piaoyang

Why did we split the IDE from the Agent Manager? We launched Antigravity 2.0 at Google I/O a couple weeks ago. We made some bold choices and I wanted to share my thoughts... [1/4] Adapt or Die I’ve been working in the AI dev tool space for the last three years. Three years is an eternity in this space and I can confidently say that I’ve seen tools, startups, and workflows come and go. Many of the features our team helped pioneer such as autocomplete and RAG-based chat have fizzled away. Every few months there is a paradigm shift that redefines the AI developer tool landscape. Miss it, and you slowly fade into the backdrop. Time it well and you stay in the game. Invent it and you get catapulted into the spotlight. It’s a fast-paced, unforgiving industry. I love it. The team loves it. What do I mean by paradigm shifts? In the last three years, we’ve gone from: Autocomplete → Chat → Agents → Multi-Agents Each phase forced us to redefine ourselves: Codeium → Windsurf → Antigravity. The reason why I tell you this is because as painful as it is, we have to continuously evolve our products. The model and the product are increasingly synergistic. The product is only as good as the model and the model gets better with the product. AI technology moves too quickly to keep the status quo. For example, we deleted chat in Windsurf when we launched in November 2024 (x [dot] com/kevinhou22/status/1892246469303820745). It was a controversial move at the time since users only knew about chat and had never used an agent. But we trusted that the “future is agentic” and I’m glad we did not back down. My goal — our team’s goal — is to give our users the best dev tool on the market to let them build beyond their wildest dreams. To give our users the best product, the product must evolve. [2/4] Current Shift: Agents → Multi-Agents At Windsurf, we introduced the first agentic IDE. That was in November 2024. We’ve come a long way since then. Models have gotten stronger, users have gotten more tenacious, and expectations are higher than ever. It’s no longer enough to run just one agent. You are now an orchestrator of many agents: multiple conversations or agents spawning their own subagents. To bring this multi-agent paradigm to our users at Antigravity, we introduced Antigravity 1.0. Highly capable models made it possible for agents to do more complex work and work for longer. The benefit of working at a lab is seeing around the corner and molding the model to fit the product. We worked with the Gemini team for months before we felt that Antigravity was ready for prime time. On November 18, 2025, we released Antigravity 1.0 alongside Gemini 3 Pro. It had two surfaces: 1) AGY IDE 2) Agent Manager Two surfaces, bundled into one app. Some users loved both. Some only used one. Some just needed Gemini to get better. [3/4] Now: Better Models + Doubling Down Over the last 6 months, we’ve been working with the research team to help improve Gemini’s coding and agentic capabilities. We’ve also been dramatically improving our internal version of Antigravity, and as Sundar announced (youtube [dot] com/live/wYSncx9zLIU?si=8nXDk_WhvoCvx12k&t=1504), we're processing over 3 trillion tokens a day. Additional breakthroughs in model research enabled Gemini 3.5 Flash — a lightweight model at the Pareto frontier (performance vs. cost & speed). Based on internal usage, we knew there were two camps: IDE and Agent Manager (uppercase). Antigravity IDE is a great product. Good because it’s familiar. Good because you can manually edit your code. Great because of its agent. We started exporting our agent to other surfaces to build an ecosystem of tools backed by the same powerful Antigravity agent: IDE, Agent Manager, SDK, CLI. That ecosystem is what we announced on stage last week at Google I/O. But Agent Manager was pulling away. Agent Manager usage was increasing in dramatic fashion and we knew we wanted to double down on this experience. Both technical and non-technical folks are relying on Antigravity every day to not only write code, but also write docs, do competitive research, design prototypes, conduct user simulations, summarize 1:1s, learn new concepts, file expenses, the list goes on and on… So we made a bold choice to split the two surfaces into two apps. We now have two applications: 1) Antigravity: unapologetically agent-first 2) Antigravity IDE: the editor you know and love You can choose which product you want to use. You can switch between the products. Same agent, different surfaces. Now, I’ll admit we botched some details about the migration and we’re working day and night to make it right. We have plenty of exciting features in the pipeline and I’m excited for you all to get your hands on them. [4/4] Competition = Users Will Win Times are changing rapidly. AI dev tools are quickly becoming agent-first. Users are managing tens if not hundreds of agents. Antigravity 2.0 is our way of giving this power to our users. You can take a look at the competitive landscape and see this for yourself. IDE’s trying to evolve to a world where work is the product and not the code files. Labs releasing agent-first products, exploiting the model <> product synergies. Users spending more and more time and tokens in agent managers (lowercase). Antigravity Agent Manager (uppercase) might’ve been first, but ideas are cheap these days. The leader will not necessarily be the winner and products + models will be constantly evolving to meet growing expectations. Ultimately, users will win. — I want Google Antigravity to be the place where developers build. I also want Antigravity to be the place for knowledge work to get done. Code is becoming an implementation detail. People from all walks of life are and will use code to solve their problems, without necessarily knowing they are “coding”. Antigravity is at the frontier and will continue to innovate for you. Thanks for helping shape the future of the product. Keep the feedback coming. More soon.