> 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
In user numbers, maybe. JetBrains is far ahead in actual developer experience though
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.
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.
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 havi…
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.
"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…
"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.
I thought you were joking until I saw the video where this is an actual quote.
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 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…
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.
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?
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.