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”.
I think this is a systemic problem of an industry where gross margin is 80% or higher, so you can plow all that extra money into superfluous headcount tasked with objectives of questionable business value. It’s a curse of riches, if you will. The rest of us living on 15 to 30% margins need to think a little harder about what we do and why.
It's worse when you consider these are the only companies that can afford it due to the tax implications of R&D, my understanding was that you still pay the full bill on a developer building something as if you were making profits, even though you're burning their entire salary and other resources on it.
Wasn't it always somewhere between 20 to 30% (especially more recently in the 30s) but the real difference is, they're in the billions of dollars, your small business might be in the millions, it's quite a drastic difference altogether.
The way I understood the 80% is that is the margin on the actual product. 36% is what remains after the “investments” in moonshot projects nobody asked for.
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
It's not an IDE, it's a way to run agents. In particular, the Antigravity CLI positioned as Gemini CLI's successor is a shell with superpowers, not something you would use for code development.
You proved the point. Gemini has been marketed better, such that even folks in the know confuse Antigravity (the IDE) with anything else attempting to be pushed.
Antigravity CLI was only announced yesterday, so pretty much no one realizes it's different from Antigravity IDE yet, but I agree with your overall point. This kind of branding is toxic for individual product awareness. I'm not sure what drives the thinking behind it; Microsoft does it too (Copilot, etc.).
I don't think so? Gemini CLI (RIP) was more of a direct competitor to Claude Code - a CLI based coding agent. Antigravity was more IDE-like, based around a VS Code fork (so more like Cursor). Antigravity CLI, per the name, seems to be positioning it as a replacement for Gemini CLI, so certainly(?) a Claude Code CLI-based coding agent, but now one with multi-agent support and some sort of server-side harness as well apparently, doing who knows what.
Any CLI-based coding agent can equally well be described as "a shell with superpowers", and people were using Claude Code for non-coding tasks (e.g. sysadmin) before OpenClaw appeared and made that it's main purpose.
> 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.
I the other reasons you mentioned could be solved while keeping the Gemini name, but this is a fair point. I didn't realize they offered 3rd party models!
> When you say Antigravity, you think of a platform whereas when you say Gemini you think of the model
Yea I guess if their goal long-term is to be something more akin to Cursor that makes sense, but Anthropic seems to be doing just fine using "Claude" in their naming scheme.
I don't ever say "Antigravity", because it's not worth getting invested into tool, that will be dead in two years, when "Google Harness" or whatever they will call it, will replace it
It's not lack of gravity - it's just that you and the space ship are both falling towards earth under the same gravitational acceleration, so your acceleration relative to the spaceship is zero. You don't need to be in space to experience this - in a "vomit comet" airplane used for training astronauts (and for photographing Kate Upton) you experience the same thing as the plane goes into freefall.
You would of course also experience the same thing if you were out in space far from any major gravitational attraction (almost "lack of gravity"), but obviously that's not the case with things like the ISS that we're used to seeing.
Yes, since the former part relates to me as the individual (as I get the benefits of an open source project)
The latter is about the contributors that can no longer reap the benefits of OSS, since the amount of noise (e.g. low quality contributions, false-positives etc) leads to wasted time and effort to keep up with the flood
Were you to decide to one day file a genuine bug report or make a pull request, big chances that you will never get a response (1.5k issues, 329 pull requests open as of now). It's a Frankenstein('s monster) of a project from all perspectives, which is a shame, since I'm rather fond of the interface
> 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 a way, it is exciting to me that people exist that think like this. It is so different than how I think, we could be from different planets.
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?
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.
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...
I think google has another 'problem': Gemini needs to do a lot more than claude.
They use Gemini for personal assistent to all of their Gmail and co users/customers. They have Google Docs, they have GCP were gemini should support you too.
They also have a lot more languages to support too.
They optimize Gemini for A LOT more than 'just' coding. So its probably a balance act for them. And because they are that rich and have no issues on compute and brain, they can play the long game easily.
If they push their tpu further and continue their build out, they will be able to start training high quality topic optimized models in parallel while everyone else needs the same amount to just train one main model.
This is the Google messaging problem all over again. Hangouts, Google Chat, Google Hangout Google whatever the fuck, messaging, GMail chat, Google Wave, Google Duo, Google MS Teams.
Between this comment, and the comment above, I dont know what feels like fair criticism here.
Having a single perfect product strategy with non-overlapping product categories and understandable names is hard for any organization, particularly in a rapidly evolving space.
Its obviously an issue to have multiple mature products be chaotically names.
At this moment antigravity and gemini cli and are hardly mature. Isn't now the perfect time to consolidate?
Internal political wrangling and competition along with poor top-level leadership explain these sorts of bumbling moves. The same story that has always been at Google.
