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by ozgung 26 days ago
I want to Ask HN relating to this: What can be the motivation behind this change? Is this the preferred way of using AI coding tools nowadays? I've been using Antigravity mainly because of its tab completions. So I can work in code like in a traditional way and AI assists me. But it was a broken experience and now they are moving away from IDE based tool. The alternative is you write the prompt and it does everything. Is this the standard SW development workflow in 2026?
5 comments
throwa356262 26 days ago
Google corporate culture where users are just numbers someone's performance report is why this happens.

Google could easily A/B test half of their users away from their products and nobody would get fired for it

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devmor 26 days ago
This is how they want you to use AI-powered apps. The more ambiguity there is between you and the end result, the likelier you are to keep paying them to avoid friction.

The problem with AI products vs other rent-seeking is that AI is very expensive to build out and run… so they are desperate to push you into relying on it quickly.

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doug_durham 26 days ago
Yes, this is the standard model for the big frontier models. You don't need Gemini or Claude to do tab completions. A modest size local model can do that just fine. If that is all you are using AI tools for you are wasting money subscribing to Google.
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browningstreet 26 days ago
I'm surprised anyone thought Google would stay committed to an IDE product built on Microsoft's VS Code.

This was clearly an experiment or stepping stone, they were never going to stick to this path. It was always going to go away.

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dist-epoch 26 days ago
The most widely used IDE inside Google to work on Google products, Cider, is based on VS Code.

https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/a-history-of-ides-at-google

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browningstreet 26 days ago
And?

Companies build all kinds of internal tools that are at odds with their long term brand and public product strategy.

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burntalmonds 26 days ago
It is the new standard. It sounds awful until you try it, and then you can't go back. But you can still use an IDE as well to edit code by hand and review changes that agents have made.
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