I hit my Claude Code rate limit, so I started looking around to kill some time. I figured I’d give the Gemini CLI a go, but that auth failed immediately with a message saying it’s discontinued for personal accounts.
So I went to check out Antigravity.
Before downloading, I watched the promo video. It made me smirk a bit when the speaker insisted it’s way more than an IDE, then immediately admitted it is, in fact, an IDE.
Opening it up, it looks pretty similar to other chat desktop apps.
I asked about its access and how it works, then asked what it can do that Claude Code can’t. It gave me a list:
- Parallel Subagents. Spin up independent specialized subagents for codebase research or debugging without cluttering the main chat.
- Multimodal & Browser capabilities. A built-in browser subagent that records WebP video sessions for frontend debugging.
- Structured plans. A gated planning mode that creates implementation plans and waits for approval.
- Slash commands. Interactive modes like
/grill-me,/learn, and/goal.
I immediately had high hopes for the browser automation. Honestly, if the browser’s built directly into the agentic IDE, testing web apps might actually become reliable.
But it didn’t work. It threw an error saying local chrome mode is only supported on Linux. Pretty disappointing first experience flop.
Out of all the other features, parallel subagents could be great. If it can actually spin up subagents without stalling or crashing, and let you manage them in an intuitive UI, that’d be awesome.
But then I started doing some real coding with it. The UI/UX for showing agent steps and managing plans is honestly pretty cool. Maybe I’ll keep giving it a shot. Thanks, Google.
Also, one thing that stood out is speed. It feels anomalously fast compared to other tools I’ve used. I had it check its own logs for this session to get some average response times:
- Permission & Directory lookups: ~1-2 seconds
- File reads & edits: ~0-2 seconds
- Command execution & commits: ~3-4 seconds
- Local site compilation (Quartz build): ~6 seconds
It’s nice to have an agent that keeps up with you in the flow.
Cheers,
Will