By Roo | Developer Tools Writer | Building on both platforms

Google just released a free agent-first IDE to challenge Cursor. One acts like a coding assistant. The other acts like an autonomous engineering team. Here is the complete breakdown including security risks, real failures, and a use-case decision matrix so you pick the right tool.

Most comparisons of these two tools stop at feature lists. This one does not.

By the end of this post you will know exactly what Google Antigravity is, how it differs from Cursor at a fundamental level, what security settings to configure before you touch any real code, what the D drive incident actually tells you about autonomous AI risk, which tool wins for your specific situation, and what neither tool wants to say out loud about where this is all going.

Google Antigravity is an AI-powered integrated development environment launched on November 18, 2025. It is a heavily modified fork of Visual Studio Code, though there is ongoing debate in the developer community about whether it is a direct VS Code fork or a fork of Windsurf, which is itself a VS Code fork. The fork question matters because it affects extensions compatibility in ways that are still being documented.

Antigravity is free during public preview. It runs on Windows 10 and above, macOS Monterey 12 and above, and 64-bit Linux with glibc 2.28 or later. As of late February 2026 it is on version 1.18.4.

The core idea behind Antigravity is that agents should not just be chatbots in a sidebar. They should have their own dedicated space to plan, execute, and verify complex development tasks with minimal human intervention.

Google describes this as an agent-first platform, and that phrase matters more than most marketing language. It is a genuine architectural difference from every previous AI coding tool including Cursor.

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If you have not used Cursor, think of it as VS Code with a very powerful AI co-pilot built directly into the editor rather than bolted on as a plugin.

Cursor's Composer model is purpose-built for code and completes typical tasks in around 30 seconds. It supports up to 8 parallel agents in isolated workspaces for true parallel development. It has been available since 2023, has serious commercial traction at around $500 million in annual recurring revenue, and has documented enterprise deployments including at NVIDIA where internal code commits tripled after rollout.

Cursor costs $20 per month for the Pro plan. It holds SOC 2 certification. It has over two years of production use with known limitations and battle-tested behavior.

Most comparisons get lost in feature lists. Here is the single most important distinction.

Cursor augments manual coding. Antigravity automates whole development tasks.

With Cursor, you open a repo, type, and get aggressive inline completions. You ask the agent to refactor something, skim the diffs, fix mistakes manually, and continue coding. It feels like pair programming with an extremely fast junior developer who types ahead of you but still waits for your direction.

With Antigravity, you become the task manager. You tell agents what to build. They plan the steps, write the code, run the terminal, open the browser, validate the output, and leave behind artifacts showing exactly what they changed and why.

One is a supercharged assistant. The other is a tiny autonomous dev team.

Which philosophy you prefer depends entirely on how you work and what you are building.

If you want to try Antigravity today, here is exactly how to do it. No Google account other than a personal Gmail is required. It is free.

Step 1: Go to antigravity.google/download and download the version for your operating system. Mac, Windows, and specific Linux distributions are supported.

Step 2: Launch the installer and work through the setup flow. At the Choose Setup Flow step, you will be offered the option to import your existing VS Code or Cursor settings. If you are coming from Cursor, use this. It brings over your keybindings, theme, and extensions preferences so you are not starting from scratch.

Step 3: At the agent autonomy setup screen, choose Review-driven development. This is the recommended setting. It means the agent will ask for your approval at key checkpoints before executing terminal commands, writing major code changes, or taking browser actions. Do not choose Agent-driven development or Turbo mode until you fully understand the security implications.

Step 4: Install the Chrome browser extension when prompted. Antigravity uses a dedicated browser subagent that requires this extension to interact with web pages, capture screenshots, and record verification videos. You will be walked through this the first time you give the agent a browser task.

Step 5: Sign in with your personal Gmail account. Antigravity is currently only available for personal Gmail accounts during public preview. You will get a generous free quota of Gemini 3.1 Pro usage to start.

You are now ready. The Agent Manager opens by default and is your Mission Control for dispatching agents to tasks.

Antigravity has two distinct interfaces that serve completely different purposes.

The Editor View

This looks and behaves almost identically to VS Code. You get a file tree, syntax highlighting, terminal, the full extensions ecosystem, and an agent side panel you can open with Command L. The agent side panel works like an advanced chat with access to your codebase context. You can use at-symbol to reference specific files, directories, or MCP servers, and slash to trigger saved workflow prompts.

In the editor you get intelligent autocomplete that completes as you type and accepts with Tab, tab-to-import suggestions for missing dependencies, tab-to-jump to move the cursor to the next logical code position, and inline command mode with Command I for natural language code generation in place.

