Google Antigravity: The Agent-First IDE is Another Signal of a Profound Shift in Software Development and Work Itself
Google has launched Antigravity, but it's not the physics-defying device the name might suggest. Instead, it's something potentially more transformative: an agent-first coding environment that fundamentally reimagines who—or what—sits at the center of software development.
To understand just how profound this shift really is, consider this: a coding IDE designed for software development was recently used to practice law—and it did so with stunning competence.
On November 19, 2025, Sam Harden of Legal Tech School published a video titled "Bunny vs. Fudd: Practicing Law in Google Antigravity" that demonstrates something remarkable. Instead of asking Antigravity to write Python scripts, Harden treated the AI agent like a junior associate and assigned it a fictional but legally complex case: Bugs Bunny v. Elmer Fudd.
What happened next reveals why this technology represents a change in kind, not just degree.
The Antigravity agent didn't just follow templates. It:
- Independently researched Florida's local court rules for Hillsborough County—without being prompted to do so
- Drafted a complete civil complaint for the 13th Judicial Circuit with proper venue, damages formatting, and jurisdiction
- Applied specific facts (Bugs Bunny's burrow, Elmer Fudd's explosives) to the actual legal elements of Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, False Imprisonment, and Negligence under Florida law
- Generated comprehensive discovery documents: interrogatories asking about Fudd's "understanding of Wabbit Season," requests for production demanding shipping records from the Acme Corporation, and requests for admission including whether Fudd "referred to Plaintiff as a 'Wascally Wabbit'"
The agent correctly identified Acme Corporation as a potential liability source without being told. It properly structured legal elements like "awareness of confinement" for false imprisonment claims. It followed procedural rules for Florida Circuit Court jurisdiction.
As Harden concluded: "Honestly, I'm kind of astonished at how good this is... This is not the intended use case for Antigravity, the code editor... but I'm kind of flummoxed by this."
According to Dazza, this example perfectly illustrates the core thesis: when you give an agent access to the same tools and operating environment that a human worker would have in their context—whether that's an IDE for a developer or research tools for a lawyer—you create a change in kind, not degree.
The agent isn't just autocompleting. It's:
- Researching context-specific rules and constraints
- Planning multi-step workflows autonomously
- Executing across multiple tools and surfaces
- Producing artifacts that demonstrate its reasoning
This is what Dazza means by "agents running agents" and why it paints the shape of the future. The paradigm isn't "AI helping humans do their jobs"—it's AI doing jobs while humans orchestrate, verify, and govern.
Dazza is currently in the middle of moving core-business multi-agent systems over to GPT-5.1 Agent Mode and now Antigravity agent mode, getting remarkable results. The key, according to Dazza, is abstracting what labor is, what management is, and what executive leadership is—then mapping those abstractions to agent capabilities, orchestration layers, and human governance roles. Early experiments are producing outcomes that would have seemed impossible just months ago.
When a "coding IDE" can practice law at the level of a competent junior associate—not because it was designed for law, but because it was designed for agentic work in general—we're witnessing the emergence of truly general-purpose autonomous systems. The legal domain is just one example. The same architecture applies anywhere humans work with tools, information, and structured processes.
Google Antigravity is a desktop agentic development platform that combines a VS Code-style IDE with an agent manager and browser control surface. Built around Gemini 3 Pro, it also supports other models like Claude Sonnet 4.5 and OpenAI's GPT-OSS.[The Verge]
According to Dazza, this represents a profound architectural shift: we're moving from human-at-the-IDE to agent-at-the-IDE. Instead of AI tools assisting human developers, Antigravity positions agents as the primary operators, with humans orchestrating and verifying their work.
Rather than offering a single assistant sidebar, Antigravity lets you orchestrate multiple agents with direct control over:
- The editor – files, refactors, tests[The Verge]
- The terminal – commands, tools, build scripts[VentureBeat]
- A Chromium/Chrome surface – running and testing web apps, clicking, filling forms[Simon Willison's Weblog]
Google explicitly positions Antigravity as the home base for software development in the era of agents, with four design principles: trust, autonomy, feedback, and self-improvement.[VentureBeat]
A dashboard-like "mission control" where you define agents, assign tasks, and monitor progress across projects.[The Verge]
A familiar VS Code-like IDE with tab completion, inline code edits, and an agent panel for planning, refactoring, testing, and running code.[The Verge]
Browser integration allowing agents to open your app, interact with it, take screenshots, and run end-to-end tests directly from Antigravity.[Simon Willison's Weblog]
Structured, human-readable "receipts" of agent actions—task lists, implementation plans, walkthrough reports, screenshots, and browser recordings. These are designed to be easier to audit than raw tool-call logs.[The Verge]
Dazza sees artifacts as a critical governance innovation: they provide the "necessary and sufficient" evidence trail that regulators, auditors, and enterprise governance teams need to trust autonomous systems.
