Google Antigravity (or Agy) was first launched as an agent-first development environment in late 2025. Then, in May 2026, Google released the new Antigravity suite, comprising four surfaces:
- Antigravity 2.0 — The agent-first, intent-driven surface. For those who care about the outcomes, but not necessarily the code. It’s the modern agentic environment for builders.
- Antigravity IDE — The familiar IDE (the IDE itself is a fork of VS Code), but with all the smarts of the Antigravity harness built-in.
- Antigravity CLI — The terminal user interface (TUI) experience. This replaced the very awesome Gemini CLI.
- Antigravity SDK — For developers who want to harness the full power of Antigravity programmatically.
All these surfaces use the same Antigravity harness. They give you capabilities such as:
- Advanced multi-stage reasoning, using the latest Gemini models.
- Full repo refactoring.
- Planning, execution and evidencing.
- Agent loops and subagent swarm orchestration.
- Integration with file system and shell environment.
- Multiple useful built-in commands and subagents.
At the same time, Google announced that both Gemini Code Assist and Gemini CLI were end-of-life. And indeed, unless you happened to run inside an organisation that had paid for enterprise licenses, these products got turned off in June 2026.
The Worry
Gemini CLI was great. I was gutted to see it go. But Antigravity CLI was a worthy replacement, and it was immediately available. So we made the switch, and we were happy.
But what about the death of Gemini Code Assist? If you’re not familiar with this tool: it was the Gemini agent that you could install as an extension into your favourite IDE, like VS Code or IntelliJ. The agent ran in a side panel, fully-integrated with your IDE.
Then Google told us:
“Gemini Code Assist is dead. But don’t worry. For all you coders out there, just switch to Antigravity IDE. It feels like VS Code and you get the Gemini Code Assist experience — on steroids.”
(They may not have actually used these words.)
And this is exactly what I did. I briefly mourned VS Code, and then went all-in on Agy IDE.
But I was rather vocal in sharing my thoughts with some influential folk at Google.
My thoughts being:
- Some folks — like me — were happy to make the switch. But there are tens of millions of developers who WILL NOT give up their favourite IDE. So, if you tell them: “Switch to Agy, or you stay where you are, but with no Gemini”, then they’re gonna say: “Okay. I’ll go with option 2.” To me, that’s a lose-lose situation.
- Some enterprises are pretty strict about their approved development environments and ecosystems. And — for reasons — they can be SOOOOO SLOW at adopting new things.
The TL;DR — there was no viable path for developers who wanted to evolve from the Gemini Code Assist experience, but stay with their favourite IDE.
Until Now
Today (August 20, as I write this), Google launched the Antigravity extension for IDEs! You can check out the official Google release blog, here. Right now, there are Agy extensions for VS Code, Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEs, and Zed.
I can’t tell you how stoked I am about this announcement!
What is it? Well, think of it as a replacement for the Gemini Code Assist extension. It’s Gemini Code Assist, but pumped with steroids and caffeine. It’s all the cool Agy harness capabilities we’ve come to love in Antigravity 2.0, Antigravity CLI and Antigravity IDE, but now packaged as an extension.
So, as of tonight, I’ve switched back to VS Code!
Install the Extension
Let’s install it! I’m using VS Code, so I’m installing this extension.
If you happen to go looking for “Google Antigravity” in the VS Code Marketplace, be sure to install this one by google.com:
When you open the extension, you’ll see this in VS Code:
Click Install, and you’ll be asked to sign-in to Google:
And you’ll be asked if you want to install any of the ready-made plugins:
And that’s it!
It took about 20 seconds, and now the Antigravity extension is working in my VS Code!
Take It For a Spin
I wondered if all my existing agent skills and MCP servers would be working. So I asked it: “Install my Gemini code reviewer”
It immediately found and activated my install-gemini-code-review-action skill and used it to install my Gemini Code Review Action into the local repo. It then asked for permission to commit these changes push them to GitHub. I gave Agy permission, and it went ahead and pushed.
