It’s no secret that Visual Studio Code has been the undisputed king of my development workflow. It serves as the reliable, extensible hub for every project I have tackled. So, when Google launched Antigravity, I viewed it less as a potential replacement and more as an ambitious experiment.
However, after integrating it into my daily routine, the results were far more surprising than I anticipated. Let me break down the transition: where Antigravity outshines the gold standard of VS Code, and where it still feels like a work in progress for a professional setup.
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Moving from Copilot to Manager
When the agent takes the wheel
My workflow with VS Code has been pretty straightforward. I write the logic, and when I get stuck or bored, I nudge the AI to finish the function. In comparison, Google’s Antigravity takes a totally different approach. Instead of me writing code, I’m issuing high-level directives and watching an autonomous agent attempt to execute them across multiple files.
At first, it feels like magic — until you realize that being a manager is often more exhausting than just doing the work yourself (more on that later).
In VS Code, I’m in a flow of state, my fingers moving as fast as I can think. In Antigravity, that flow is replaced by a weird kind of cognitive overhead. I’m not coding in the traditional sense; I am reviewing, auditing, and course-correcting.
It’s a major shift from creating to supervising.
Antigravity is automated but slower
Requires some amount of babysitting
The weirdest thing about using a tool that’s supposed to be autonomous is how much it actually needs you to hold its hand. I went into this thinking I would finally be able to offload the grunt work and focus on the big-picture architecture.
In my usual VS Code setup, if I want to change a variable name or move a component, I just do it. It’s a split-second action. In Antigravity, because the agent is doing heavy lifting, every sub-task it performs comes with a prompt for approval.
I would ask it to refactor a module, and suddenly I’m hit with five or six Accept/Reject buttons in a row.
On the surface, Antigravity is brilliant. It is technically doing the work, but I’m spending more time validating its choices than I would have spent just typing the code myself.
After a while, I was tired from the sheer volume of micro-decisions I had to make just to keep the agent moving forward.
Stability and performance
VS Code wins here
When it comes to daily workflow, the two most important things for me are stability and speed. On paper, both tools are impressive – Antigravity’s cloud-native power is undeniable, and VS Code’s years of refinement make it a heavyweight.
Antigravity is surprisingly snappy for a tool that’s doing so much heavy lifting in the background (and the one that was launched only a couple of months ago). When it works, it feels like the future; the way it indexes a massive codebase without turning on my laptop sound is impressive.
But that performance comes with a catch: it’s unpredictable. There were a couple of instances where I ran into the ‘Agent terminated’ error. It’s a total momentum killer. One minute, I’m watching the future of AI-assisted coding, and the next, I’m staring at a crash report.
VS Code, on the other hand, is rock solid. I have pushed it to its absolute limits with dozens of extensions and multiple live-server instances running at once, and it just works.
It doesn’t have the same flashiness as Antigravity, but its performance is consistent. I know exactly how it’s going to behave every time I hit a keyboard shortcut.
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Debugging is challenging
Where the AI blindspot hits hard
One of the biggest selling points for Antigravity is its multimodal debugging — it can look at your code, terminal, and even browser simultaneously to figure out why things are breaking.
In reality, I found that when the logic gets messy, the AI can get into trouble. I had a situation where a simple race condition was causing a frontend glitch.
My manual VS Code debugger showed me exactly where the state was lagging. Antigravity’s agent, however, got stuck in a circular loop.
From bloated to blazing
Make no mistake, VS Code remains a powerhouse of versatility and community support. However, Antigravity has proven that there is still room for innovation in how we interact with our code and environments. The shocking part of this experiment is that it made my previous workflow feel dated.
It may not be the perfect fit for every developer or every project just yet, but the efficiency and speed it delivers are too significant to overlook. So, what are you waiting for? Set up a small project, test out its AI-driven features, and see if it changes your workflow as much as it did mine.
Cursor is another robust IDE out there. Check out our dedicated post if you are confused between Cursor and Antigravity.