The dust is finally settling on the November AI frenzy. We’ve had two weeks to digest the Gemini 3 launch, the inevitable counter-moves from OpenAI, and the sheer volume of announcements flooding our feeds since November 18. If you are anything like me, you are probably exhausted by the headlines claiming every new chatbot is going to replace your engineering team.
But if you look past the marketing metaphors and the sci-fi branding coming out of Mountain View, you’ll realize we are standing on the precipice of a genuine architectural shift. We are moving from the era of AI assistance to the era of AI agency.
I’ve watched developer tooling evolve from the early days of IntelliSense to the first time I saw GitHub Copilot guess my function correctly. But what Google released with Antigravity isn’t just another step on that ladder. It’s a completely different ladder.
We need to talk about orchestration. While the rest of the industry is arguing about benchmark scores and context windows, Google has quietly shipped a platform that fundamentally changes who is driving the IDE.
The Manager View and the Shift to Dispatcher
If you are using Cursor or GitHub Copilot today, you are accustomed to a linear workflow. You type, the AI suggests. You ask a question, the AI answers. You are the pilot and the AI is the passenger offering directions.
Antigravity breaks that contract. It introduces a Manager View that feels less like a code editor and more like a dispatch center. You aren’t just completing lines of code; you are spawning autonomous agents to go off and execute entire workflows.
I’ve been testing the preview since it dropped, and the difference is jarring. You can assign one agent to scrape a web page for data and another to scaffold a React component to display it. They run in parallel, planning and executing on their own.
My Expert Take
This is where the industry is heading, whether we like it or not. The chat interface we’ve all grown used to is becoming a bottleneck because it requires you to be synchronous. Google is betting that the next productivity unlock comes from asynchronous delegation. It’s the difference between doing the work yourself and managing a team of interns who work at lightspeed but occasionally hallucinate a dependency.
Bridging the Trust Gap with Artifacts
Trust is the single biggest barrier to adopting agentic AI. If I can’t see what the bot did, I can’t merge it. This is where Google’s acquisition of the Windsurf team seems to be paying dividends.
Antigravity agents don’t just work in the dark. They generate Artifacts which act as tangible proof of work. I’m talking about implementation plans, diff patches, and even recordings of the headless browser session where the agent tested the UI.
My Expert Take
This feature is the sleeper hit of the release. It forces the AI to show its work. As we move toward this agent-first reality, the skill set of a senior engineer is going to shift rapidly from writing elegant syntax to auditing autonomous output. If you aren’t verifying the artifacts, you aren’t coding, you’re just gambling.
The Security Nightmare Lurking Beneath
However, we need to have a sober conversation about safety. While everyone is celebrating the autonomy, the security implications are terrifying.
In the last 48 hours, we’ve seen reports—verified by researchers like Aaron Portnoy—that these agents can be tricked into compromising the very machine they are running on. We are giving these bots shell access, file system access, and internet access simultaneously. That violates the “Rule of Two” which states you should never give an agent access to input, private data, and action capability all at once.
There are already horror stories circulating on Reddit about agents accidentally deleting entire drives because they lacked the context to understand a cleanup command.
My Expert Take
This is the Wild West phase of agentic AI. We are building skyscrapers on foundations of sand. Google’s safeguards are a nice thought, but they are insufficient against a prompt injection attack embedded in a malicious README file. If you are running this on your production machine without a sandbox, you are asking for trouble.
How Google is Sherlock-ing the Competition
It is impossible to view this release in a vacuum. Google is clearly taking a shot at the startups that have been eating its lunch. By integrating the browser, terminal, and editor into one full-stack tool, they are trying to Sherlock companies like Warp and Cursor.
GitHub Copilot is still the safe, reliable choice for enterprise, mostly because it doesn’t let the AI run wild on your terminal. But with Antigravity, Google is pushing the envelope on what an IDE is supposed to be. It’s messy, it’s dangerous, and it’s undeniably powerful.
The Future is Curated
We are entering the age of AgentOps. The goal isn’t just to write code; it’s to curate the output of probabilistic engines. Google Antigravity is our first real look at that future, warts and all. It offers a glimpse of a world where we spend less time typing and more time directing. But until the security model matures, I’d suggest you keep your hands on the wheel.
Action Plan for the Curious
If you are brave enough to try the preview this week, here is how you should approach it.
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Sandbox It Do not install this on your root drive. Use a VM or a container. The risk of data loss is non-zero.
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Use the Manager View Don’t treat it like a chatbot. Assign a multi-step task that involves the terminal and the browser to see what the engine can actually do.
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Audit the Artifacts Before you accept any code, look at the plan the agent generated. If the logic is flawed there, the code will be too.
About the Author: Roger Lund is a 20-year industry architect, founder of vbrainstorm.com, and a Tech Field Day Delegate. He specializes in data resilience, cloud architecture, and the intersection of infrastructure and AI.