- First-class support: Gemini 3 Pro (including Deep Think mode)[blog.google]
- Also supports: Claude Sonnet 4.5 and OpenAI GPT-OSS[VentureBeat]
- Currently free in public preview with generous rate limits on Gemini 3 Pro[Google Antigravity]
Desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux.[The Verge] Early reports indicate it's currently limited to personal @gmail.com accounts; Workspace accounts often fail authentication.[Hacker News]
- Use a personal Gmail account (not Workspace) due to current restrictions[Hacker News]
- Download the desktop client from the official Antigravity site[Google Antigravity]
- Sign in and grant permissions for file access, terminal access, and browser extension
- Connect repositories – open a local repo or create a new project; agents will call into Git, package managers, and test runners via the terminal[Geeky Gadgets]
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Create a workspace/project – open a folder and pick or infer your tech stack
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Define agents – examples include:
- "Builder" – implements features and fixes tests
- "Reviewer" – performs PR-style review
- "Researcher" – queries documentation and APIs
The Agent Manager lets you configure each agent's role, tools (editor/terminal/browser), and model.[Geeky Gadgets]
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Describe tasks at the artifact level – for example: "Add a REST endpoint to generate a legal risk report and surface it in the dashboard"
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Let agents execute – the Builder agent edits files, runs tests, and exercises the UI via the browser. You see live logs and diffs and can pause or redirect at any time.[The Verge]
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Review artifacts – check implementation plans, walkthrough reports, and test results. Leave comments that feed back into agent execution.[VentureBeat]
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Commit and push – use built-in Git integration with context-aware commit messages[Geeky Gadgets]
The consensus: "This looks like a VS Code fork / Cursor clone at first glance, but actually has some novel ideas (artifacts, multi-surface design, browser integration)." It's positioned as Google's flagship agentic coding tool competing with Cursor, Claude Code, and similar platforms.[The Verge]
Positive feedback:
- Reddit r/vibecoding: "It's not better than Cursor but it's already on the same level… unbelievably fast… breaks work into small multi-step operations and iterates."
- r/singularity users report it "squashed bugs" and revived dormant projects; multi-agent setup helpful for larger repos[Reddit]
Critical voices:
- Some Hacker News users call it "just another slop fork" and question differentiation versus existing IDE+agent setups[Hacker News]
- Simon Willison encountered "agent execution terminated due to model provider overload" errors during early testing[Simon Willison's Weblog]
Praised features:
- Very familiar VS Code-like interface for easy onboarding[The Verge]
- Multi-agent orchestration allowing specialized agents (builder, reviewer, refactorer) to work concurrently[Reddit]
- Fast response and execution for small, incremental actions[Reddit]
Reported issues:
- Authentication difficulties with Workspace accounts
- Installation getting stuck on macOS[Hacker News]
- Model-provider overload errors during early use[Simon Willison's Weblog]
According to Dazza, what makes Antigravity significant isn't just its feature set—it's the architectural philosophy. This is the shape of the future: agents orchestrating other agents, with humans in oversight and governance roles rather than as primary executors.
Google's approach addresses the critical trust problem through task-level artifacts rather than raw logs. Antigravity produces:
- Task lists
- Implementation plans
- Walkthrough reports
- Screenshots and browser recordings for verification[The Verge]
The goal is presenting "necessary and sufficient" evidence for trust without overwhelming users with low-level traces, while building in feedback hooks at every level.[VentureBeat]
Reviewers appreciate that artifacts feel closer to design documents and test reports than opaque logs.[Geeky Gadgets] Dazza views this as a crucial step toward auditable, governable AI workflows—especially important for regulated industries and enterprise environments that need to demonstrate accountability.
The Verge and others note Antigravity looks quite similar to Windsurf, which tracks with Google's acquisition of the Windsurf team and technology.[VentureBeat] Some users describe it as "Windsurf under a new skin."[Instagram]
Reddit r/vibecoding users place it "on the same level" as Cursor, with a different execution style: smaller, faster multi-step operations versus larger monolithic changes.[Reddit]
- Agent Manager + multi-surface model: Not just a sidebar but integrated agent orchestration with browser control[Simon Willison's Weblog]
- Artifacts as first-class objects rather than bolt-on log viewers[The Verge]
- Tight Gemini 3 integration while maintaining model agnosticism at the platform level[blog.google]
- Enterprise framing: VentureBeat emphasizes asynchronous workflows, team collaboration, and enterprise needs for reviewing AI-generated code[VentureBeat]
Many users describe it as "unbelievably fast" on the happy path.[Reddit] However, stability issues include:
- Model-provider overload errors during peak usage[Simon Willison's Weblog]
- Mixed experiences with slow generations and errors[VentureBeat]
- Account limitations with Workspace users[Hacker News]
Some users treat it like "smarter autocomplete" rather than exploiting the manager and browser surfaces. Guides emphasize thinking in terms of parallel agent tasks, not line-by-line code suggestions.[Geeky Gadgets]
Dazza notes this learning curve reflects the deeper paradigm shift: developers must learn to orchestrate autonomous workers rather than direct every action themselves.
Google frames Antigravity as part of a "new era of intelligence" where models excel at long-running, tool-rich, agentic tasks.[blog.google] Some coverage ties it to Google's earlier "anti-gravity" search Easter eggs, positioning this as the infrastructural successor to those gravity tricks.[Medium]
But according to Dazza, the real significance goes deeper: Antigravity represents the transition from AI-assisted development to AI-primary development. We're not just getting better autocomplete—we're fundamentally restructuring who does the work and how humans verify, govern, and guide that work.
This is agents running agents. And that, according to Dazza, is the shape of software development's future.
Key Resources:
- Official Antigravity site[Google Antigravity]
- The Verge coverage[The Verge]
- VentureBeat analysis[VentureBeat]
- Simon Willison's hands-on notes[Simon Willison's Weblog]
- Gemini 3 announcement[blog.google]