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Google's Antigravity bait and switch

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Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#342

Google made its lack of interest in Antigravity IDE obvious from very early. Updates were few and far between and app-breaking bugs stuck around, despite tons of reports. Google's lack of focus is astounding. They sprinkle random products here and there and seem to then tepidly pick the product surface that is doing least bad and then tepidly focus on that. Compare that to every other AI lab, large and small that kno…

> Google's lack of focus is astounding. As the sayinig goes, companies' products reflect their org charts. Google is too top heavy. Each leader wants to expand his/her fiefdom, aka empire building. They'll ship random shit and if it doesn't stick, just drop it and move on. Google needs someone senior internally who represents users; whose sole job is to look at things from their users' viewpoint and call out BS when…

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#343
post #327

"We should be able to trust that our tools will remain the tools we actually signed up to use." Yep... well that's what free software and open-source is for. You can't trust corporations so you MUST have the actual code. Harsh lesson but at least if something is learned and the mistake not repeated, that's OK.

You have the source to everything you use in life right? You can make your own car, patrol, shampoo, grow your own food, build your own house, wire your own electricity (and generate it), can switch to having your own reserve of drinking water anytime and plumb it, etc. Nothing against you personally but that kind of logic is getting old. I get it that you don't trust corporations but asserting it like open source pr…

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

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

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

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#344
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

be proud of your own imitative, not thankful for the boot to the ass. Google did nothing to help you , but your response to the dire situation is to be commended.

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#345
post #227
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jules is still alive. https://jules.google.com

Which somewhat ironically can import from github but not directly from aistudio.. It's a little crazy they still depend on microsoft as an intermediate between all their tools.

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#346
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetski/Antigravity is a better piece of software. The Gemini CLI codebase looks like someone tried to vibe-code a Claude code clone in nodeJS, as it's simply not maintainable. That being said, until recently Gemini CLI was better. It had support for persistent policies on what code could run without asking and had good extension hooks to allow you write extensions that influence policy (to perform complex logic like…

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

Nobody is getting rewarded for reinventing the wheel.

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#348

> The 2.0 update, it turns out, aggressively rewrites the default application paths to the point where it's impossible, at the time of writing, to have both versions of Antigravity installed and functioning at the same time. Maybe it’s an OS difference but on my Mac when the new crappy antigravity updated, I got a very helpful dialog box explaining the changes and offering to download and install Antigravity IDE. Of…

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

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

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