Photocopied!

The video above is the official presentation of Google Antigravity, an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that is not just a simple IDE but is “a new way of working for this next era of agentic intelligence”. I haven’t yet figured out what that truly means, but it surely sounds very smart and up‑to‑date.

So let’s see what this “new way of working” is, in which the agents “help you experience liftoff”. An expression that back in the day used to mean something quite different.

I download the latest version of Google Antigravity (1.11.17), which once installed takes up a whopping 700 MB. Once I get past the usual onboarding screens and log in with my Gmail account, here’s what comes up

It’s basically VS Code from Microsoft, plus the agentic tool Antigravity, whose exact purpose I still don’t know and, more importantly, whether it’s useful.

After all, that’s essentially what they told me during the onboarding process, when I was presented with a screen offering to either set up the editor from scratch or import settings from VS Code. Or Windsurf.

Windsurf?

Yes, Windsurf, an editor derived from Cursor,¹ which in turn was derived from the always-present VS Code.

The similarity (to use a euphemism) becomes obvious when you place them side by side, with Antigravity on the left and Windsurf on the right.

Identical.

In short, the revolutionary IDE, the “new way of working for this upcoming era of agentic intelligence” that “helps you liftoff”, is nothing more than a clone of an editor that was already a clone of another editor that was itself a clone…

Digging a little deeper it is easy to learn that Google spent $2.4 billion to acquire the Windsurf code and hire its two founders, Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, along with a handful of the company’s developers.² However, fearing antitrust intervention, Google avoided buying the actual product or the brand, so that Windsurf continues to exist and be developed independently, trying to repeat the David versus Goliath story.

It is a more or less as if, in the 1980s, Microsoft had hired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, maybe also Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Susan Kare, taking the original Macintosh code with them. Then re‑releasing it a few months later as Windows 1.0. In the meantime, Apple would have continued to develop the same code for the original Mac.

I get the feeling that the Google team used something else to liftoff.

But putting the (silly) jokes aside, are the agents in Antigravity actually useful during development? I’m not sure myself, and that’s what we’ll find out live next time.