Tutorial : Getting Started with Google Antigravity - Antigravity setup
You can think of Antigravity as a new agentic development platform that evolves the traditional IDE into an agent-first experience. Unlike standard coding assistants that just autocomplete lines, Antigravity provides a "Mission Control" for managing autonomous agents that can plan, code, and even browse the web to help you build.
Antigravity is designed as an "agent-first" platform. It presupposes that the AI is not just a tool for writing code but an autonomous actor capable of planning, executing, validating, and iterating on complex engineering tasks with minimal human intervention.
What is your role as a developer in this environment? It moves the developer's role from that of someone filling out code snippets, editing it, etc to that of an "architect" or "manager," orchestrating a workforce of digital agents. Let’s calm the nerves a little bit here. Should you want to make changes to your code, you still have the editor view.
But let’s understand this a bit better. When we say “Architect” or “Manager” what do we mean? What does it look like to move from a traditional IDE to one that puts you in control of orchestrating a workforce of digital agents? The diagram below provide a comparison of the Traditional IDE workflow (left), where the user interacts directly with code, versus the Antigravity Agentic workflow (right), where the user directs autonomous agents via a Manager Interface.
Introduction to Antigravity and this tutorial (Your guide to navigating this tutorial)
Here is a recommended approach to get the best out of this tutorial:
Setup and Navigation: You should definitely complete this section first to install Antigravity, use recommended configurations and then understand its core concepts and key navigation features.
Use Cases: Once you cross that stage, take a a look at a few use cases that you can try out today, ranging from web site generation, dynamic web application development, external news aggregation tasks and more.
At this point, you should have a got understanding of Antigravity and you should give it a try with some of your prompts and tasks that you want it to carry out.
Antigravity Customizations: You might start to look at what it means to nudge Antigravity towards respecting your coding standards, guidelines and/or created a repeatable set of instructions that you can invoke via a single command. In this section, you will learn about Rules and Workflows, which are instructions that you can give Antigravity Agent to follow and abide by. We have multiple examples for you to understand that.
Securing the Agent: The Antigravity Agents go off with your tasks and are likely to interact with various terminal/shell commands to do their work. You might want to ensure that certain commands are off limits and require your permission before execution while some are ok to execute. This section covers how to configure Allow List and Deny List commands in Antigravity.
Note: As we discover interesting things that one can do with Antigravity, this tutorial will be updated.
Key Resources
Let’s get a few resources listed upfront that will help provide you a ready reference to currently available official documentation on Antigravity (at the time of this writing : Nov 19, 2025)
Official Site : https://antigravity.google/
Documentation: https://antigravity.google/docs
Use cases : https://antigravity.google/use-cases
Download : https://antigravity.google/download
Youtube Channel for Google Antigravity : https://www.youtube.com/@googleantigravity
Installing Antigravity
We will begin with installing Antigravity. Currently the product is available for preview and you can use your personal Gmail account to get started with it.
Go to the downloads page and click on the appropriate Operating System version that is applicable to your case:
I have installed the MacOS version of Antigravity and the steps that I have outlined later are specific to that version.
Here are a couple of blog posts that might be useful to you, if you are looking to take the Linux version and install it on ChromeOS or even WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux):
Working with Google Antigravity in WSL by
Running Antigravity on ChromeOS / ChromeOS Flex by
Setting up Antigravity
Launch the application installer and install the same on your machine. Once you have completed the installation, launch the Antigravity application. You should see a screen similar to the following:
Click on the next button. This brings up the option for you to import from your existing VS Code or Cursor settings. We will go with a fresh start.
The next screen is to choose a theme type. We will go with the Dark theme but its entirely upto you, depending on your preference.
The next screen is important. It demonstrates the flexibility that is available in Antigravity in terms of how you want the Agent to behave.
Let’s understand this in a bit more detail and remember that it is not set in stone and can be changed at any time, even as you interact with the Agent.
Before we delve into the options, let us look at two specific properties here (which you see to the right of the dialog):
Terminal execution policy: This is about giving the Agent the ability to execute commands (applications/tools) in your terminal. There are three options over here.
Off: Never auto-execute terminal commands (except those in a configurable Allow list)
Auto: Agent decides whether to auto-execute any given terminal command. In case it needs to get your permission, it will decide and ask you for it.
Turbo: Always auto-execute terminal commands (except those in a configurable Deny list)
Review policy : As the Agent goes about its task, it creates various artifacts (Task plan, Implementation plan, etc). The review policy is set such that you can determine who decides if it needs to be reviewed. Should you always want to review it, or let the agent decide on this. Accordingly, there are three options here too.
Always Proceed: Agent never asks for review
Agent Decides: Agent will decide when to ask for review
Request Review: Agent always asks for review
Now that we have understood this, the 4 options are nothing but specific presets for the Terminal execution and review policies for 3 of them and a 4th option available where we can completely custom control it. These 4 options are available so that we can choose how much autonomy you want to give to the Agent to execute commands in the terminal and get artifacts reviewed before moving ahead with the task.
These 4 options are:
Agent-driven development
Agent-assisted development
Review-driven development
Custom configuration
The Agent-assisted development option is a good balance and the recommended one since it allows the Agent to make a decision and come back to the user for approval.
