Vibe Coding using Antigravity

With AI dominating headlines, especially regarding my work in software engineering, I decided I couldn't ignore it any longer. I needed to see what AI can and can't actually do.

First, I wanted to try agentic AI, where you let the AI do the actual the work, as opposed to a standard chatbot where you're just copying and pasting from a prompt. Second, I was determined to let the agent do all the work, intervening only when absolutely necessary.

I chose Google’s Gemini as my agent. Why? It wasn’t because of its performance on benchmarks like SWE-Bench or APEX-SWE. Honestly, Google was offering 2TB of storage with the monthly Google AI Pro subscription. I figured if this AI thing was a bust, at least I’d have the storage! I don't mean to sound too cynical; if agentic coding is as good as Sam or Dario says, I’ll eventually check out tools like Claude , which I would have chosen if not for the storage thing (as this past Wednesday, Google actually just upped the storage to 5TB for the same price; so, win-win)!

Google’s agentic tool for coding is Antigravity, a fork of Visual Studio Code. If you use VS Code, you’ll feel right at home. Do you need Antigravity to use Gemini as an agent? No. You can use the Gemini extension in vanilla VS Code. I tested both for a few days to compare. If you plan on using Gemini exclusively, Antigravity is the way to go; the experience is much more seamless.

In Antigravity, you can choose to review changes before the agent applies them, or just let it 'do its thing' and alert you when it's finished. I wanted to see the thought process, so I opted for the review. When you prompt Gemini in Antigravity, it creates a clean implementation plan, a high-level overview with screenshots, and a walkthrough of the modified files. As of this writing, the standard extension doesn't have this level of detail. Plus, the Antigravity sidebar shows Gemini explaining its logic and the commands it's running in real-time, which is not in the extension.

In my next post, I’ll dive into my actual experience coding with Antigravity. Thanks for reading!"