During the launch of the Gemini 3 model in November 2025, Google quietly dropped one of the most important developer tools – Antigravity. With the integrated AI horsepower, the Mountain View giant is making a clear play to reclaim the developer desktop. However, it faces major competition with Cursor, especially with the recently introduced version 2.0.

Cursor has spent the last year perfecting the AI-native interface that feels like an extension of the brain rather than a plugin for a search company.

AI-first IDE vs. Agent-first platform

A major difference

When I first opened Google’s Antigravity, it felt like a high-tech command center. I had a Manager View (more on that in a minute), a number of agents, and a dashboard tracking ‘Implementation Progress.’ It was impressive, sure – but it was also a reminder of why I’m not quitting Cursor yet.

In Antigravity, the workflow is top-down. I give a prompt, and the system goes into ‘Planning Mode.’ It researches, uses sub-agents, and asks me to review a four-page ‘Action Plan.’ By the time I have finished auditing the agent’s logic, I could have just written the feature myself.

I don’t want to be a middle manager for an AI. On the flip side, Cursor understands the inner loop. The AI lives in my tab key and my sidebar. There is no context switching to a manager dashboard. I stay in the file, logic, and in the flow.

Google wants to move the developer to the outer loop, where we just oversee the construction. But that’s a dangerous bet.

Antigravity makes me feel like I’m supervising an intern. Cursor makes me feel like I have a second brain wired directly into my IDE. As long as I’m the one responsible for the production bug at 2 AM, I would much rather work with Cursor than Antigravity, where I deal with a fleet of agents I don’t quite trust.

Speed and predictability

Cursor is a mature platform

Google’s Antigravity feels futuristic – exciting, shiny, and experimental. But Cursor feels like a mature weapon. In Antigraviry, everything is heavy. When the agent starts thinking, I can actually feel the input lag in my cursor.

Cursor, on the other hand, is built for the 30-second win. While Antigravity is still planning its research, Cursor’s local RAG has already indexed my entire repo in the background. It knows my types, naming conventions, and my messy helper utils before I even finish the prompt.

Let’s be honest: Antigravity is currently a collection of brilliant ideas trapped in a buggy shell. I have had sidebar icons vanish, extensions break the entire editor, and basic arrow-key navigation fail during an agent run.

It's not Google's fault

I’m not blaming Google here. Even Cursor has had early-adopter issues. But with version 2.0, it looks and feels mature and has moved past all those annoying glitches.

My biggest gripe with Antigravity has been the reliability. I tried building a Learning Management System (LMS) in Antigravity, and it crashed multiple times.

The AI agent shut down due to errors, and I had to intervene, restart conversations, and add prompts to continue. In comparison, Cursor successfully generated a working project with far fewer issues.

Cursor creates the entire project structure and code, and allows the developer to step away and come back to a finished product. Antigravity requires constant manual effort to accept different tasks. You have to sit through implementation plans. Such micromanagement defeats the purpose of vibe-coding.

Even in terms of debugging and error handling, I found Cursor outshining Antigravity. During my testing, when an error occurred, Cursor analyzed it, identified the root cause in the logic, and fixed it across multiple files.

Cursor’s cult

Reason behind a huge following

Looking at Google’s past, its strategy with Antigravity seems predictable. The search giant would bundle it with Google Cloud credits, make it the official IDE of the Workspace ecosystem, and give it away for free to every student. The approach is similar to what we have seen with Microsoft Teams.

Then there is Cursor. Nobody forced me to use Cursor. In fact, I went out of my way to download it, migrate my extensions, and enter my credit card info for $20 per month.

Also, when I’m on X or in a Discord thread, I see developers boasting Cursor moments – those instances where the AI predicted five steps of a refactor perfectly. It feels like a secret connection among people who actually enjoy shipping code.

The unbeatable underdog

At the end of the day, Google is a search company that happens to build tools, while Cursor is a tool company that happens to use AI. Make no mistake, Antigravity will surely find its way into the enterprise stack – bundled into Workspace or pushed through cloud credits – but it will have a hard time winning developers' hearts.

Of course, Antigravity is still in the early stages, and I can’t wait to see how quickly Google addresses all the developer feedback. If you're still stuck with Microsoft’s VS Code, I highly recommend trying out the latest Cursor v2.