The Agent Manager View

This is the genuinely new thing Antigravity introduces. Think of it as Mission Control for autonomous agents.

In the Agent Manager you can dispatch multiple agents to work on completely different tasks simultaneously. Each agent gets its own workspace, its own task thread, and produces Artifacts you can review asynchronously. You can have one agent refactoring an authentication module while another generates a test suite for the billing API while you are not watching either of them.

This architecture addresses a fundamental limitation of previous AI coding tools. In a traditional chat interface like Cursor's sidebar, you wait for the AI to finish before asking the next question. In Antigravity's Manager View, you dispatch five agents to five different problems and check the results when they finish.

Planning Mode vs Fast Mode

Both the Editor and Agent Manager offer two conversation modes.

Planning mode is for complex tasks. The agent creates an implementation plan before writing any code, produces a full task list, and checks in at each major milestone. You can review and comment on the plan before the agent proceeds. Use this for anything non-trivial.

Fast mode is for simple tasks. The agent executes directly without a planning phase. Use this for renaming variables, running bash commands, making localized small changes. It is faster but produces less verification output.

Artifacts solve what Google calls the Trust Gap. When an agent says it fixed the bug, you previously had to read the code yourself to verify it. Antigravity instead has agents produce tangible deliverables at each stage of their work.

There are five types of artifacts:

Task Lists are structured plans the agent creates before writing code. You can review and comment on these before the agent proceeds.

Implementation Plans are technical architecture documents showing exactly what changes the agent intends to make to your codebase. These appear before coding begins and are meant to be reviewed unless you have set your policy to Always Proceed.

Walkthroughs are summary documents created after the agent finishes implementation. They explain what was changed and how to verify it.

Screenshots are UI captures the agent takes before and after any visual change. You can review the before and after at a glance without running the application yourself.

Browser Recordings are videos of the agent's verification session. For a task like "click the login button and verify the dashboard loads," the agent records the entire interaction. You can watch the video to confirm the feature works without opening the browser yourself.

You can leave Google Docs style comments directly on any artifact and the agent will incorporate your feedback without stopping its execution.

These three features are what separate basic Antigravity usage from professional usage. They are documented in the Codelabs tutorial in technical detail but almost never explained in plain language for developers who do not want to read 10,000 words of setup instructions.

Rules

Rules are persistent instructions that apply to every agent interaction in your workspace or globally across all workspaces. Think of them as system instructions for your personal AI developer. Examples of useful rules: always follow PEP 8 style guidelines, always document every method, never put logic directly in main.py, always handle null cases explicitly.

Rules are saved as markdown files. Workspace rules live in your-workspace/.agents/rules/ and apply only to that project. Global rules live in home/.gemini/GEMINI.md and apply everywhere.

Workflows

Workflows are saved prompts you trigger on demand using the slash command in the agent chat. They guide agent behavior for specific repeatable tasks. A useful example is a generate-unit-tests workflow that you trigger only after you are satisfied with the code, rather than having the agent generate tests automatically every time.

Workflows are different from Rules because they are activated by choice rather than running automatically on every task.

Skills

Skills are specialized knowledge packages that sit dormant until a relevant task activates them. They use progressive disclosure: the agent only reads a skill's full instructions when your request matches the skill's description. This prevents tool bloat and keeps the agent's context window clean.

Skills can be global (available across all projects) or workspace-specific (only active in one project). They are directory-based packages that can contain instructions, scripts, reference documents, and assets.

A practical example: a code-review skill that loads detailed review criteria only when you ask the agent to review a file, and a license-header-adder skill that automatically prepends your company's copyright header to every new source file.

This is the section that should exist on every Antigravity review article but does not.

Giving an AI agent access to your terminal and browser is powerful and genuinely risky if configured incorrectly. Before you use Antigravity on anything other than a throwaway test project, configure these settings.

Terminal Command Auto Execution Policy

Go to Antigravity Settings, then Advanced Settings, then find the Terminal section. You have three modes.

Off mode means the agent never auto-executes terminal commands unless you explicitly allow specific commands via an allow list. This is the most secure configuration.

Auto mode means the agent decides whether to execute based on internal safety models and asks for permission on commands it considers risky. This is the default and reasonable middle ground.

Turbo mode means the agent always auto-executes commands unless you have explicitly blocked them via a deny list. This is the fastest but most dangerous configuration. Do not use this on a machine with important files until you have a comprehensive deny list in place.

