[crakhamster01]

How does anyone internally at Google justify these decisions?

Even if there are competing implementations, in terms of brand recognition, I feel like “Gemini” is more closely associated with Google than “Antigravity”. Why pick the more obscure option?!

Perhaps they felt the sentiment on Gemini CLI was beyond repair, but surely there must be some voice on the inside saying “developers will never adopt our products if we keep killing them”.

[hydra-f]

By unifying the billing and quota systems, as well as providing better integration, I presume

The Antigravity harness is by far better than the gemini-cli one. Antigravity also offers models other than Gemini as well. When you say Antigravity, you think of a platform whereas when you say Gemini you think of the model

It's great that gemini-cli is open-source, but that also comes with a bunch of ai-generated issues and pull-requests, which is sure to impede development

[tauntz]

> When you say Antigravity, you think of a platform

Absolutely not? When you say "Antigravity" then the first thing that comes to mind is "yet another IDE" and I have no desire in switching my IDE.

[decimalenough]

It's not an IDE, it's a way to run agents. In particular, the Antigravity CLI positioned as Gemini CLI's successor is a shell with superpowers, not something you would use for code development.

[tomrod]

You proved the point. Gemini has been marketed better, such that even folks in the know confuse Antigravity (the IDE) with anything else attempting to be pushed.

[AlanYx]

Antigravity CLI was only announced yesterday, so pretty much no one realizes it's different from Antigravity IDE yet, but I agree with your overall point. This kind of branding is toxic for individual product awareness. I'm not sure what drives the thinking behind it; Microsoft does it too (Copilot, etc.).

[stogot]

Took me this long down the thread to understand it wasn’t an IDE. Terrible marketing and product strat

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I don't think so? Gemini CLI (RIP) was more of a direct competitor to Claude Code - a CLI based coding agent. Antigravity was more IDE-like, based around a VS Code fork (so more like Cursor). Antigravity CLI, per the name, seems to be positioning it as a replacement for Gemini CLI, so certainly(?) a Claude Code CLI-based coding agent, but now one with multi-agent support and some sort of server-side harness as well apparently, doing who knows what.

Any CLI-based coding agent can equally well be described as "a shell with superpowers", and people were using Claude Code for non-coding tasks (e.g. sysadmin) before OpenClaw appeared and made that it's main purpose.

[crakhamster01]

> Antigravity also offers models other than Gemini as well. When you say Antigravity, you think of a platform whereas when you say Gemini you think of the model.

I the other reasons you mentioned could be solved while keeping the Gemini name, but this is a fair point. I didn't realize they offered 3rd party models!

> When you say Antigravity, you think of a platform whereas when you say Gemini you think of the model

Yea I guess if their goal long-term is to be something more akin to Cursor that makes sense, but Anthropic seems to be doing just fine using "Claude" in their naming scheme.

[dzikimarian]

I don't ever say "Antigravity", because it's not worth getting invested into tool, that will be dead in two years, when "Google Harness" or whatever they will call it, will replace it

[blitzar]

When you say Antigravity, I think of floating around on a space ship.

[benfortuna]

I think that's a lack of gravity. According to wikipedia antigravity is in fact impossible (under known laws of physics).

[HarHarVeryFunny]

It's not lack of gravity - it's just that you and the space ship are both falling towards earth under the same gravitational acceleration, so your acceleration relative to the spaceship is zero. You don't need to be in space to experience this - in a "vomit comet" airplane used for training astronauts (and for photographing Kate Upton) you experience the same thing as the plane goes into freefall.

You would of course also experience the same thing if you were out in space far from any major gravitational attraction (almost "lack of gravity"), but obviously that's not the case with things like the ISS that we're used to seeing.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Maybe that's what the experience of using it is like ?

[Ferret7446]

You failed the shibboleth. Real programmers think of xkcd.

[jawilson2]

"When you say Antigravity, you think of a platform..."

No, I don't.

I've never heard of Antigravity, but have (rarely) used Gemini, so there's that.

[otikik]

> It's great that gemini-cli is open-source, but that also comes with a bunch of ai-generated issues and pull-requests, which is sure to impede development

In a way, it is exciting to me that people exist that think like this. It is so different than how I think, we could be from different planets.

[chrisweekly]

OSS == "great... but... will impede development"?

[hydra-f]

Yes, since the former part relates to me as the individual (as I get the benefits of an open source project)

The latter is about the contributors that can no longer reap the benefits of OSS, since the amount of noise (e.g. low quality contributions, false-positives etc) leads to wasted time and effort to keep up with the flood

Were you to decide to one day file a genuine bug report or make a pull request, big chances that you will never get a response (1.5k issues, 329 pull requests open as of now). It's a Frankenstein('s monster) of a project from all perspectives, which is a shame, since I'm rather fond of the interface

[aleksiy123]

I saw someone in a different thread describe Google product/tool strategy as a: “monkey knife fight”

And tbh I can’t really argue with that.

[throwaway894345]

Reminds me of the Microsoft days circa 2010 when Microsoft published half a dozen media players (Zune!), word processors, email clients, etc.

[opsnooperfax]

I think this is a systemic problem of an industry where gross margin is 80% or higher, so you can plow all that extra money into superfluous headcount tasked with objectives of questionable business value. It’s a curse of riches, if you will. The rest of us living on 15 to 30% margins need to think a little harder about what we do and why.

[giancarlostoro]

It's worse when you consider these are the only companies that can afford it due to the tax implications of R&D, my understanding was that you still pay the full bill on a developer building something as if you were making profits, even though you're burning their entire salary and other resources on it.

