Get started with Antigravity
An underrated AI stack
You might already know things like ChatGPT which has the AI Coding version called Codex. Also Claude Code which is the AI Coding from Anthropic’s Claude. And you might already pay handsomely to either/both OpenAI and Anthropic. What if I told you that for regular person which are not an AI Influencer nor people like Boris Cherny of Anthropic who are in the edge of AI R&D don’t need that fancy AI Coding Agent and just need a simple one that you might already have.
Yes, that AI stack that you might already have but not actively being used is Antigravity from Google. Antigravity just like Codex or Claude Code is an AI Coding Agent that is becoming general purpose because it’s capability in Coding. It is awesome because if you’re a big user of Google you might already have it and using it is not an additional cost for you.
Antigravity comes free from Google One which many people who is using Google for backup or Google Photos or just an upgraded version of their Google Drive might already have. I’m not in any way associated with Google and I’m sharing this because my genuine use case that I have which is to have coding agent at home that is cheap and I can trust. I have plenty fancy coding at work, but that’s because the company paid for it.
Is Google really untrustworthy?
Google which many people now believes is not trustworthy is actually something that I can reasonably trust, there are many reason which I can talk about
It is Google, it is a pioneer of search engine and have successfully built useful product for the past decades including things like Gmail, Google Photos, Android, Chrome, etc. My evolution in using software is literally shaped by Google. I still remember how I was impressed by Google Chrome when it was first arrived and still many people are using Firefox. It was revolutionary. They have reputation to keep and they shouldn’t be evil, at least not suspiciously evil like Chinese model for example.
It is not trustworthy but who is better? Maybe outside of Google I can trust Apple, but Apple doesn’t have it’s own AI. I can trust other big names like Claude, Codex, SpaceX’s Cursor, but those are too expensive for just an occasional usage of coding agent at home. And if I go to Chinese model, I don’t think they’re more trustworthy than Google. At least Google is headquartered in America and I lived in Europe where rule of law does exists. I would rather give my data to Google which at least respect GDPR than (no so random) Chinese company. Rule of law have this very interesting feature where you might not trust the people but you trust the system, while in country like China you might trust their people just like you might trust people from any place, but you don’t trust their system especially their rule of law.
It’s cheap, it comes with my existing Google One. And also if you’re a currently enrolled student you got 1 year of Google One for free. And also if you’re invited by someone you got 4 months for free.
It has good enough model. I know that Google’s Gemini doesn’t have Fable-level quality just yet, but think about it they have perfected high quality small model like Gemma and also have a very decent agent quality, so not bad deal. For me, who is a professional software developer at home, my use case for Gemini is to help me tinker with software and technical idea while I still be the driver of the idea. Sure I can have goals or loops, but I still be the one deciding the idea and judging the quality and hey given enough constraints the AI does really well.
My use case mostly are (1) improving my blog (2) building personal software for my day to day chores (3) exploring new ideas like building kids which I don’t have enough time previously. And with all of these I can say Antigravity helps me comfortably.
And how about the benchmarks?
Sure Antigravity’s model might not have the best model in mind, but who cares about the benchmark? I don’t buy the highest Macbook Pro when it comes out, well if I get it for free I will use it, but if I don’t have money I’ll just learn how to wield my current tools better. My AI model should respect my pocket, I don’t die if I don’t use Fable today. I might be broke if I use it
Ready to get started?
If you’re new to Google One you can sign up using my referral code and you get 4 months for free and I get nothing in return, just a satisfaction that someone read my article :)
If you already have Google One you can head to their website antigravity.google. They shipped with both CLI and IDE and both shared the same harness. They also have SDK but for most cases the CLI and IDE is enough for you.
My usual workflow is I would use the IDE as my main workflow since it has a native history and also scheduler feature which comes in handy if I want to make some kind of repetitive workflow.
My favorite features?
Project Management. It is very fun to have so many project at once window, I can add both my website project as well as my second brain so I can go back and forth between them.
Scheduled Tasks. I like taking notes but I don’t like organizing it. I like it to be organized though. So what’s the solution? Let’s AI do it for us. I put some rules and I put scheduled to let AI make connection in graphs and very the graphs, now everyday AI annotate my notes and connect the dots, and when I taking notes I don’t care what kind of note is this, I just left just enough information and AI help organize it for me.
Multiple agent at once. In the Desktop Antigravity (not the CLI) I can spin multiple at once one native window. I usually use it to brainstorm ideas in parallel and let it bloom, not every idea make it to production but at least I can tinker with it freely.
Variety of models. There are many generations of Gemini models as well as Claude models coming to the picture, so this is not a bad deal at all. It is what Naval Ravikant called customer surplus, we got more by paying less.
Where’s the screenshots?
Thanks for reading my article. While I appreciate my readers and try to do my best to give the most entertaining article. I don’t make a living writing, I code and build product for a living. Don’t expect too much from me :) I also don’t expect much from you.
If you like my post, consider subscribe and I’ll post more comprehensive post in return :)
This is for now, tot ziens!