google/use-cases/fullstack
|
| Am I going crazy or are they just handwaving the _actual_
| development tasks in all this?
| fourseventy wrote:
| How long until they discontinue it?
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Do any white people still work at Google or has DEI gone so far
| that being white means you can't be in their marketing videos
| anymore?
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| It's fascinating to me how far they de-emphasize product
| screenshots on the website, even in the video on it. And the
| pricing page is all but blank.
|
| Really reflects how companies are prioritizing hype and adoption
| over product quality.
|
| (now off to download it...)
| eugene-kim wrote:
| Lots of commenters are simply calling this a VSCode fork and I
| think they're missing something important as far as how this
| product fits into the market.
|
| Anthropic and OpenAI are investing a _lot_ into this space and
| are now competing directly with companies like Cursor. Cursor 's
| biggest moat at the moment is their tab completion model, which
| doesn't exist in the Anthropic's and OpenAI's current offerings
| and is leagues ahead of Github Copilot's.
|
| Antigravity is a VSCode fork that adds both Google's own tab
| complete and an agent composer, similar to products like
| https://conductor.build/. Assuming that Google doesn't shoot
| themselves in the foot (which they seem to like doing), we'll see
| if wrappers like Cursor / Windsurf / Cognition can compete
| against the big labs. It's worth noting that the category seems
| to be blurring, since Cursor has trained not only their own tab
| complete model but also their own agent model.
| vimto wrote:
| Yeah I've used it today quite heavily and I genuinely feel it's
| given me the best AI workflow yet, and I say this coming from
| Jetbrains + Claude Code.
|
| Personally I felt having immediate access to the VSCode
| extension ecosystem to be a huge boon and I quickly got a setup
| to my liking.
| archon810 wrote:
| Have you tried Cursor though? To me, that is the system to
| beat.
| vimto wrote:
| I haven't no. I could be wrong but I always saw Cursor as
| more of a low-code tool whereas Claude Code + IDE as the
| more professional combo.
| archon810 wrote:
| AI integration into all aspects of the IDE is the killer
| feature of Cursor for me. Also access for $20 a month to
| every important model out there, and once you go over
| your credits, they grant you about another $25 in free
| credits and then you can work pretty much unlimited in
| Auto mode where it automatically picks the model for you.
| carabiner wrote:
| Does anyone notice that this story has had almost the same number
| of points and comments for 24 hours?
| vimto wrote:
| I've been using it today and honestly I'm impressed. I seem to be
| the exception when I say I don't care it's a vscode fork. Having
| access to the extension ecosystem seems like a boon to me and I
| could quickly get a setup to my liking to rival my current
| Jetbrains Claude Code setup.
|
| It seems to streamline my existing Claude Code workflow with a
| much better UI. The tab complete seems the best I've experienced
| and the text/image selection, adding comments and iterating on a
| plan is genius.
|
| Depressing to see everyone here unable to see the forest for the
| trees.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| I agree! It's great. Until you hit the limit, then there's
| literally no path to continue.
|
| I would happily pay 20 or whatever for 4x limits. I'm very
| curious what they end up offering. My major reservation is side
| project vibes. I think it's hard to believe on this long term
| unless Google themselves adopt it.
| vimto wrote:
| I think hitting limits is a common complaint I see across all
| the AI tools. I used it with Gemini Pro and didn't hit such
| limits.
| Huppie wrote:
| How is it compared to Cursur though?
| vimto wrote:
| I haven't used Cursor sorry.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| I've spent time with this today and I really like it.
|
| The problem is the rate limiting is both aggressive and has no
| option to pay to bypass.
|
| Also call it "antigrav". Less of a mouthful
| sauercrowd wrote:
| Comments here complaining about the fact that it's vscode seem to
| miss the point here.
|
| That's a huge advantage, it's means all the obvious stuff will
| just work. LSPs, debuggers, version control, customisation.
|
| As much as I like Emacs, it's an insane pain to make all these
| things work.
|
| If your value prop is agents on a codebase, there's no point in
| trying to reinvent those. They have basically been solved.
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