Posted by ssiddharth 2 hours ago
Edit: I forgot to mention the curiosity and humility they bring to our calls. If I point out another vendors approach to a problem that we have, they always lean in and want to help improve their offerings from our feedback. They know it's not just enough to "be Google".
Other companies usually have a soulless void of an automatic system which gives you no confirmation your messages and inquiries are received whatsoever. Not Google. There is always a human on the other side so you know you are in good hands. Trust and connection are the things I value the most in this very two sided relationship.
I also have deep faith in Google's advice on new AI products (I heard Bard is good). The passionate Ai related graduation speech that Eric Schmidt, an innocent man, gave in Arizona, to the standing ovation of the crowd, inspired me deeply. I am now an even bigger Google fan than I ever was.
This is a huge surprise, never thought I would see this in my life time.
Now I think it totally gets the joke and it’s telling you a joke back.
As opposed to the usual, figurative sarcasm. (Just kidding.)
Your coding environment stands a lower chance of disrupion when you use an open source IDE with a CLI agent. Yes it's slightly annoying to separate the agent from the IDE but the benefit is that it's much easier to switch between Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI (now antigravity CLI), etc which means you can more easily benefit from pricing and coding performance differences which seem to change monthly.
It seems like Google is hitting the reset button on the product they call "Antigravity", existing users be damned. Fine, if you've never installed or used the previous version before... but for existing users the "bait and switch" is incredibly disorientating.
My take is they saw the market size for a general agentic tool as being larger and more significant than a specialised IDE. It shows a pretty large lack of respect for users in the later group though.
Also the Antigravity CLI doesn't remember your credentials in WSL. It asks you to log in every time you run the program.
And after 4 chat sessions, my ~/antigravity-server folder now takes up 4 GB.
Hot take: At least they're ripping the bandaid now instead of stringing users along and eventually abandoning it like they normally do.
Uhhh, about that :)
Gemini CLI (the open source cli) is being deprecated, and the recommended replacement is Antigravity CLI (which supposedly comes with the new Antigravity, not the IDE). shrug. Surely this will be maintained long term...
Will they make it work headless before the June deadline when they turn off gemini-cli? I guess we'll see...
https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transi...
No wonder they are losing massively to Huawei in several markets. Mobile marketshare is probably an indicator of some kind of their future prospects.
I don't like Google either, but I don't think this is a fair comparison.
It's easy for anyone to beat Google in China when the state has decided to block their servers.
Edit: Probably the high end non apple market in nearly all African countries too, but idk if there is reliable data for those.
Google's lack of focus is astounding. They sprinkle random products here and there and seem to then tepidly pick the product surface that is doing least bad and then tepidly focus on that. Compare that to every other AI lab, large and small that knows its identity and shaped its products around that.
Perhaps it's a sort of resource curse. Google doesn't need any one of these products to succeed, and it shows.
Because google can't help but constantly shoot its customers and itself in the foot.
What lead? Maybe because I'm mostly using AI/LLMs for development, but neither Google, Anthropic, xAI or anyone else has ever been in the lead, OpenAI always had the best models in my mind, as long as you're comparing the "top" plans between all of them.
Besides, they all seem to shoot themselves in the foot, OpenAI included, seems the only thing that differs is how often and how big the damage is.
Be skeptical of anything you read online, not just what you think is "obvious astroturf".
(on a serious note, do you feel comfortable naming and shaming such companies, this is sort of a serious accusation imo and if not then how much money they are trying to give. It would be an interesting discussion and feel free to mail me if its confidential, waiting for your response and have a nice day :-D)
and what is the metric for companies sending you messages, like I have never gotten a single message (aside from one/two companies here and there and I even made a HN post about one of the companies)
and what do these companies really have a metric for in terms of sending spam for? karma points, I mean emsh I remember we both had close enough about the same karmas not too long ago, surprised to see you at 13k+ karma, so good to see that but is the metric karma, hype (you had made the rust browser ..) or what exactly? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on that!
I do understand the point of these companies sending mail though, I mean I can't say that if I had a company at the moment I might not do the same either, but I think that you might get frustrated too with it, so what would your recommendation be to people sending you mails in general?
I would be curious to know that too!
Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).
We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.
We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, I don't think one party is more responsible than someone else, unless you're specifically involved with the specific technology, then you can attribute it to them.
So yes, Google's researchers might have invented the Transformer, but OpenAI researchers invented GPT. Does it matter we credit "LLMs" more to one than the other? I don't think so, especially in this context it's highly irrelevant. Google didn't have the "LLM lead" before LLMs even existed...
Also, if we're going backwards, who invented neural networks, does that mean that person also then "had LLMs before OpenAI existed"?
Google did, as they already said.
OpenAI was better at marketing and a lot more willing to cannibalize the search market as a newcomer. So Google blew their lead in research by not recognizing the product value quickly enough, or failing to win an internal political war on it anyway
Is there a fine-tuned Gemma coding model? I'd assume that would perform quite well.
> This unexpected shift completely broke my preferred workflow
it might not have been so unexpected if you knew you were one of ~15 people that start their day with Antigravity
And mind you, I'm not an anti AI extremist. But I dont think there's any need to adopt the new tool as your new full workbench, a Claude style chat in a nearby terminal has the same benefit and exposes you to a ridiculously smaller personal risk.
Recently I started to get harassed to upgrade. Big button in gmail, large notifications on top of my mail in the mobile app etc. Also two other buttons to get me to turn on AI features I don't need.
I already pay a lot, I don't want to pay double just not to be harassed.
Having buttons to features that I would have to pay extra for is one thing. But having notifications and large buttons to upgrade when I am already a paying customer is harassment.
Idk what google is doing
Maybe it’s an OS difference but on my Mac when the new crappy antigravity updated, I got a very helpful dialog box explaining the changes and offering to download and install Antigravity IDE. Of course I did so and both run happily at the same time. Well, they did the one time I launched both, but now I’m back to just using the IDE.