I have never understood basically any decision Google makes at any level. I think they're equivalent to a land owner sitting on top of oil. They have no idea what to do, and anything they do makes pennies compared to the oil, so it doesn't really matter what they do on top of that, customers be damned.
As if I needed another reason to hate them, they turned our Nest back to shitty thermostats last year by dropping older models from their Google Home service. There's no justification for it other than some product owner wanted to.
> 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?
As someone who worked there for a decade, I would wager instead that all that analysis at the top makes no difference when you're unable to execute because your internal politics are broken.
EDIT: ... also that the analysis at the "top" is mostly being made by people with the wrong incentives and motives, too.
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.
There's a fair amount of enterprise usage. It's a really good product, despite the Claude hype. Anthropic is a PITA to deal with, and it's slow as shit weekday morning Eastern time.
> If your organization uses Gemini CLI or our IDE extensions via a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license, or if your organization uses Gemini Code Assist for GitHub through Google Cloud, your access remains unchanged.
I use all 3 compared to what do you think Gemini CLI is a good product? (my only use case for it now is triple checking specifications for drift inconsistencies beyond that I find it pretty lacking compared to codex and cc).
I think for the average corporate person in a non-software company, the "out of box" experience is better with Gemini. It's also cheap.
Once you get deeper into it, both Codex and Claude have better integrations with skills, etc. I sort of "discovered" skills via GStack and now use a few things, I find Claude's performance infuriating, but it can do more things. I happily pay $200 for Claude now, mostly for my own personal stuff. I think Gemini is better at external data sourcing and coding complex math.
But note this is my anecdotal take, mostly in the context of hobby projects. I'm a journeyman AI slinger at best.
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.
Wow, this is rough. Gemini Cli was already losing and it’s now being replaced by something they’re saying doesn’t yet have feature parity. Doesn’t seem likely to inspire defections from competitors.
One could argue coding is only a use case and that their models are still killing it overall. However agents are strategic across the board and coding agents are at the forefront. They’ve already lead to new products like CoWork and it’s easy to understand why Google should be doing everything possible to catch up.
Surprised they’re not trying to entice developers away with more heavily subsidized subscription plans. Maybe it’s because as some say those days are ending and soon we’ll all be paying per token. Or maybe it would just put too much of a strain on available compute.
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.
The issue is that your comment is a rationalization. In reality, evidence beats logic any day of the week. Just because what you say is logical doesn't mean it's true. As such, it's not adding anything to the conversation.
Your take is cynical, but sensible in a massive org with dysfunctional culture that jades and burns out engineers until they only care about their own personal gains and everything else is secondary. I think people project their values in situations that don't have place for them and get upset
Which is "Google" in this sense, the employees are just workers, Google is not a coop. Google operates for Google, or it's owners which are the shareholders. No?
a) A vast majority of Google FTE are actually shareholders via equity grants, so there's that. Not a coop, but a taste of it.
b) The way you make more money at Google is by getting promoted. And unfortunately, the way you get promoted at Google is by looking like you are actively innovating, but without any measured correlation to the actual impact on the bottom line of the company. The result is typically the kind of shite everyone is complaining about in this thread.
But that i pay for some 2tb storage and i'm a 'pro' user while not really a 'pro'user and that there is another 'pro' package makes all of that very weird. This is something they need to clean up
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.
>This account isn't eligible for Google Antigravity
And clicking on "Explore Google AI plans" takes me to...I kid you not...the storage settings page of google drive.
Genuinely can't tell wtf google even wants me to use. Vertex? Gemini? Antigravity? Antigravity 2? Agent platform? Google One? Gemini Enterprise? Google AI?
Don't they have a senior management team that can impose some coordination?
I wonder what the hell the problem with naming things is in the AI space. They pretty much all suck at it.
OpenAI came up with GPT 4o, o4, 4.5, 4.1 (which came out later than 4.5 and had a completely different purpose), Microsoft just calls everything a copilot (Github Copilot, Azure Copilot, Microsoft Copilot - all from the same company, completely different things), and Google apparently just picks random words from the comments.
> - A SKILL.md system mirroring Anthropic's skills convention.
> - Subagents, an artifacts review workflow (slash commands), and conversation rewind.
Antigravity CLI, like Gemini CLI, is a copy of most of Claude Code. At least in Antigravity CLI they copied the better UI as well. The scope of copying includes support for definitions of Agents, Skills, Commands, Plugins, MCP and so on. In fact, for some time, the Gemini CLI "extensions" documentation referred directly to Claude Code marketplace repositories. An artifact of this is that for example CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR is made available to hooks, by Gemini CLI.
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.
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.
