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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
by nateb2022 11mo ago
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)
- koakuma-chan 11mo agoOh no, not another VSCode fork...
- rvz 11mo agoMany software engineering principles have been broken. Google using Electron tells us that quality control is completely out of the window. Unbelievable.
- user34283 11mo agoI tried writing a native Windows app using WinUI 3. I wasted a day on trying to get some PNGs to render correctly, but no matter the config I used, the colors came out wrongly oversaturated. I used Tauri with a WebView, and the app was rendering the images perfectly fine. On top of that the UI looked much better, and I was done in half the time I spend trying to fix the rendering issue in WinUI 3. Never again will I go native.
- sirwhinesalot 11mo agoTo be fair WinUI3 is particularly bad. If you're forced to install a 100MB runtime anyway, might as well make that runtime be a browser.
- user34283 11mo agoSince Tauri uses the system's WebView, it shouldn't be that big. The docs say a minimal app could be 600 KB.
- sirwhinesalot 11mo agoYeah, Tauri is better in that regard. My point is if the comparison is with WinUI, you might as well use Electron.
- morshu9001 11mo agoNative app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the mercy of Apple etc. It's unfortunate that things are so inefficient now, but competition is good, and native platforms can get good.
- zahlman 11mo ago> Native app dev is covered in red tape and puts you at the mercy of Apple etc. ... Aren't we talking about a programming IDE here? When did mobile become anything like the primary market for that? Are people expected to sit around for hours inputting symbols with an OSK?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- morshu9001 11mo agoMac. It's a pain to target, and I don't mean cause of the code signing.
- timeon 11mo agoIf Zed can make it, even with completely new stack, why not Google? What are all this LLMs for when everything is just fork of electron app? Does not look like good marketing.
- morshu9001 11mo agoI'm not ignoring this question, I'm just not familiar with Zed and don't know how native it feels. Maybe Vscode is quicker to modify in the future as needed (esp if Google already uses it), or Antigravity is better in ways than Zed, or Zed just has a more skilled team than Google. Also I'm used to vim and sensitive to lag, so I always hated vscode, but seems a lot of people don't notice or something. And when you're using AI for 90% of the loc, it matters less.
- badgersnake 11mo agoLooks like they managed to make it Mac only in the process.
- koakuma-chan 11mo agoI would love this to be true to further make fun of Electron, but I don't think it's Mac only. https://antigravity.google/download https://antigravity.google/download
- badgersnake 11mo agoAhh you’re right. The UX of that site is bad on my phone.
- modeless 11mo agoThank 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.
- shrikant 11mo agoIt'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.
- echelon 11mo agoGoogle 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/ https://pluralpolicy.com/find-your-legislator/ Demand a Google breakup.
- ethmarks 11mo agoInteresting 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.
- NitpickLawyer 11mo agoThey'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.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- golergka 11mo agoAs 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.
- nahuel0x 11mo agoWhy the need to fork it instead of creating a new extension? (besides marketing)
- benoau 11mo agoBecause if they're just an extension they're stuck with whatever rules Microsoft makes up, and Google is no stranger to using this leverage against others.
- meowface 11mo agoBecause there are plenty of good reasons why you may want to modify/extend the code and the look and feel beyond what an extension would let you do. I never understood why people scoff at VS Code forks. I'd honestly tend to be more skeptical of new editors that don't fork VS Code, because then they're probably missing a ton of useful capabilities and are incompatible with all the VSC extensions everyone's gotten used to.
- jonny_eh 11mo agohttps://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-apologizes-for-removing-vscode-extensions-used-by-millions/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-ap...
- ghuntley 11mo agoit isn’t http://ghuntley.com/fracture 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.
- aniviacat 11mo agoI wonder why these forks don't build off Eclipse Theia. Is it because of the Eclipse license?
- desireco42 11mo agoI 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.
- chuckadams 11mo agoJust 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.
- gmueckl 11mo agoAt least for a while, Eclipse seemed like an Architect Astronaut's happy fever dream: actual bits if implementations hidden behind 5 to 10 nested interfaces and facades wherever I looked. I remember that at one point that I wanted to debug some weird behavior in the Plugin Development Kit and after sinking about half a day into exploring the source code, I didn't even see a single line of code that was actually doing anything meaningful. It was quite shocking to my old junior level self.
- sakesun 11mo agoEclipse Theia is based on VSCode, not the legacy Eclipse Java IDE.
- tecleandor 11mo agoWell, it uses the just the Monaco editor, but the rest is not based on VS Code.
- theshrike79 11mo ago
- alyxya 11mo agoMaking 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.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- latentsea 11mo agoGitHub 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.
- timeon 11mo ago> VSCode Which is on top of 'Chrome'. Interesting sandwich: Google-Microsoft-Google.
- dartharva 11mo agoDoesn't VScode's inbuilt GitHub copilot already support all of these?