Hands-on with Antigravity 2: No IDE, just agent chat
InfoWorld ·
The original Antigravity was an IDE with native integration for Google’s generative AI models. With Antigravity 2, Google offers a refashioned version of the product that it describes as a “ standalone desktop command center ” for agents. Antigravity 2 is closer to projects like LM Studio than a full-blown IDE. It provides a streamlined, chat-centric interface for working with models and agents, uncluttered by a code editor, debugging tools, and other trappings of an integrated development environment. For those who want an IDE and agent orchestration together, Google still offers the Antigravity IDE ( read our hands-on look ). But for those who want a chat-centric desktop app experience, or who want to keep their hands-on development separate from their vibe coding , Google has elected to also offer this IDE-less version of Antigravity. When you launch the Antigravity app and start a new task, you have a few choices about how to manage your work. If you just want to have a quick conversation and don’t need to create a whole project to go with it, you can select “No Project” and just start prompting. If you do create a project, you can either configure the details yourself — what directory to use, what to call it — or have Antigravity set a randomly generated name and empty directory for starters. Antigravity 2.0’s agent chat interface. This discussion revolves around a Python web project, which the agent has permission to modify. Foundry Projects and worktrees Earlier versions of Antigravity had the concept of workspaces, which were confined to a single directory and lacked granular permissions or customizations. With Antigravity 2.0, workspaces are replaced by projects, which may span multiple directories (that you define explicitly) and have their own isolated settings and permissions. This new scheme better accommodates how many software projects work, especially those with shared components living in different places. Another new option is local mode vs. worktree mode, which controls how agents interact with your project’s directories. It’s another example of how the Antigravity app lets you choose between the quick-and-dirty or slow-but-correct way of doing things. Local mode has the agent working directly on local folders or Git checkouts, for convenience and speed. The new worktree mode creates a new Git worktree for each conversation, so that the active working folder won’t be affected and work done by any subagents running in parallel won’t conflict. An example of one of Antigravity 2.0’s responses for the “grill-me” function. The last option is always left blank for the user to fill in; here, it’s “A mix of #1 and #2”. Foundry Agent commands By default agents come with several common control commands, prefixed with a slash : /btw lets you interject with a quick question that makes use of the current context, but without derailing the workflow. /grill-me has the agent prompt you with a few specific, focused questions about the project to better guide its responses. For instance, during a conversation about creating a templating system for a blogging engine, /grill-me produced questions like “What is the primary goal you want to achieve with your program?” and presented several different options, along with a fill-in-the-blank option. One thing to be wary of with these command operations is API timeouts. When I was using /grill-me , the API for the service timed out and the context for the grilling vanished and couldn’t be recovered. If Antigravity has an API timeout in the middle of a “grill-me” session, it tends to forget the context, including any already-asked questions. The last question shown was asked previously in a slightly different form. Foundry Build with Google bundles The Antigravity app also includes bundles of agent skills and capabilities for building with various Google services and technology stacks. For instance, the modern web guidance bundle provides agent skills and guidelines for building web apps with best practices and broad browser compatibility. The Android CLI bundle gives agents tools and guidelines for building Android apps, or refreshing older Android apps or their components. Most intriguing of the bunch, if maybe also the most esoteric, is the Google DeepMind science skills collection for doing scientific research with Antigravity . There is growing interest in speeding up agentic development through parallelism — for instance, by having multiple agents analyze different aspects of a project in parallel and report their results independently. Antigravity gives you a couple of complementary ways to do this. One is subagents, which are spawned by the main agent and work on a specific task in their own isolated workspace. Another is to run agents or subagents asynchronously as a background process, so you and the main agent can continue working without waiting for them to complete. The biggest limitation of Antigravity, which I’m betting is by design, is that it doesn’t let you use any models besides versions of Gemini, Claude, and GPT. There is no mechanism for connecting Antigravity to a self-hosted model with an industry-standard interface. For that you will want a product like LM Studio .