[HFguy]

FWIW, what you will see at times in the HF world is a firm will want to get into a strategy and build competing teams. It lights a fire under both. It diversifies the risk. You can select winner and move some people over from loser. And if they both work, they both work.

It isn't a crazy idea if the opportunity is large enough to make the larger investment required worth it.

The problem I see in applying this to products is it can be very confusing for clients.

[ur-whale]

> I think this is a systemic problem of an industry where gross margin is 80%

explain how GOOG's margin is 80%

what methodology do you use to derive that number?

just curious.

[Eisenstein]

Its 36% for Q1 2026.

* https://i.imgur.com/3gDVMCk.png

[superjan]

The way I understood the 80% is that is the margin on the actual product. 36% is what remains after the “investments” in moonshot projects nobody asked for.

[giancarlostoro]

Wasn't it always somewhere between 20 to 30% (especially more recently in the 30s) but the real difference is, they're in the billions of dollars, your small business might be in the millions, it's quite a drastic difference altogether.

[seviu]

In those rare occasion when I want to use Gemini I just type gemini on my terminal.

Gemini was on life support on my side. I barely get to use it due to its subpar performance in coding, which is to be honest the only use I have of it.

And now I read that they spent 4 to 5 months testing 3.5 internally. Let that sink in. By the time they release the world has moved on. I don’t know who makes decisions at Google regarding AI but it saddens me to see this happening. Google should be up there leading but they are lagging against everybody.

How can I justify dropping 100$ per month, for a coding agent that is half a year behind, knowing that Codex or Kimi is going to do much better?

Stock might be ripping but that’s about it.

[popcorncowboy]

On the other hand I quietly cheer every time they fumble even slightly, in their seemingly inexorable march to becoming our ultimate, terrifying, corporate overlords.

[pimeys]

Yes. Every possible pain they have makes me happy when their other hand is slowly destroying Android. Let them suffer.

[kreelman]

I get what you're saying about Gemini for coding and it's useful that you mention it.

I wonder though if Google isn't so worried about the viability of their coding AIs and have a longer term view than simply providing coding aids. This might also be indicated by their recent $40B investment in Anthropic, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/google-to-invest-up-to-40-bi...

...Only time will tell!

[Glohrischi]

I think google has another 'problem': Gemini needs to do a lot more than claude.

They use Gemini for personal assistent to all of their Gmail and co users/customers. They have Google Docs, they have GCP were gemini should support you too.

They also have a lot more languages to support too.

They optimize Gemini for A LOT more than 'just' coding. So its probably a balance act for them. And because they are that rich and have no issues on compute and brain, they can play the long game easily.

If they push their tpu further and continue their build out, they will be able to start training high quality topic optimized models in parallel while everyone else needs the same amount to just train one main model.

[amunozo]

What is preventing them from making a coding dedicated model if that's the issue?

[Mond_]

Strategic vision.

The common sentiment is that you didn't really want to do that. You expect higher returns from only having a single base model.

[blitzar]

I disagree; gemini is their ai model brand, antigravity is their code harness.

Its much better branding than calling every single product "Co-Pilot (tm)".

[dbbk]

Yes it'd be like if Claude Code was actually called Opus

[dzikimarian]

Except they have Flash & Pro labels too for another level of complexity

[ethbr1]

Ah, so Gemini is the new Watson.

[blitzar]

Gemini Inside (tm)

[bmitc]

I have never understood basically any decision Google makes at any level. I think they're equivalent to a land owner sitting on top of oil. They have no idea what to do, and anything they do makes pennies compared to the oil, so it doesn't really matter what they do on top of that, customers be damned.

As if I needed another reason to hate them, they turned our Nest back to shitty thermostats last year by dropping older models from their Google Home service. There's no justification for it other than some product owner wanted to.

[skywhopper]

Internal political wrangling and competition along with poor top-level leadership explain these sorts of bumbling moves. The same story that has always been at Google.

[crespire]

This is the Google messaging problem all over again. Hangouts, Google Chat, Google Hangout Google whatever the fuck, messaging, GMail chat, Google Wave, Google Duo, Google MS Teams.

Now Meets Chat is Hangouts again!

[Rebuff5007]

Between this comment, and the comment above, I dont know what feels like fair criticism here.

Having a single perfect product strategy with non-overlapping product categories and understandable names is hard for any organization, particularly in a rapidly evolving space.

Its obviously an issue to have multiple mature products be chaotically names.

At this moment antigravity and gemini cli and are hardly mature. Isn't now the perfect time to consolidate?

[butlike]

Each consolidation is a reset. It's essentially a vote saying the brand recognition isn't strong enough, which implies a low confidence in the product

[baby]

I still call it bard

[kilroy123]

With a LOT of money, that's how.

[egorfine]

> developers will never adopt our products if we keep killing them

We all want this to be the case but it's never the case. It never stops to amuse me how developers of the world fall into the Google trap again and again and again despite knowing better.

Personally have been hurt a lot by the abandonment of Polymer and since then it would not occur to me to touch any Google development product because what's the point really?

[jstummbillig]

I would wager your feelings conflict with their analysis (which they are probably quite good at, with all that practice)

[cmrdporcupine]

As someone who worked there for a decade, I would wager instead that all that analysis at the top makes no difference when you're unable to execute because your internal politics are broken.

EDIT: ... also that the analysis at the "top" is mostly being made by people with the wrong incentives and motives, too.

[crakhamster01]

> I would wager your feelings conflict with their analysis

How their target audience feels isn’t separate from “analysis” - it’s the input.