Google Antigravity 2.0 beats Claude Code and Codex at their own game

Just when the tech world thought Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex had locked down the AI-driven development space, Google went ahead and flipped the script.

While competitors have spent the last year refining incremental autocomplete and context windows, Antigravity 2.0 has quietly rewritten the rules of the game.

Here is exactly how Google’s latest powerhouse is beating the industry’s favorite dev tools at their own game.

What is Antigravity 2.0, anyway?

Let’s understand the context here

When Google first dropped Antigravity last year, I will admit I was intrigued but thoroughly confused. While it’s basically a VS Code fork, Antigravity had this dual identity: a standard text editor and a futuristic Agent Manager, which looks like a totally different app.

Trying to split my brain between writing code manually and monitoring background AI agents in the same cluttered window felt like a massive challenge.

Google understood the identity crisis, and at I/O 2026, the company announced version 2.0. Now, the Antigravity software is split into two parts: a dedicated Agent Manager that looks and feels a lot like Claude Code and Codex and an Antigravity IDE tool which feels like VS Code with the Gemini add-on.

The best part of this pivot is the new UI. It is streamlined, responsive, and well-built. More importantly for my daily workflow, it is lightweight too. Unlike Codex, which regularly turns my laptop into a space heater and sets the cooling fans to maximum blast, Antigravity 2.0 runs completely cool in the background, even when it’s dealing with complex, parallel tasks.

Antigravity 2.0 features

Don’t forget about speed, too

Using the new standalone interface is a night-and-day difference from the cluttered, split-screen identity crisis of the old app. Antigravity 2.0 acts like a high-level command center. Google has packed a ton of agentic power into this release, and a few specific features redefine the workflow for me.

The biggest benefit is how it handles my files. Version 2.0 introduces an abstracted UI built around Projects. Now, a single project workspace can span multiple, totally separate folders across my machine.

It gives me the freedom to let an agent look at a frontend repo, a backend service, and a documentation folder all at once.

With the old app, if I gave the AI a massive, multi-part task, it would try to solve everything in a single chat. The context window would get bloated with terminal logs, and the model would eventually lose the plot.

Antigravity 2.0 solves this with dynamic subagents. The main orchestrator looks at a complex problem, breaks it down, and spins up subagents to tackle different parts in parallel.

Scheduled Tasks is where the futuristic workflow really clicks. I no longer have to sit down, prompt the AI, and wait for a response. I can use Scheduled Tasks to automate routine background checks. For example, I can configure an agent to wake up automatically at midnight, run localized tests across my projects, scan for errors, and handle basic maintenance autonomously while I sleep.

Live voice transcription is another quality-of-life upgrade I have with Antigravity 2.0. Because it’s powered natively by the latest Gemini audio models, I don’t have to record a voice note, wait for an upload, and hope for a clean transcription.

Advanced slash commands

Quite helpful

Because Google optimized the application layer around Gemini 3.5, the execution speed is excellent. I ran some complex tasks on all three and Antigravity was faster than Codex and right up there with Claude Code in terms of generating code. The code quality was commendable too.

Google has also implemented advanced slash commands that let me direct the AI like an engineering manager.

Among them, I use the /goal command all the time. Here, I ask the agent to run without any hurdles, self-correct through errors, and bypass any need to approve actions from my side. It’s quite helpful for my small projects.

/grill-me is another command I use frequently. Instead of guessing my intent, the agent pauses and cross-examines me before touching a single file. /browser and /schedule are the other two commands you can use. I hope to see more such useful commands in future updates.

While Google is fully focused on Antigravity 2.0, the company hasn’t completely ditched the traditional IDE app. Of course, the company will eventually remove the Agent Manager from it and ask users to move to the 2.0 version, but if you are dealing with old projects and need a Gemini-powered text editor, you can always download the original app from the website.

Google's new AI coding beast

If Claude Code and Codex felt like the peak of the first generation of AI coding tools, Antigravity 2.0 feels like the arrival of the second. After all, developers don’t care about AI rivalries; we care about shipping clean code without the friction.

Whether you are trying to one-shot a complex microservice or seamlessly orchestrate a massive multi-file legacy codebase, one this is now undeniable: the bar for dev AI has just been raised, and the competition has some serious catching up to do.

Google Antigravity

Google Antigravity is an AI-powered IDE that rivals VS Code and Codex.

See at Google Antigravity

Paul

Paul

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Member since 2026-02-05

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I knew it was out but I haven't even bothered firing it up mostly because the old antigravity was only really good if you wanted to see how quick it will break your code, not sure if it's my style or what but Gemini always seems like the sickly child even against open weight models, I don't know how it does so well on benchmark

2026-06-01 23:59:16

Google Antigravity 2.0: il nuovo punto di riferimento per il coding AI