So this proved that my existing skills were immediately discovered, activated and used, and that it was able to use my GitHub MCP to perform the commit and push. Nice!
Models
We can see the models that are available:
And we can see more model and Antigravity extension settings here:
(I love the fact that next to my “AI Ultra” subscription is an “Upgrade” button. Seriously? Lol!)
The Plugins Created Some Skills Duplication
The newly installed plugins resulted in duplication of some skills I had previously installed in my ~/.gemini/config/skills folder. So I said to Antigravity: "Let's do a skills optimisation run."
It went ahead and activated my organise-agent-skills. The skill made a number of recommendations which I implemented. The results looked like this:
Wow!
- 29 duplicated skills deleted.
- 56 “sub-skills” set to excluded, because they are managed by their parent skills.
- 68% reduction in token overhead!
Great, so our skills are back to running nice and lean.
A Nice View of Token Usage
Whilst we’re talking about token optimisation, I stumbled across this “Customization” page in the Agy extension settings:
This is nice view that how much of your “customization budget” is being consumed by all your GEMINI.md (or AGENTS.md), your skills, and your MCP tools. What’s quite interesting to note is that Agy will automatically start truncating if you exceed this budget. So you might suddenly find that your skills are being ignored, for example. This is another good reason to optimise your install skills and MCP servers.
Things Not Working
Browser Subagent
The first thing I struggled with is the built-in browser subagent. I couldn’t get this to browse web pages for me, even after I enabled the remote debugging in Chrome. I did expect this. My VS Code is running in Windows, but connected to my repos in WSL. This has typically been a problem area for browser subagents. Maybe I’ll be able to get it working, if I put in a bit of work. But tonight… I’m far too tired!
(I should mention: this issue is only for WSL users. 4 out of 5 developers won’t be affected by this.)
On the plus side, I was able to remote control the browser with my existing BrowserMCP configuration. No changes required.
Antigravity In-Line Complete and Tab Features
One thing I really love about Antigravity IDE is the real-time suggestions and edits you can make in the editor window.
For example: if I were to change one instance of “We did something” to “I did something”, then Antigravity IDE allows me to update all remaining instances in a context-aware way, just by pressing tab.
This feature is not currently working for me with the Agy extension in VS Code. So it’s possible my configuration isn’t correct, or this feature hasn’t been implemented in the extension yet. But this is only day 1!
What Does This Mean for Agy IDE?
Within hours of the extension arriving, many folks have been asking me, “What does this mean for Agy IDE? Will Google kill it?” It’s a question I’ve been asking my friends at Google for a little while.
Nobody has explicitly told me that Google will kill Agy IDE. But my thoughts are:
- If the Agy extension provides the full Agy harness experience in all the major IDEs, what’s the point in having a separate IDE that looks a lot like VS Code?
- Why would Google want to maintain the “IDE” components of Agy IDE, when these are essentially just a fork of VS Code anyway? That’s a lot of work.
- Lastly, take a look at the release notes for Agy 2.0, Agy CLI, and Agy IDE. The relative sparsity (is that a word?) of Agy IDE patches is telling.
Personally, I think the writing is on the wall.
Wrap-Up
I’m so happy this Agy extension has arrived. Now any developer can use the extremely capable Antigravity harness from their IDE of choice. It gives a viable migration path for those who were using Gemini Code Assist before.
For me, the install experience was totally painless, and everything just worked out-of-the-box. (Well, almost everything. But I can wait for the other things.) The agent is responsive and works. And it picked up all my existing configuration.
That’s it! Go forth and use Antigravity in your favourite editor!
Before You Go
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References and Useful Links
- Dazbo’s Portfolio
- Google Antigravity Official Site
- Google Antigravity IDE Extensions Announcement
- Google Antigravity Extension on the Visual Studio Marketplace
- Dazbo’s Agent Skills Repository — if you like it, please add a star!
- Dazbo’s Gemini Code Review Action — if you like it, please add a star!