Weird, I saw nobody "throwing shade", all complaining is very direct and simple: gemini-cli sucks but Google sucks even more but discontinuing it to relaunch it with another name a tool that still sucks.
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.
Same, this has been a challenge since my development machine also has access to banking/personal sensitive data. I would really like to run with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` (or equivalents) without too much worry.
Local VMs are heavyweight but useful if you are sandboxing an entire IDE/GUI app like Cursor. With containers it's somewhat annoying to share local files - Distrobox helps with GUI apps and mounting the home directory but loses sandboxing. I have been curious about Flatpak/bubblewrap, but haven't had time to try it.
For now I've settled on containers, but I would like to shift to a remote VM like I have at work.
I built a pi extension. Pi repo has an example extension that uses anthropics sandbox which is a total buggy mess. (To be clear, that's anthropics sandbox itself, not the pi extension wrapper which is fine)
I dug into it a little bit to see about improving things there, but decided to write a minimal version that better suited my needs instead.
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 had been using Antigravity for about 4 months now. I used Gemini Pro 3.1 heavily for small to medium size projects, alongside I used AWS Kiro and Claude Code. Then I use Angtigravity but instead of Gemini I installed Claude code extention which was working great till Today with the new update, Antigravity removed all the vscode extentions. Not sure even how git will work here. This antigravity update isn't an update but a completely new product. All the investments we have made in order set it down with our dev process, integration is gone, wasted.
This is a very bad move but actually its the permanent state of Google, launch a product and a bunch of similar kind of products and then pull the rug.
With the current state of the AI companies and models, one should stay as far away as possible from vendor lock in. Use open and agnostic harnesses and processes.
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.
Earlier this month I switched from Claude Code to Codex and wanted to try Gemini CLI as well.
It felt far behind both CC and Codex but I wanted to give it another chance with the new Antigravity CLI.
What can I say, it did surprise me and not in a good way in but two short sessions that included just two prompts (trying to reverse engineer some earbuds OTA firmware) using Gemini Flash 3.5, I managed to finish my weekly quota. I'm currently on the Google AI Pro subscription. Couldn't even figure out my tokens usage or if my plan is even counted toward usage inside Antigravity CLI.
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.
This is why most devs I know have stopped building anything serious on top of Googles AI tools. You cant build a workflow around something that gets renamed or killed every 6 months. Anthropic and OpenAI atleast understand that developer trust requires stability, Google still treats their AI devtools like consumer products. Ship it, rebrand it, kill it.
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
Google and Azure are masters in shitshow when it comes to AI products. Create/rename/abandon at god speed, giving more reason to never use them for anything serious.
Tried making an MCP server with Antigravity CLI. Antigravity CLI suffers from an identity crisis caused by a tool/ecosystem change: "I am unsure if I should be reading Gemini documentation, Gemini CLI documentation, Antigravity documentation or Antigravity CLI documentation". It couldn't really correctly answer how I should be registering the MCP server in its own system until I googled it.
If your organization uses Gemini CLI or our IDE extensions via a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise license, or if your organization uses Gemini Code Assist for GitHub through Google Cloud, your access remains unchanged. We’ll continue to support Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist with access to the latest Gemini models and other updates.
Oh, at least they didn't drop off Enterprise users. I think the general transition is towards building specialized products on top of agents. A lot of people are using claude code, codex, and other subsidized coding agents for non coding purposes as well.
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
Gemini CLI was my late entry into AI-assisted work.
It was included in my employers workspace subscription so I tried it out last june, and that's how I finally understood the power of AI.
Then they announced that it was no longer included in our license and I bought my own Claude license instead, the employer went with another AI company.
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.
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.
Google Takeout doesn't work properly for exporting Gemini chats.
Antigravity locks your chats locally behind .pb files.
Nothing to export your very own data.
OpenAI is best at personal data export. Claude has something at least, despite being quirky. Yet, Google looks very purpose-built to not give anything back.
Iflow and Qwen cli are gone too. They probably think the clis don't make much sense without pairing them with free use and free use has become very expensive.
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.
Not really using this product, but every time things like this happens, my trust in Google just goes further down even if I thought it wasn't possible. I don't get how companies even dare to rely on anything made by Google.
everytime google creates a project i pessimistically say i wont use it because it will be dead soon...i always get some downvotes by fanatics...and in the end its always true
Agy cli is a giant pile of turd, at the moment, compared to the gemini cli. Though much much faster using the 3.5 flash, which is quite good, ridiculously fast and seems capable, but it has a 1 week expiry after you exhausted your very tiny pool of tokens. Sigh.
Migration is half assed, lots of extensions and mcps doesnt work
Themes are fucked up (why not just copy everything over from geminicli?)
agy cli doesn't know about itself and can't comment on basic things about its config
...
> 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.
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”.
reply