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Comment by ddp26 | Hacker News Reader

This whole blog post is seemingly about Google, not about the user. "Why We Built Antigravity" etc. "We want Antigravity to be the home base for software development in the era of agents" - cool, why would I as the user care about that?

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You wouldn’t. It’s made to suck out investor money and show that google does something, not to actually bring value.

My crystal ball says it will be shutdown next year.

Most of the AI products are not for the end user, they are just signaling shareholders and possible investors that the company is on the hype.

There is also mechanism inside Google that rewards teams that launches new products, more than the teams that actually maintain existing ones.

This kind of cynicism is wild to me. Of course most AI products (and products in general) are for end users. Especially for a company like Google--they need to do everything they can to win the AI wars, and that means winning adoption for their AI models.

http://killedbygoogle.com/ - most Google products are for the temporary career advancement of some exec or product lead.

Their only real product is advertising, everything else is a pretense to capture users attention and behaviors that they can auction off.

This is different. AI is an existential threat to Google. I've almost stopped using Google entirely since ChatGPT came out. Why search for a list of webpages which might have the answer to your question and then manually read them one at a time when I can instead just ask an AI to tell me the answer?

If Google doesn't adapt, they could easily be dead in a decade.

That's funny. I stopped using ChatGPT completely and use Gemini to search, because it actually integrates with Google nicely as opposed to ChatGPT which for some reason messes up sometimes (likely due to being blocked by websites while no one dares block Google's crawler lest they be wiped off the face of the internet), and for coding, it's Claude (and maybe now Gemini for that as well). I see no need to use any other LLMs these days. Sometimes I test out the open source ones like DeepSeek or Kimi but those are just as a curiosity.

If web-pages don't contain the answer, the AI likely won't either. But the AI will confidently tell me "the answer" anyway. I've had atrocious issues with wrong or straight up invented information that I must search up every single claim it makes on a website.

My primary workflow is asking AI questions vaguely to see if it successfully explains information I already know or starts to guess. My average context length of a chat is around 3 messages, since I create new chats with a rephrased version of the question to avoid the context poison. Asking three separate instances the same question in slightly different way regularly gives me 2 different answers.

This is still faster than my old approach of finding a dry ground source like a standards document, book, reference, or datasheet, and chewing through it for everything. Now I can sift through 50 secondary sources for the same information much faster because the AI gives me hunches and keywords to google. But I will not take a single claim for an AI seriously without a link to something that says the same thing.

Given how embracing AI is an imperative in tech companies, "a link to something" is likely to be a product of LLM-assisted writing itself. Entire concept of checking through the internet becomes more and more recursive with every passing moment.

Google is still looking for investors?

Of course, Alphabet exists to give returns to their shareholders.

funny my magic 8 ball says the same thing!

I know Google is quick to shut things down but these ultra-cynical ultra-skeptical HN takes are so tiresome at this point.

This is what Google is like though. It is practically part of their corporate DNA.

I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at wooing investors. I believe it is intended to be a genuine superior alternative to Cursor and Kiro etc. and is attempting to provide the best AI coding experience for the average developer.

Most of the other people (so far) in this sub-thread do not think this. They essentially have a conspiratorial view on it.

> I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at wooing investors.

There is no evidence to support any other motive.

Any experienced (as in, 10+ years) developer knows better than to trust google with dev tools.

What dev tools has Google shut down?

Colab is still going strong. Chrome inspector is still going strong.

They've never released a full-fledged IDE before, have they? Which I don't count Apps Script editor as one, but that's been around for a long time as well.

I think it's much more likely that Google believes this is the future of development and wants to get in on the ground floor. As they should.

> Google believes this is the future of development

This is hardly possible as this is definitely not the future of development which is obvious to developers who created this. Or to any developer for that matter.

This is a stakeholders' feature.

Agree to disagree, I guess. What you think is obvious, I think is false. And I think the rapidly growing success of Cursor is the proof of that. But I guess you must think Cursor is just a fad or something, since you don't see why Google would want to legitimately compete with it?

Cursor is obviously a fad (unlike Copilot - I'm not at all an AI hater, quite the opposite) and perhaps Google needs to present something to shareholders that will pretend to be competing.

None of that matters for actual development work.

Well, just so you know, there are lots of us who think Cursor is not a fad, and see that Google realizes this as well, and is genuinely competing with it.

A lot of people find it's actually quite valuable for "actual development work". If you want to ignore all that, then I guess go ahead.

But just know that what you're claiming is "obvious", is clearly not. There seems to be large disagreement over it, so it is objectively not obvious, but rather quite debatable.