The Deny List: Start with These Commands

If you use Turbo or Auto mode, add these commands to your deny list immediately via the Advanced Settings panel:

rm, sudo, curl, wget

These four commands represent the categories of irreversible or externally communicating actions. Blocking them by default means the agent must ask your permission before deleting files, running with elevated privileges, or making outbound network requests outside of the browser subagent.

The Allow List

If you use Off mode for maximum security, you can explicitly whitelist the terminal commands you want the agent to run autonomously. Start with ls, git status, git add, git commit, and the specific package manager commands for your language. Everything else requires your approval.

The Browser URL Allowlist

The agent's browser can visit any URL during tasks, which creates a prompt injection risk. A compromised documentation site could contain instructions designed to manipulate the agent. Set up a browser URL allowlist in Advanced Settings by opening the allowlist file at home/.gemini/antigravity/browserAllowlist.txt and adding only the domains your agent should be allowed to visit autonomously.

A widely cited real incident occurred during Antigravity's early public preview. The agent incorrectly interpreted a cache deletion task and accidentally wiped a user's entire D drive, deleting code, documentation, and media files with no recovery path.

The platform issued an apology to the user. The incident was not a bug in the traditional sense. It was an autonomous misinterpretation of intent combined with an insufficiently restrictive terminal policy.

The lesson is not that Antigravity is unsafe. It is that autonomous AI agents with terminal access require explicit constraints before you run them on a machine that contains anything you cannot afford to lose.

The deny list configuration above is exactly what prevents this class of incident. rm on a deny list means the agent cannot delete files without your explicit manual approval, regardless of how it interprets a task description.

Before you use Antigravity on any real project: set your terminal policy to Off or Auto, add rm to your deny list, and never grant the agent access to a workspace that contains irreplaceable files you have not backed up.

Rapid prototyping and greenfield projects

If you want to go from an idea to a working prototype as fast as possible and you are comfortable reviewing agent decisions rather than writing code yourself, Antigravity is genuinely remarkable. The combination of autonomous planning, browser verification, and artifact generation means you can describe a goal and watch it get built with minimal direct intervention.

Exploratory development

Antigravity performs significantly better than other coding agents on exploratory tasks and self-corrects more effectively during execution. Google has tuned the balance between autonomous execution and human validation checkpoints better than most of its competitors.

Cost

Antigravity is completely free during public preview. Cursor costs $20 per month for Pro. For indie developers, students, and people experimenting with side projects, this is a genuinely meaningful difference.

Multi-model flexibility

Antigravity supports Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.6, and GPT-OSS-120B. You can switch models per task. Cursor uses its proprietary Composer model for most tasks.

Daily production work

Cursor holds SOC 2 certification and has validated enterprise deployments with two plus years of documented production use. Antigravity launched four months ago with no enterprise case studies and acknowledged security limitations still being addressed. When you are working on a codebase that actually ships to customers, Cursor's maturity is a real and meaningful advantage.

MCP server support

Cursor supports MCP servers natively. Antigravity does not yet. If you have existing workflows built on MCP integrations, you cannot fully migrate to Antigravity until this gap is closed. There is no published timeline for MCP support in Antigravity.

Consistent speed for synchronous coding

Cursor's Composer model completes typical tasks in around 30 seconds with predictable behavior. Companies using Cursor see a 25 percent or more increase in PR volume and over 100 percent increase in average PR size. If your priority is consistent, measurable throughput on production code, Cursor's performance data is more established.

Developer control and comfort

Many developers find Cursor's approach of keeping them in the driver's seat more comfortable than Antigravity's autonomous style. Cursor feels like pair programming with someone who understands your codebase. Antigravity feels like managing an autonomous contractor. Both are valid. The preference is personal.

You are a professional developer writing production code every day

Use Cursor as your primary tool. Its SOC 2 certification, MCP support, and two plus years of production validation make it the safer, more reliable choice for code that ships to real users. Use Antigravity on the side for experimentation.

You are an indie developer or side project builder

Start with Antigravity. It is free, it handles greenfield projects extremely well, and the artifact system helps you understand what the agent is actually doing. Use Cursor if and when you need MCP integrations or production-grade reliability.

You are building a startup or MVP

Use both. Antigravity for the initial build and rapid feature prototyping. Cursor once the codebase has enough production complexity that predictability matters more than autonomy.

You are a non-developer or no-code builder

Antigravity is more accessible for non-developers than any previous coding tool. The ability to describe a goal in plain English and watch the agent plan and execute the task is genuinely usable without deep coding knowledge. Configure your security settings conservatively before running it on anything important.

You are an enterprise team or organization

Use Cursor until Antigravity achieves enterprise security certifications. The current public preview status and the absence of SOC 2 or equivalent certification means Antigravity is not ready for enterprise deployment on sensitive codebases.

