Hands-on agentic development with Google’s Antigravity IDE

Google Antigravity IDE is one of the most sophisticated integrated development environments available today. In contrast to Antigravity 2.0, which focuses exclusively on managing agents, or Antigravity CLI, which is a way to interact with agents from the command line, Antigravity IDE covers the spectrum from a basic code editor, to an auto-completion engine, to an AI-powered editor, to a full-blown multi-agent orchestrator. 

Antigravity IDE uses Google’s Gemini models, and optionally Claude models. And it boasts several state-of-the-art features for agentic software development:

• Multi-agent: Antigravity IDE can spawn and orchestrate multiple agents working in parallel.
• Planning: Antigravity IDE will generate task lists and detailed implementation plans for approval and modification.
• Project awareness: Antigravity IDE understands your project’s structure and can run terminal commands and respond to their output.
• Interactivity: Antigravity IDE can run web searches and open a Chrome browser window to test a web app via the UI.

One of the most important factors in modern AI-driven development is the divide between programmers and non-programmers. There is a sense that the “citizen developer” or non-technical user has been empowered to build software. And to some extent, that is true. But the reality is that the AI only gets you so far before demanding some expertise.

Antigravity IDE is clean enough to be inviting to the non-developer. However, its most compelling features, the multi-agent orchestration and detailed implementation planning, will quickly call for knowledge of the architecture and internals of the application or system you intend to build. Even the clearest of natural language will become impenetrable jargon if you don’t have some grounding in concepts like dependencies, server routes, and database schemas.

To see exactly where this divide occurs in practice, and where the technical user benefits from the extra power, let’s put Antigravity IDE to work on a lightweight, local-first web project.

Building a web app with Antigravity IDE

We’ll start our project, a website called Vintage Guitar Vault, by launching Antigravity IDE, opening a command-line terminal pane, and issuing a straight command. 

When you first open Antigravity IDE, you’ll get a welcome screen similar to this:

Foundry

Let’s bootstrap our app using a standard terminal command. At the top of the screen, open Terminal -> New Terminal. In the command line that opens, enter:

npm create astro@latest vintage-guitar-vault

Following the wizard prompts, create an empty project and install the dependencies. 

Now open the folder we just created, using the left-hand file explorer menu. Open the src/pages/index.astro page, delete the placeholder content, and start typing:

---

const guitars = [

As you type, Antigravity IDE’s “foreground” AI will offer context suggestions. This is the same old auto-completion that we have become accustomed to, but it already might reveal where the difference between a developer and a non-developer lies. If you miss the “fence” (the three dashed lines at the head of the file) the auto-complete feature will not trigger. That is because .astro files expect that syntax to indicate it isn’t plain HTML—a distinction that might trip up a non-technical user.

When you type in the guitars array, auto-complete will offer a reasonable data set to fill it. But it will be fairly random. To get a more specific data set, we can use comments:

// Array of 3 acoustic guitars including id, make, model, and year

const acousticGuitars = [

Now when you auto-complete that, you’ll get a schema that works for our purposes. Something like:

Foundry

Wire up the UI with inline AI assistance

Now that we have our data, let’s render it to the page. Below the closing --- fence, insert some standard Astro HTML to map over our acoustic guitars:

  {acousticGuitars.map((guitar) => (
    

      {guitar.year} {guitar.make} {guitar.model}
      View Setup History
    
  ))}

This is a basic listing of the guitars. At this point, you can run the app at the terminal with npm run dev, and view it at http://localhost:4321/. 

You will see a static list of the instruments, but if you click the “View Setup History” button, nothing will happen. To bring this page to life, without dragging in a massive JavaScript framework, we will use HTMX. But instead of looking up the exact attributes and typing them manually, we’ll let Antigravity IDE’s inline AI assistant handle the syntax.

Highlight the element inside index.astro and press Control/Command-I to open Antigravity IDE’s inline command bar. Give the AI a prompt like so:

Add an HTMX get request to fetch this guitar’s maintenance log from /api/maintenance/${guitar.id} and swap the response into the #maintenance-log div.

The AI will produce the correct HTMX

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Hands-on agentic development with Google’s Antigravity IDE