I was curious and just installed it, and... Antigravity is a literal clone of VSCode. Wtf? Honestly, it's so embarassing. I might write a blog post about this, but I remember falling in love with the art of product watching Google demo Google Wave. Janky sure, ahead-of-its-time maybe, but also visionary and mind-blowing. Here we are almost two decades later and Google is re-releasing something made by Microsoft. The epitome of laziness and uninspired hive-think.

Imo, there's so much room for an actual normie end-product that supercharges local work with AI for regular people (office workers, creatives, etc.), but a VSCode clone ain't it. (Insert: fine, I'll do it myself Thanos meme.)

Most AI IDEs are VSCode fork. Everyone is just pushing their own subscription service. Antigravity is made by Windsurf team and pushes Gemini models

You have to realize why something like antigravity exists.

There are two usual ways it occurs:

1. Political fights internal to the company resulting in incoherent strategy and products. HN assumes this is almost always the case, and but it's only sometimes the case :).

or

2. A bunch of execs sitting in a room saying stuff like "we have to have a platform with eyeballs that we control where we can surface our AI innovations and tools or else we'll be disintermediated/unable to release stuff that matters" or whatever.

(or both!)

The second part is often a real problem to solve. The first (you have to have a platform) does not follow.

At least two of the main issues with solving these kinds of problems this way (ie antigravity) is:

a. No user actually cares about your strategic problems and isn't interested in helping you. What you release still has to be valuable/etc enough that people are willing to use it over their existing tooling. At least right now, antigravity really isn't.

b. The strategy seems to assume a complete vacuum where it's Google vs existing tools. However, there are tons of large developer companies with the same exact problem of wanting a place they control to surface stuff (or whatever particular problem this is meant to solve). If they opt for the same approach, why would Google's strategy beat them? . If they opt for a different approach, same question.

If you poke there, i suspect you will find nobody has good answers to these questions.

So this approach turns into, at best, skating to where the puck is instead of where it will be.

Erm - It is VSCode.

They have like 100 junk AI products, antigravity is just one. AI is hardly super charging anyone's work either, regardless of how you package it, especially normies.

95% of people just want to search things and be entertained with their tech. Most dont want to write slop emails at light speed or whatever it is you think AI might be useful for to the average person.

If you consider slopifying your output at a really high velocity "supercharging" then maybe.

Edge browser copied Chrome, its only fair