Antigravity is in public preview and it shows.

Users report lag and freezes after multiple agents are running simultaneously, particularly on hardware with less than 16GB of RAM. CPU usage spikes during active agent sessions.

There is a currently reported security vulnerability that could expose users to backdoor attacks. Google states it is working to address this. Until it is patched, do not use Antigravity on machines with access to sensitive credentials, production databases, or proprietary code.

MCP support is absent. For developers with existing MCP-based workflows, this is a blocking limitation.

Cursor has its own rough edges. Inconsistent behavior after updates, removal of models mid-workflow, and the complexity of managing 8 parallel agents and merging their outputs are real friction points with real user complaints.

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, allows AI tools to connect with external services, data sources, and APIs through standardized server integrations. Cursor supports MCP natively.

Antigravity does not yet support MCP. This is not a minor missing feature for developers who have built workflows around MCP-connected tools. It is a blocking reason not to migrate.

Google has not published a timeline for MCP support. Until that gap closes, any Antigravity user with MCP-dependent workflows must maintain a parallel Cursor setup.

Here is what neither tool wants to say out loud.

Both Antigravity and Cursor represent a fundamental shift in what being a developer means. The real debate between them is not about which writes better code in a narrow technical sense. It is about whether you want to keep your hands on the wheel or hand the wheel to an AI and become the reviewer rather than the writer.

Some in the developer community are quietly noting that Google can sustain free access longer than Cursor can maintain its pricing, and predicting that competitive pressure will force a response. The category will improve faster because of this rivalry. Developers benefit from that competition regardless of which tool wins.

For now, the honest playbook is simple.

Download Antigravity this weekend. Configure your security settings first. Give it a real task on a project that does not matter if something breaks. Watch what it does.

Then open Cursor on Monday for the code that needs to actually ship.

That is the right answer for 2026. Check back in Q4 when the MCP gap closes and the security patch lands.

Is Google Antigravity free to use?

Yes. Antigravity is completely free during its public preview period. It includes generous rate limits for Gemini 3.1 Pro. No pricing has been announced for after the preview period ends.

Can I import my VS Code or Cursor settings into Antigravity?

Yes. During the setup flow, Antigravity offers the option to import your existing VS Code or Cursor keybindings, theme, and extension preferences. This removes most of the friction of switching environments.

What models does Google Antigravity support?

Antigravity supports Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.6, and GPT-OSS-120B. You can select your model per conversation in both the Editor and Agent Manager views.

Does Antigravity support MCP servers?

Not yet. MCP server support is a known missing feature. There is no published timeline from Google on when it will be added. Cursor supports MCP natively.

What happened with the D drive deletion incident?

An early user gave Antigravity a cache deletion task and the agent misinterpreted it, wiping their entire D drive. The incident resulted from the agent having unrestricted terminal access combined with an ambiguous task description. Configuring your terminal policy to Off or Auto mode and adding rm to your deny list prevents this class of incident entirely.

Is Antigravity a fork of VS Code or Windsurf?

Antigravity is officially described as a fork of VS Code. There is ongoing developer community debate about whether it is actually a fork of Windsurf, which is itself a VS Code fork. Google has not fully clarified this and the question has implications for extensions compatibility.

What is the difference between Planning mode and Fast mode in Antigravity?

Planning mode has the agent create a full implementation plan and task list before writing code, checking in at each milestone for your approval. Use it for anything complex or important. Fast mode has the agent execute directly without a planning phase. Use it for simple, localized tasks like renaming variables or running specific commands where speed matters more than verification.

Should I switch from Cursor to Antigravity?

Not entirely, not yet. The absence of MCP support, the public preview security limitations, and the lack of enterprise certification mean Antigravity is not a full replacement for Cursor in 2026 for most professional developers. The better approach is using both: Antigravity for greenfield projects and experimentation, Cursor for production code and MCP-dependent workflows.

What are the platform requirements for Google Antigravity?

Antigravity requires Windows 10 64-bit or later, macOS Monterey 12 or later, or 64-bit Linux with glibc 2.28 or later and glibcxx 3.4.25 or later. A personal Gmail account is required to sign in during the public preview.

What is the Antigravity Skills system?

Skills are specialized knowledge packages that sit dormant in the agent's context until a relevant task activates them. They prevent tool bloat by loading detailed instructions only when needed. Skills can be global across all your projects or specific to a single workspace, and can contain instructions, scripts, reference documents, and template assets.

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Roo's Newsletter. Exploring technology, trends, and the mindset shaping what is next. Published 2026.