Isn't it great that in this case we don't have to fight because the judgment of history will reveal itself quite soon on that matter, right? :-)

I wish I could save this comment in a way that we would both come back to it in 10 years ;)

!remindme 5 years

Cursor is very obviously not a fad (Copilot I'd say actually is!), nor are any of the Cursor clones/competitors. Of course it matters very much for actual development work. I feel like everything you're writing in this sub-thread is essentially the opposite of what exists in reality.

This worldview is so bizarre and uncharitable that I'd be rather concerned to hear what any of your takes on politics might be.

I've played with Antigravity for the past 48 hours for lots of different tasks. Is it revolutionizing development for me? No. Do I think they want it to do that and are working extremely hard to try to achieve that? I think the answer is very obviously: of course. Will it maybe get closer to that within a few months or a year? Maybe.

I would say it's the opposite. I believe there is zero evidence to support your allegation.

> I do not believe that Google Antigravity is aimed at wooing investors.

I think the comment you’re replying to was addressing the “shutting down” part, not the “investors” part.

exactly.

also i was alluding to the way their promotion policy encourages people to start rather than maintain projects.

I wonder why is that.

Investor money?

Google is highly profitable. It's not looking for investment, it's the one investing.

Maybe you are confusing it with OpenAI?

I think they are referring to public market investors vs private investors. Meaning, their stock valuation.

After using Google AI studio, Google Vertex, and Google Gemini Chat I honestly can't wait to use Google Antigravity!

edit: Also Jules...

snark off:

I think the Google PMs should have coffee together and see if all of this sprawl makes any sense.

It does?

Google AI studio is their developer dashboard.

Google Vertex is their equivalent of Amazon Bedrock.

Google Gemini Chat is their ChatGPT app for normies.

Google Antigravity is their Cursor equivalent.

I agree what you’ve listed makes sense as a product portfolio.

But AI Studio is getting vibe coding tools. AI Studio also has a API that competes with Vertex. They have IDE plugins for existing IDEs to expose Chat, Agents, etc. They also have Gemini CLI for when those don’t work. There is also Firebase Studio, a browser based IDE for vibe coding. Jules, a browser based code agent orchestration tool. Opal, a node-based tool to build AI… things? Stich, a tool to build UIs. Colab with AI for a different type of coding. Notebook LM for AI research (many features now available in Gemini App). AI Overviews and AI mode in search, which now feature a generic chat interface.

Thats just new stuff, and not including all the existing products (Gmail, Home) that have Gemini added.

This is the benefit of a big company vs startups. They can build out a product for every type of user and every user journey, at once.

I concede.

Don't forget Gemini CLI

In another 2 years we'll probably be back to just "Google" as digital agent that can do any research, creative, or coding task you can imagine.

> Google Vertex is their equivalent of Amazon Bedrock

Well, that clears that up.

In "real world" you don't use OpenAI or Anthropic API directly—you are forced to use AWS, GCP, or Azure. Each of these has its own service for running LLMs, which is conceptually the same as using OpenAI or Anthropic API directly, but with much worse DX. For AWS it's called Bedrock, for GCP—Vertex, and for Azure it's AI Foundry I believe. They also may offer complementary features like prompt management, evals, etc, but from what I've seen so far it's all crap.

And In practice, when I needed to use one of their models for a small project, it turned out that the only sane way is to go via OpenRouter…

Also gemini-cli (terrible)

Google ADK (agent development kit, awesome)

you forgot jules

Everybody forgets Jules.

The also launched a coding agent Jules: https://jules.google/

Jules is nifty. Weirdly heavy on the browser CPU.

Jules is the first and only one to add a full API, which I've found very beneficial. It lets you integrate agentic coding features into web apps quite nicely. (In theory you could always hack your own thing together with Claude Code or Codex to achieve a similar effect but a cloud agent with an API saves a lot of effort.)

Google ADK is real nice and gives you an API as well (also web browser and terminal prompt)

Wasn't there something called Bard at some point?

Bard is the old name of Gemini

Great point!

Remember took my a while early in my career from changing my resume away from saying "I want to do this at my next job and make a lot of money" and towards "here is how I can make money and save costs for your company".

Google didn't learn that lesson here. They are describing why us using Antigravity is good for Google, not why us using Antigravity is good for us.

More accurately, it should be neither about Google nor about the user, but about the product. Describe what the product is and does, don’t make assumptions about the user, and let the user be the judge of it.

I swear most of these pages is to sell this to companies so they can force it onto developers.

The whole webpage looks like something from Apple.

All these companies were built by self-referential narcissists, and it seems to be their culture at the core.

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