Google's Antigravity puts coding productivity before AI hype - and the result is astonishing (www.zdnet.com)

Google today unveiled Antigravity, an AI-first coding IDE built as a fork of VS Code that prioritizes developer productivity over pure AI hype. Wrapped in a familiar editor and plugin ecosystem, Antigravity layers agentic features powered by Gemini 3: automatic screenshots and screen recordings, in-IDE annotation of images and clips to guide agents, a Chrome extension that runs and tests browser apps in a real Chrome instance, multi-agent management across multiple workspaces, and even on‑the‑fly image generation via Nano Banana. Agents can produce pre/post execution plans and recorded walkthroughs showing exactly what they tested and why, and Antigravity can commit changes back to GitHub. For the AI/ML and dev tooling community this is notable because it moves beyond simple code completion to tightly integrated, observable agent workflows that can dramatically speed debugging and feature delivery—especially for web projects where browser-level testing matters. The VS Code lineage lowers adoption friction, but there are caveats: browser integration is limited to web apps, multi-workspace agent concurrency could increase cognitive load, and it’s unclear how Antigravity will coexist with Google’s existing agents like Jules. Overall, Antigravity signals a practical shift toward orchestration, observability, and in-context multimodal input for agent-assisted development—areas likely to shape next-generation developer tooling and ML ops.