Google Antigravity: The Agent-First Development Platform That’s Changing How We Code

The landscape of AI-powered development tools has exploded in recent years. We’ve gone from simple code completion to sophisticated chat assistants, but there’s been a fundamental limitation: these tools still require you to be the orchestrator. You’re constantly switching contexts, managing prompts, and manually guiding the AI through each step.

Enter Google Antigravity*—a radical new approach that flips the script. Instead of being an assistant that helps you code faster, Antigravity is a *platform that lets you delegate entire development tasks to autonomous agents while you focus on higher-level problems.

What is Google Antigravity?

Google Antigravity is an agentic development platform that combines a familiar AI-powered editor with a revolutionary “Manager Surface” where you can deploy agents that work autonomously across your entire development environment.

At its core, Antigravity reimagines what an AI coding tool should be. Rather than being a chatbot in a sidebar, agents get their own dedicated workspace where they can:

• Plan complex multi-step tasks
• Execute code changes across editors, terminals, and browsers
• Verify their work through tangible deliverables
• Communicate progress transparently

The platform launched in public preview in November 2025 and is completely free for individual developers. It supports macOS, Windows, and Linux, with flexible model options including Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-OSS.

The Two-Face Interface: Editor View vs. Manager Surface

Antigravity introduces a dual-mode workflow that adapts to how you want to work:

Editor View: Your Familiar AI-Powered IDE

When you need hands-on control, Editor View gives you a state-of-the-art IDE with:

• Tab completions that understand your codebase context
• Inline commands for quick transformations
• Real-time collaboration with AI assistance
• Full editor functionality (syntax highlighting, debugging, etc.)

This is your traditional IDE experience—only smarter. The AI understands your entire codebase and provides context-aware suggestions as you type.

Manager Surface: Where the Magic Happens

This is Antigravity’s killer feature. The Manager Surface is a dedicated interface where you:

1. Spawn multiple agents working on different tasks simultaneously
2. Define high-level goals like “Implement user authentication” or “Fix the memory leak in API module”
3. Watch agents work across different workspaces asynchronously
4. Review artifacts instead of parsing through logs
5. Provide feedback directly on deliverables without interrupting workflow

The shift is profound: you become a manager, not a coder-in-the-loop.

Artifacts: Verify Work, Not Watch It Happen

One of Antigravity’s most elegant solutions is Artifacts—tangible deliverables that agents produce instead of raw tool calls. Instead of scrolling through thousands of lines of terminal output and API responses, you get:

• Screenshots showing UI changes
• Browser recordings demonstrating functionality
• Task lists with completion status
• Implementation plans with trade-off analysis
• Test results and performance metrics

If something looks off, you can comment directly on the Artifact (like Google Docs comments), and the agent will incorporate your feedback without stopping its execution. This creates a natural review cycle that builds trust over time.

Figure 1: The Artifact panel provides visual verification of agent work instead of raw logs.

Skills: Plug-and-Play Agent Capabilities

Antigravity’s ecosystem includes 300+ specialized skills that give agents domain expertise. Think of skills as pre-packaged knowledge and workflows for specific tasks.

Popular skill categories include:

• Python/JavaScript/TypeScript expertise (language-specific patterns and best practices)
• Kubernetes & Cloud (deployment, scaling, infrastructure as code)
• Security auditing (SAST, vulnerability scanning, hardening)
• Testing strategies (unit tests, E2E patterns, TDD workflows)
• Architecture design (C4 diagrams, microservices, API design)
• CI/CD automation (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI patterns)

You install skills to your project (`.agent/skills/`) or globally (`~/.gemini/antigravity/skills/`), and Antigravity automatically activates the right skills based on your task description.

For example:

• “Help me design a REST API” → activates `api-design-principles` + `backend-architect`
• “Review this PR for security” → activates `security-auditor` + `security-scanning`
• “Scaffold a FastAPI project” → activates `python-scaffold`

Figure 2: The Skills panel allows you to install domain-specific capabilities for your agents.

How Antigravity Compares to Cursor and GitHub Copilot

Let’s be clear: Antigravity isn’t trying to be a better version of Cursor or Copilot. It’s playing a different game entirely.

GitHub Copilot: The AI Pair Programmer

Copilot is fantastic at:

• Inline code completion
• Quick chat-assisted fixes
• Explaining code snippets
• Working within your current context

But it’s still fundamentally an assistant that requires you to drive. You write the code, and Copilot helps along the way. For complex, multi-file features or cross-cutting concerns, you’re still doing the orchestration.

Antigravity wins when: You need to delegate whole features, bug fixes, or refactors that span multiple files, tools, and even environments (like “implement this feature, test it in the browser, and write documentation”).

Cursor: The AI-First Editor

Cursor has evolved into a powerful agentic editor with features like:

• Autonomous coding agents
• Codebase-wide understanding
• Multi-model support (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini)
• Deep editor integration

Cursor’s “autonomy slider” lets you choose between tab completion and full agentic mode. It’s the closest competitor to Antigravity in spirit.

The key differences:

| Feature | Cursor | Antigravity |
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