Google's Antigravity bait and switch • Hacker News Board

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#261

Post by locusofself » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:44 PM UTC

karussell wrote: post #258

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

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#262

Post by easton » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:45 PM UTC

karussell wrote: post #258

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

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

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#263

Post by Andrex » Thu, May 21, 2026, 10:57 PM UTC

poly2it wrote: post #259

Andrex wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is talking up a new "Neural AI" design language that seems to just be for their in-house Gemini-related apps. Possibly what the new Antigrav is using? We don't know if this is Material 4.0, just Google's proprietary design, or really anything.

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

D'oh. Thanks.

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#264

Post by hunterpayne » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

Sevii wrote: post #2

How did Google blow their AI lead? Why is Google the 2nd or 3rd tier player in the AI coding market? Why can't GCP supplant AWS? Because google can't help but constantly shoot its customers and itself in the foot.

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#265

Post by TacticalCoder » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

karussell wrote: post #258

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notice the dash?

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

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#266

Post by ceheaaf » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#267

Post by Nifty3929 » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:28 PM UTC

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

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#268

Post by manyatoms » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:29 PM UTC

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

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#269

Post by sdeiley » Thu, May 21, 2026, 11:31 PM UTC

Tenoke wrote: post #203

knollimar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No compacting?????????

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

It does auto compact

Re: Google's Antigravity bait and switch

#270

Post by jim33442 » Fri, May 22, 2026, 12:03 AM UTC

htrp wrote: post #237

postalcoder wrote: post #24

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…

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

All I know is internally they were recommending people use Gemini CLI until they switched to recommending Jetski/Windsurf CLI. Even before that, I could tell Jetski was way ahead, but still people from Gemini CLI were trying to convince me to use it.