So pick your choice and ideally for now, let’s go with the recommended approach.
The next step is to configure the Editor. Choose your preferences.
As mentioned earlier, Antigravity is available in preview mode and free if you have a personal Gmail account. So sign in now with your account. This will open up the browser allowing you to sign in.
On successful authentication, you will see a message similar to the one below and it will lead you back to the Antigravity application. Go with the flow.
The last step, as is typical, is the terms of use. You can make a decision if you’d like to opt-in or not and then click on Next.
This will lead you to the moment of truth, where Antigravity will be waiting to collaborate with you.
Let’s get started.
The Agent Manager
Antigravity forks the open-source Visual Studio Code (VS Code) foundation but radically alters the user experience to prioritize agent management over text editing. The interface is bifurcated into two distinct primary windows: the Editor and the Agent Manager. This separation of concerns mirrors the distinction between individual contribution and engineering management.
The Agent Manager View: Mission Control
Upon launching Antigravity, the user is typically greeted not by a file tree, but by the Agent Manager, as shown below:
This interface acts as a Mission Control dashboard. It is designed for high-level orchestration, allowing developers to spawn, monitor, and interact with multiple agents operating asynchronously across different workspaces or tasks.
In this view, the developer acts as an architect. They define high-level objectives, examples could be:
Refactor the authentication moduleUpdate the dependency treeGenerate a test suite for the billing API
As the diagram above indicates, each of these requests spawns a dedicated agent instance. The UI provides a visualization of these parallel work streams, displaying the status of each agent, the Artifacts they have produced (plans, results, diffs), and any pending requests for human approval.
This architecture addresses a key limitation of previous IDEs that had more of a chatbot experience, which were linear and synchronous. In a traditional chat interface, the developer must wait for the AI to finish generating code before asking the next question. In Antigravity’s Manager View, a developer can dispatch five different agents to work on five different bugs simultaneously, effectively multiplying their throughput.
If you click on Next above, you have the option to open a Workspace.
Think of Workspace as you knew from VS Code and you will be done. So we can open up a local folder by clicking on the button and then selecting a folder to start with. In my case, I had a folder in my home folder named my-agy-projects and I selected that. You can use a completely different folder.
Note, you can completely skip this step if you’d like and you can open up a Workspace at any time later too.
Once you complete this step, you will be in the Agent Manager window, which is shown below:
You will notice that the application is immediately geared to start a new conversation in the workspace folder (my-agy-projects) that was selected. Just notice that you can use your existing knowledge of working with other AI applications (Cursor, Gemini CLI) and use @ and other ways to include additional context while prompting.
Do look at both the Planning and the Model Selection dropdowns. The Model Selection dropdown allows you to choose from one of the models available at the moment, for your Agent to use. The list is shown below:
Similarly, we find that the Agent is going to be in a default Planning mode. But we can also go for the Fast mode.
Let’s look at what the documentation says on this:
Planning: An Agent can plan before executing tasks. Use for deep research, complex tasks, or collaborative work. In this mode, the Agent organizes its work in task groups, produces Artifacts, and takes other steps to thoroughly research, think through, and plan its work for optimal quality. You will see a lot more output here.
Fast: An Agent will execute tasks directly. Use for simple tasks that can be completed faster, such as renaming variables, kicking off a few bash commands, or other smaller, localized tasks. This is helpful for when speed is an important factor, and the task is simple enough that there is low worry of worse quality.
If you are familiar with the Thinking budget and similar terms in Agents, think of this as the ability to control the thinking of the Agent, thereby having a direct impact on the thinking budget. We will go with the defaults for now but do remember that at the time of the launch, Gemini 3 Pro model availability is as per limited quotas to everyone, so do expect appropriate messages indicating if you have exhausted those free quotas for Gemini 3 usage.
Let’s spend a bit of time now on the Agent Manager (window) here and understand a few things, so that it’s clear about the basic building blocks, how you navigate in Antigravity and more. The Agent Manager window is produced below:
Please refer to the above diagram with the numbers:
Inbox: Think of this as a way to track all your conversations in one place. As you send Agents off on their tasks, these will appear in the Inbox and you can click on the Inbox to get a list of all the current conversations. Tapping on any of the conversations will lead you to all the messages that have been exchanged, status of the tasks, what the Agent has produced or even if it is waiting for an approval from your side on the tasks. This is a great way to come back later to a previous task that you were working on. A very handy feature.
Start Conversation: Click on this to begin a new conversation. This will directly lead you to the input where it says Ask anything.
Workspaces: We mentioned about Workspaces and that you can work across any workspace that you want. You can add more workspaces at any time and can select any workspace while starting the conversation.
Playground: This is a great way by which you can simply start a conversation with the agent and then if you’d like to convert that into a workspace, where you have stricter control over the files, etc. Think of this as a scratch area.
Editor View: So far we are in the Agent Manager view. You can switch at any time to the Editor view, if you’d like. This will show you your workspace folder and any files generated. You can directly edit the files there, or even provide inline guidance, command in the editor, so that the Agent can do something or change as per your modified recommendations/instructions. We will cover the Editor View in detail in a later section.
Browser: Finally, we come to one of the clear differentiators that makes Antigravity very powerful and that is its close integration with the Chrome browser. Let’s get going with setting up the Browser in the next section.
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