Google is a company that has an app for almost everything, pretty much like Microsoft. It offers the same suite of office apps as Sheets, Docs, Slides, and more. Google Drive takes the place of OneDrive, Google Cloud is an Azure alternative, and Gemini easily beats Copilot on the AI front. Google has always been an all-in-one company, but for the longest time, it didn’t have an IDE. I was always surprised that the search giant never built anything to go up against VS Code or newer forks like Cursor. Turns out they finally did, with something called Antigravity. Google describes it as “an agentic development platform, evolving the IDE into the agent-first era”. I tested these big claims, and it turns out they actually hold up.

Antigravity isn’t just another VS Code fork

It's a lot more than that

When you open Antigravity for the first time, it feels familiar enough that you know where everything is. That’s because Google built it on top of VS Code’s open-source base. You still get the usual editor layout, IntelliSense, tab completions, a terminal, and all the classic bits you depend on. The difference shows up once you meet the agent manager.

Think of this Manager view as a control room. You spin up a server, launch agents, and watch each one tackle its own task without waiting for anything else you are doing. You can keep writing code while an agent plans, edits files, runs tests, or even browses the web to gather context. VS Code with Copilot doesn’t give you that kind of freedom. You type a prompt, wait for it to finish, and then move on. It’s a one-track workflow, and you feel that limitation as soon as you switch to Antigravity.

What also stands out is how Antigravity handles task context. Instead of a messy chat log, you get something closer to a project tracker. Each task produces a plan and a set of artifacts. When an agent finishes, it hands you a clear report. It might say it modified three files, ran two tests, and attached a screenshot of the output. Everything the agent touched is laid out for you. Copilot can generate code or comments, but it will not autonomously test your changes or wrap everything into a clean summary.

This structure is what makes Antigravity feel like more than an assistant. You can run multiple agents at the same time and let them attack different problems in parallel. One might refactor a component while another handles API tests, all while you continue coding elsewhere.

Antigravity’s AI features aren’t just a gimmick

I actually found the AI features to be useful

A lot of tools slap “AI-powered” on the box without doing anything meaningful with it. Antigravity isn’t one of those. Google ships it with Gemini 3 Pro by default, and it can switch to other models like Claude Sonnet 4.5 or OpenAI’s GPT-OSS. This matters because Gemini’s context window is huge. It can look at millions of tokens at once, which gives it room to understand entire projects instead of single files. Copilot is great for line-level help, but its context is nowhere near this scale. That shows up in real use. Gemini tends to handle full-file rewrites, architecture-level understanding, and long refactors with more confidence.

All of this feeds into how Antigravity’s agents work. You hand them a goal, and they build a plan. You can check the plan before anything runs, then watch the agent write code, update multiple files, run tests, and verify behavior. Copilot’s newer Workspaces feature gets close in spirit, but you still end up steering every move. It produces ideas, but it doesn’t execute workflows on its own.

Google also treats these agents as real parts of the workspace. They’re not squeezed into a chat sidebar. The Manager view shows you each agent’s progress in real time. You get artifacts like screenshots, task plans, and session logs that feel built into the editor instead of bolted on. There’s even a voice and CLI companion if you prefer working from the terminal.

What you don’t get is the full VS Code marketplace. Antigravity defaults to Open VSX instead of Microsoft’s official registry. Most common extensions install without trouble, but the Microsoft-only ones refuse to load. You can point Antigravity to the VS Code marketplace manually, though even then, some extensions won’t install because they check for a valid VS Code license. Language servers, linters, themes, and Git tools work fine. Things like the C# Dev Kit either break or require community forks.

VS Code still has its place

All of this doesn’t mean you need to ditch VS Code. It has grown far beyond a simple editor. VS Code has become an open-source platform with countless ways to extend its capabilities. If you already rely on it, you can keep pushing it further with tools that sharpen your workflow, improve navigation, automate repetitive tasks, or help you learn better coding habits. You can even self-host a VS Code fork and access it in your browser.