How does anyone internally at Google justify these decisions?
Even if there are competing implementations, in terms of brand recognition, I feel like “Gemini” is more closely associated with Google than “Antigravity”. Why pick the more obscure option?!
Perhaps they felt the sentiment on Gemini CLI was beyond repair, but surely there must be some voice on the inside saying “developers will never adopt our products if we keep killing them”.
By unifying the billing and quota systems, as well as providing better integration, I presume
The Antigravity harness is by far better than the gemini-cli one. Antigravity also offers models other than Gemini as well. When you say Antigravity, you think of a platform whereas when you say Gemini you think of the model
It's great that gemini-cli is open-source, but that also comes with a bunch of ai-generated issues and pull-requests, which is sure to impede development
In those rare occasion when I want to use Gemini I just type gemini on my terminal.
Gemini was on life support on my side. I barely get to use it due to its subpar performance in coding, which is to be honest the only use I have of it.
And now I read that they spent 4 to 5 months testing 3.5 internally. Let that sink in. By the time they release the world has moved on. I don’t know who makes decisions at Google regarding AI but it saddens me to see this happening. Google should be up there leading but they are lagging against everybody.
How can I justify dropping 100$ per month, for a coding agent that is half a year behind, knowing that Codex or Kimi is going to do much better?
I get what you're saying about Gemini for coding and it's useful that you mention it.
I wonder though if Google isn't so worried about the viability of their coding AIs and have a longer term view than simply providing coding aids. This might also be indicated by their recent $40B investment in Anthropic, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/google-to-invest-up-to-40-bi...
On the other hand I quietly cheer every time they fumble even slightly, in their seemingly inexorable march to becoming our ultimate, terrifying, corporate overlords.
> developers will never adopt our products if we keep killing them
We all want this to be the case but it's never the case. It never stops to amuse me how developers of the world fall into the Google trap again and again and again despite knowing better.
Personally have been hurt a lot by the abandonment of Polymer and since then it would not occur to me to touch any Google development product because what's the point really?
Google really can’t help themselves but to have some internal re-org kill off a public thing people are actively using. It’s honestly impressive how consistent they are.
If the repo is already forked, what difference does it make if Google supports it or not? The community can just continue development if they so choose
Even thought there are people using, it doesn’t mean they see a future in it.
Google is the best when it comes to analytics and trends. If they see a product is expected to fail, which in this case it was, they simply kill it and move on instead of wasting resources saving a sinking ship.
Of course, something could’ve been improved, but that’s just how they operate.
Whoever is in charge of these decisions, is absolutely disconnected with the reality. First they sent a message saying the Ultra plan is ending, with no other option for a Workspace use to buy an equivalent plan. It was suppose to be active tilll June or July 7 , that's all. So the users are not suppose to know how they will need to plan or budget and just guess. I read once that after a certain level , the managers need to make their own decisions. Seems like someone just came in and decided that all the Gemini CLI and Antigravity needs to be one , because some other manager thought Antigravity was a better name than Gemini or whatever and started this mess in the first place. I am loosing my faith in these managers and Google.
> Whoever is in charge of these decisions, is absolutely disconnected with the reality.
The problem is with your perception of reality. Google doesn't operate for the outside, you're on the outside, Google operates for Google and people in Google care about themselves first, then Google, and then -- if t all, outside.
It's the same thing they continuously do with GCP: put internal needs first and put the customer last. Nobody at Google ever got fired for screwing over customers.
I would love to sign up for antigravity cli but when I click on Get Plan it says: “This account isn't eligible for Google Antigravity benefits included with Google AI plans
Google Antigravity benefits included with Google AI plans aren't available in some countries or for people under a certain age. Learn more about Google One feature eligibility.”
With a button that says “Explore Google AI Plans” that when I click on it takes me to my Drive.
I can’t believe our Google account setup is different from any other startup in SF. Anyone have success with this? Do they even have a bot at Google that tracks this attrition?
This is the main reason I’m not using Gemini for work. Google won’t let me pay for it. I pay for just about every AI service under the sun but Google needs to refuse my card, account, location or a combination of these.
But they happily take my money for a couple of Workspce accounts.
It seems that Google has those product Managers that work barely an hour a day and have zero idea about anything at all. Those in "Life in a day of XYX" sort of videos that were trendy at one point.
Adapting "if a product is free, you are the product":
If the agent won't tell you what it's programming is, it's not your agent.
Two fast reflections:
1. I personally really doubt you can stay competitive selling such low-agency products to agentic developers, who are used to having access to/ability to see & reform their agentic worlds.
