Google's Antigravity Bait and Switch(0xsid.com) |
Google's Antigravity Bait and Switch(0xsid.com) |
Gemini CLI was fun for five minutes of testing until it tried to rewrite my whole code base.
Edit: I forgot to mention the curiosity and humility they bring to our calls. If I point out another vendors approach to a problem that we have, they always lean in and want to help improve their offerings from our feedback. They know it's not just enough to "be Google".
This is a huge surprise, never thought I would see this in my life time.
It seems like Google is hitting the reset button on the product they call "Antigravity", existing users be damned. Fine, if you've never installed or used the previous version before... but for existing users the "bait and switch" is incredibly disorientating.
My take is they saw the market size for a general agentic tool as being larger and more significant than a specialised IDE. It shows a pretty large lack of respect for users in the later group though.
Hot take: At least they're ripping the bandaid now instead of stringing users along and eventually abandoning it like they normally do.
Uhhh, about that :)
Gemini CLI (the open source cli) is being deprecated, and the recommended replacement is Antigravity CLI (which supposedly comes with the new Antigravity, not the IDE). shrug. Surely this will be maintained long term...
https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transi...
No wonder they are losing massively to Huawei in several markets. Mobile marketshare is probably an indicator of some kind of their future prospects.
I don't like Google either, but I don't think this is a fair comparison.
It's easy for anyone to beat Google in China when the state has decided to block their servers.
Your coding environment stands a lower chance of disrupion when you use an open source IDE with a CLI agent. Yes it's slightly annoying to separate the agent from the IDE but the benefit is that it's much easier to switch between Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI (now antigravity CLI), etc which means you can more easily benefit from pricing and coding performance differences which seem to change monthly.
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 knows its identity and shaped its products around that.
Perhaps it's a sort of resource curse. Google doesn't need any one of these products to succeed, and it shows.
Because google can't help but constantly shoot its customers and itself in the foot.
What lead? Maybe because I'm mostly using AI/LLMs for development, but neither Google, Anthropic, xAI or anyone else has ever been in the lead, OpenAI always had the best models in my mind, as long as you're comparing the "top" plans between all of them.
Besides, they all seem to shoot themselves in the foot, OpenAI included, seems the only thing that differs is how often and how big the damage is.
Cursor still supports both the IDE and the Agents window, open at the same time, in the same project. I frequently use both and switch back and forth between them. They also link to each other from the top bar and right-click context menus so you can switch to one or the other seamlessly. Best of both worlds. Switch back to Cursor.
So much for AI getting cheaper.
For now, that's DeepSeek: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ (they have a discount until the end of the month, even after that they will have pretty good prices)
Or GLM or Kimi, Mistral is also surprisingly passable. Or just have to open the wallet and give money to OpenAI or Anthropic for the subsidized tokens.
> Google Enterprise accounts are sunsetting AI Ultra in favor of consumption based pricing at the end of the month.
This whole thing feels a bit like what GitHub did with Copilot, though.
Google could easily A/B test half of their users away from their products and nobody would get fired for it
This was clearly an experiment or stepping stone, they were never going to stick to this path. It was always going to go away.
The problem with AI products vs other rent-seeking is that AI is very expensive to build out and run… so they are desperate to push you into relying on it quickly.
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 course I did so and both run happily at the same time. Well, they did the one time I launched both, but now I’m back to just using the IDE.
Recently I started to get harassed to upgrade. Big button in gmail, large notifications on top of my mail in the mobile app etc. Also two other buttons to get me to turn on AI features I don't need.
I already pay a lot, I don't want to pay double just not to be harassed.
Having buttons to features that I would have to pay extra for is one thing. But having notifications and large buttons to upgrade when I am already a paying customer is harassment.
Overall the experience was pretty bad for what is expected from them and I'm wondering what the thought process behind this is, I dislike this single prompt box review workflow and is a reason I don't use any of the tui stuff and it's odd that they are leaning so hard to mimic CC when others like cursor are embracing the same workflow but still sculpting around the code. I want to edit as I'm working and have access to all my normal tools and fragmenting my work to this new vision and a separate text editor defeats the point.
For now I'll probably switch to using it as a fallback when I've exhausted my quota elsewhere and start to rely on it less before the next rug pull when I wake up and the IDE is gone. Aside, Gemini has been surprisingly good and I really liked their take on the implementation and review workflow.
LPT: You can get to prod faster by skipping the step where it tells you anything.
I have to reenable a “Classic UI” plugin to fix it. This is annoying enough, but if they did something like the OP’s experience they’d lose a paying customer of 14 years overnight.
IDEs aren’t social media apps- they’re tools. Familiarity is not just important, it is VITAL.
--someone important
So just restore it from your repo.
Will they make it work headless before the June deadline when they turn off gemini-cli? I guess we'll see...
Edit: Probably the high end non apple market in nearly all African countries too, but idk if there is reliable data for those.
We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, I don't think one party is more responsible than someone else, unless you're specifically involved with the specific technology, then you can attribute it to them.
So yes, Google's researchers might have invented the Transformer, but OpenAI researchers invented GPT. Does it matter we credit "LLMs" more to one than the other? I don't think so, especially in this context it's highly irrelevant. Google didn't have the "LLM lead" before LLMs even existed...
As opposed to the usual, figurative sarcasm. (Just kidding.)
Also, if we're going backwards, who invented neural networks, does that mean that person also then "had LLMs before OpenAI existed"?
Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".
(on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)
Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).
and what is the metric for companies sending you messages, like I have never gotten a single message (aside from one/two companies here and there and I even made a HN post about one of the companies)
and what do these companies really have a metric for in terms of sending spam for? karma points, I mean emsh I remember we both had close enough about the same karmas not too long ago, surprised to see you at 13k+ karma, so good to see that but is the metric karma, hype (you had made the rust browser ..) or what exactly? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that!
I do understand the point of these companies sending mail though, I mean I can't say that if I had a company at the moment I might not do the same either, but I think that you might get frustrated too with it, so what would your recommendation be to people sending you mails in general?
I would be curious to know that too!
We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.