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by nateb2022·9mo ago·view on hn ↗
I went ahead and downloaded it, it looks to be a VSCode fork very similar to Cursor, with support for the following models:

  - Gemini 3 Pro (High)
  - Gemini 3 Pro (Low)
  - Claude Sonnet 4.5
  - Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Thinking)
  - GPT-OSS 120B (Medium)
8 comments
Thank you for saying what this entire blog post doesn't. It's actually disrespectful of Google to launch this without even a mention of the fact that it is based on VSCode.
There's some irony in that, given how many other companies have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong way.

The intro checklist for Antigravity includes watching VS Code tutorials!

VS Code is based on Chromium:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/v...

We've come full circle.

It's a good point, and in fact I went and looked at the original announcement of VS Code and it appears that Microsoft didn't credit Chromium or Electron back then either. I guess big companies are allergic to crediting other big companies.
> given how many other companies have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong way

Has there been any indication that these folks are "rubbing Google the wrong way"? I think Chromium, as a project, is actually very happy that more people are using their engine.

+1 - it also doesn't support remote ssh (the open vsx variant), so is probably only focused at local web design development vibe coding ;(

Should have just been an extension with a paid plan.

It also feels like they couldn't use the GOOGLE ANTIGRAVITY logo enough times in this blog post. Gigantic image with the logo and a subtitle, plastered over and over again.
I’m using remote ssh with it via the same plugin and settings I use in VS Code.
> so is probably only focused at local web design development vibe coding

Quick, someone throw the Linux kernel source at it and report back! xD

It's so obvious from even just the vague screenshots that are hidden somewhere on the site that it's a VSCode fork, that I suppose I can see why they've tried to obfuscate that as much as possible.
AI companies blogs are not for devs, they write for tech journalists to hype
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge

Nothing in there about chromium.

It's Windsurf
and also isn't
The welcome video says "We started with the core IDE then..." and shows a picture of VS Code.

They knew exactly what they were saying.

Yeah I also thought that was weird. Ctrl-f’d for vscode and was pretty confused that they didn’t even mention it.
And VSCode is based on Chromium (a fact you won't find on VS Code's website other than related to updates).
VSCode isn't a Chromium fork, it's an Electron app. Utilizing something is different than making a derivative of it. For example, an empty "Hello World" Electron app wouldn't have any value for an app developer, but creating a web browser derived from Chromium means you've already finished 99.9% of the work.
It uses Electron which itself uses the Chromium rendering engine.
That's like saying news.ycombinator.com is based on Chromium.

VSCode runs on chromium, like any website you visit when using a Chromium browser.

Honestly they don't even need to say so. The image literally looks like a vs code screenshot.
Why credit? Come on, the world has moved on from 1990s-era 4-clause BSD licenses. If you recall, the 4-clause BSD license states that all advertising materials must display an acknowledgement. It’s widely considered to be a mistake and nobody uses this license any more. Not because of legal reasons (incompatibility with GPL) but because it is madness to require so many acknowledgements. Stallman was right.
>it is madness to require so many acknowledgements

Really? Madness? "We started with VS Code to develop our IDE...".

Oh, so onerous.

A thank you to the principle developers is a minimum if you're using someone else's work commercially and aren't an asshole.

No it's not a legal requirement, it's just about being a good part of society.

Google is going to win AI and kill all the other market participants.

They have the revenues to support all of this.

They spent time learning from all the players and can now fast follow into every market. Now they're fast and nimble and are willing to clone other products wholesale, fork VSCode, etc.

They're developing all of this, meanwhile Pichai is calling it a "bubble" to put a chill on funding (read: competition). It's not like Google is slowing down.

We had a chance to break them up with regulation, and we didn't. Now they're going to kill every market participant.

This isn't healthy. We have an invasive species in the ecology eating up all the diverse, healthy species.

a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.

As engineers, you should certainly hate this. Google does everything it can to push wages down. Layoffs, offshoring, colluding with competitors. Fewer startups mean fewer rewards for innovation capital and more accrual to the conglomerate taxing the entire internet.

Chrome, Android, Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Workspace, Other Bets, and AI/Deepmind need to be split into separate companies.

Call or email your legislators and ask for antitrust enforcement: https://pluralpolicy.com/find-your-legislator/

Demand a Google breakup.

Google? Push wages down? Google is mostly known for paying top of market to keep a zoo of engineers whose only output is blog posts about how smart they are because they solved a problem they also caused.

(presumably because if they touch the ad system it might break)

> a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.

And a16z's main business is investing in financial scams.

For the wage suppression thing, Google pays their engineers better than say Amazon or Microsoft.
You ok?
Has Google *ever* successfully entered and taken over an existing market?
As somebody who worked on two IDEs which didn't fork VSCode but still used Monaco for code editing views, I think forking VSCode is almost always the right solutions for a new IDE. You get extensions, familiarity and most importantly, don't waste valuable time on the boring stuff which VSCode has already implemented.

Nothing bad with using code other people made open. Our whole industry is built on this.

it isn’t http://ghuntley.com/fracture

forking vscode? simple. extensions not so simple. they are controlled by microsoft. without them you’ll run into continual papercuts as a vendor who has forked vscode.

Why the need to fork it instead of creating a new extension? (besides marketing)
I wonder why these forks don't build off Eclipse Theia. Is it because of the Eclipse license?
Just the Eclipse legacy and development approach perhaps. Eclipse is 24 years old and its codebase stems from VisualAge before that, so I imagine it's ... idiosyncratic. Probably the most successful thing built on OSGi, though I dont imagine Theia brought any of that along.
I am not fan of Eclipse, mostly due to bad experience with it, but this is excellent idea, if more people and companies would invest in it's development, we would have alternative to VS Code.
I had the displeasure of using Eclipse in the 2000s Java times. I don't have many fond experiences of it.

We finally discovered IDEA and never looked back.

Interesting that they include non-Gemini models. Both Claude and GPT oss are both on Google Cloud, so I assume that Antigravity is using GC as the provider and not making API calls to Anthropic or OpenAI.
They're subsidising calls for data & reward signals. If they can do that without also sharing the data with other providers it's a win/win.
> VSCode

Which is on top of 'Chrome'.

Interesting sandwich: Google-Microsoft-Google.

just to add to the sandwich somehow, vscode is mainly written in typescript
similar sandwich is Angular-Typescript-V8
Doesn't VScode's inbuilt GitHub copilot already support all of these?
Oh no, not another VSCode fork...
Looks like they managed to make it Mac only in the process.
Many software engineering principles have been broken.

Google using Electron tells us that quality control is completely out of the window.

Unbelievable.

Making a VSCode fork is probably the wrong direction at this point in time. The future of agentic coding should need less support for code editor related functionality, and could eventually primarily support viewing code rather than editing code. There's a lot more flexibility in UI starting from scratch, and personally I want to see a UI that allows flexible manipulation of context and code changes with multiple agents.
GitHub is building a UI like this. I like it. I sometimes need the full IDE, but plenty of times don't. It's nice to be able to easily see what the agent is up to and converse with it in real-time while reviewing it's outputs.