What is Google Antigravity, and how does it differ from traditional coding tools?

What is Google Antigravity?
Google Antigravity is an artificial intelligence (AI) based integrated development environment (IDE) created and released by Google, published in its public preview on November 18, 2025, when its Gemini 3 AI model was released. It is built like an agent-first system that takes software development out of human-based coding and allocates it to the coordination of autonomous AI agents. Antigravity is an open-source, free desktop app based on Visual Studio Code, and has no rate limitations on its main model, the entry-level Gemini 3 Pro. It also allows third-party models such as the Claude Sonnet 4.5 provided by Anthropic and open-source versions of the GPT models of OpenAI, allowing developers to select on a case by case basis depending on task requirements.

Primarily, Antigravity lets developers entrust AI agents with multi-step or multi-system debugging or web interface testing functions, that is, creating an entire application, debugging several systems, or testing web interfaces. These agents are asynchronous on integrated surfaces: a customary code editor, a terminal to run the command and a browser (through a Chrome extension) to do real-world testing. The agents also plan, execute and self-review their work, which are used to generate Artifacts such as task lists, implementation plans, screenshots, browser recordings, and test logs unlike passive AI assistants. This forms a verifiable audit trail, which builds trust without inundating users with raw logs or even tool calls.

The platform has two major interfaces:

• Editor View: A code-like familiar experience where agents write code and communicate with your codebase.

• Agent Manager View: This is a kind of a mission control dashboard that is used to monitor multiple agents, view Artifacts, and interfere as necessary.

Google presents Antigravity as one of the milestones in developing an agentic future, in which humans will be coders-in-chief or supervisors but not the actual coder. It is experimental but already in application in cases such as creating complete apps with prompting or end-to-end testing automation.

How Does It Differ from Traditional Coding Tools?

The traditional tools of a code code, such as IDEs like Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ or even simple text editors with extensions, are more of a humanistic nature: they include syntax highlighting, debugging, version control, extensions to improve productivity, but the developer is still fully in charge of planning, writing and verifying code. Improvements to AI in these (e.g. GitHub Copilot or rudimentary autocomplete) commonly happen in a reactive way, i.e., who propose snippets on-demand but do not deliver end-to-end workflows independently.

Antigravity, in its turn, is constructed on the basis of proactive, independent AI agent and this does add few important differences:

Google Antigravity is fundamentally different with software development in relation to traditional coding software. In contrast to the human-first core paradigm of classic IDEs (where all tasks are initiated by the developer and all capabilities of the AI are restricted to reactive processes such as code completion), Antigravity is designed as an agent-first platform, where autonomous AI agents are allowed to plan and execute whole tasks on their own. Independence will go beyond mere proposals to entire workflows of all three in the editor, terminal and the live browser. Checking becomes not test-running but immediate automated Artifacts (screenshots, videos, and logs) verification to have a quick look of trust building. Integration is non-silos as well as unified rather than siloed, and multi-agent support is no longer a poor set of team tools but a formidable dashboard of orchestrating special agents acting concurrently. Workflows are asynchronous and agents are working on their own as you look over their shoulder, but model customizations are no longer limited by single-ecosystem lock-in (such as Copilot) to the freedom to select a Gemini 3 Pro, Claude, or open-source GPT model per task. Simply stated, old technology enhances the coder; Antigravity allows AI to do the driving as you do the vision.