2. Also impressed by the hubris of giving everyone a single month to make the transition! I'd love the Google Graveyard to keep track of how long between announcement and shut down products got; I expect Gemini CLI getting axed for Antigravity CLI with one month transition is close to a record.
I stopped using Google products due to their propensity for killing them off. I continue to be proven correct in my assertion that they do not care about their customers.
100%. I really wish that I could treat them as a valid option, but they continuously reaffirm the position that it is dangerous to rely on them for anything commercial.
As luck would have it, I tried Antigravity for the first time a few days ago.
It was a complete buggy mess - at one point I asked Gemini why it could not use the network despite having network access enabled in the sandbox settings, and it told me that although it had network access, it couldn't use mdnsresponder while running with the built-in sandbox. Like, how well thought out, network access without DNS.
After burning through about 80% of my 5-hour window of credits, I finally just went sandboxless to get the thing running. It hit the limit pretty quickly. I waited until the 5 hour limit was up, and found the 5 hour window had morphed into a one week window, still drained of credits.
I thought at least I can keep on using Gemini CLI until Google figures out this Antigravity thing. Oh well.
Lots of people throwing shade at Gemini CLI in the comments. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I enjoy using it. I haven't tried antigravity at all yet. I hope it will be an experience that is somewhat close to agentic coding on the CLI. I hit other model providers from Pi agent, but I'd like to be able to take advantage of my Google AI subscription on the CLI.
It’s a good decision. If an IDE can do everything that a CLI does and it surely can, then I fail to see the point of a CLI. It’s not like an IDE can’t emulate everything a CLI does but better, faster, and more interactive. It’s not like one does not need to read code either. Besides, what about session management? What about configuring agents, especially for multi-agent orchestration? The list can go on. The point is, IDE or GUI in general gives us optionality. Then, what’s wrong with that?
One may argue that Google’s Antigravity is clunky or cluttered or something worse, but that’s confusing organizational capability with principles.
They nuked anti-gravity and installed their codex knockoff in place. The vs code fork IDE and all your settings with it have been removed. Reinstalling the anti-gravity IDE, as it's been renamed does not bring back any of your settings or extensions.
This is the right move but I don’t know if I am ready to try them again. I am still bitter from the significantly reduced quotas, even on Ultra, their highest tier. Claude became unusable for me.
It would be much better if they just gave up on Gemini for coding and exclusively adopted Claude models. Even Deep Mind folks themselves prefer Claude over Gemini[1].
Even if they adopted Claude over Gemini they'd probably still try to nickel and dime customers by providing an increasingly degraded experience. The problem isn't Gemini itself, it's all the throttling, quantization and limit reductions that Google does to it.
I was working on a product that relies on ACP (agent client protocol). Gemini CLI supports ACP natively although it is missing some protocols. But I found that Antigravity CLI (agy) lacks ACP support! It's a bad sign for me.
As much as I like Gemini CLI and don’t like them shutting it down, I think it’s good some of the offerings are getting unified. There was too much fragmentation in the google offering and this is making it a tiny bit better.
Yeah, so they are worried about things like CAS that let you use lots of CLI agents from different companies. The fork I'm using lets me use Claude and Codex, and Gemini if I want, but I haven't much lately. Anyway, that sounds like what's happening. Is that wrong?
I think we will need to move to workarounds based on MCP going forwards.
> run CLI agent with an initial prompt
> tell the agent it isn't allowed to directly reply to the user and must use your tool instead. also all of the CLI's original interactive tools are blocked and it has to use your alternatives
> when the agent uses tools in the MCP, it redirects to your GUI's prompt editor
This is a double edged sword for me, I've dabbled with the Antigravity CLI and it is better but I got a lot of LLM use out of google's chaotic decentralized quotas.
gemini-cli had it's own quota, antigravity had it's own quota, and ai studio had it's own free tier quota and I managed to make use of all of them super cheaply.
Now they're finally unifying everything and cutting down, which is less of a cognitive load to keep track of quotas but also fewer benefits
> Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem.
So now there's 3 different Antigravity products: CLI, Antigravity 2, and Antigravity IDE. And Gemini CLI goes to the Google graveyard of products. Wow.
Gemini CLI is so incomprehensibly bad. I can only hope dedicated focus on agy will be the difference maker. It'd be nice to actually be able to integrate Gemini models into my workflows because they offer genuinely unique approaches to problems that complement Claude/Codex really well.