Every week, it seems there’s a new AI coding assistant. Cursor, Windsor, Claude Code, Codeex—they all promise the same thing. Most of them follow a familiar pattern: you type a prompt, a single model thinks, writes some code, and then waits for your next instruction.
But this article is about something that behaves completely differently. It’s called Antigravity, Google’s new agentic IDE. Using it doesn’t feel like interacting with one assistant; it feels like having a small, dedicated engineering team living inside your editor.
So, here’s the plan. We’ll break down what an agentic IDE is and why Antigravity isn’t just another AI tool with a new logo. Then, we’ll build a full 3D prototype tool with it, from start to finish. Let’s dive in.
What is an Agentic IDE?
In most tools today, the workflow is linear. You have one chat window, one model, and one long reply. That’s it. You ask it to scaffold a project, and it does that. You ask it to wire up an API, and it complies. You ask it to fix a bug, and it tries. It’s helpful, but it’s still a single flow, driven by a single brain.
Antigravity works on a different paradigm entirely, offering three interconnected surfaces that work in concert.
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The Agent Manager: Think of this as your mission control. Here, you can see all your agents, their workspaces, and every task they’ve completed. You can initiate a new task, pause an existing one, inspect an agent’s thought process, and let it run in the background while you focus on something else.
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The Editor: At first glance, it looks like a normal editor with tabs, autocomplete, and a file tree. But an agent is always present, observing the entire codebase. It can jump in whenever you ask, handling refactors, migrations, or even fixing half-written functions.
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The Browser: This is where things get truly interesting. Antigravity can spawn and control a real browser. It can scroll, click, type, submit forms, and record everything it does. A command like “test my feature” literally means the agent opens your application, interacts with it as a user would, and reports back on its findings. No more screenshots, debugging monologues, or begging an LLM to understand the context.
You get to choose how much control the agent has through three modes: agent proceeds, agent decides, and you decide. For this project, we’ll use agent proceeds, which allows the IDE to make most decisions on its own unless it encounters something that truly requires approval. Instead of micromanaging every small action, you guide the overall strategy while the agent handles the grunt work.
The Unfair Advantage: A Powerful Model Stack
Antigravity provides access to top-tier models from Google and Anthropic, plus an open-source OpenAI model. The model stack we found most effective is:
- Gemini 3 for UI and Frontend: Gemini excels at thinking in components and grids, making it ideal for understanding structure and aesthetics.
- Opus 4.5 for Backend and Logic: This is the big brain for heavy-lifting tasks. Opus is perfect for refactors, architecture decisions, and navigating large codebases with complex logic.
Think about that for a moment. You have access to Opus 4.5 right inside your IDE. It’s arguably the best model out there for coding, and developers are already feeling its power. Antigravity treats these models like teammates. Gemini 3 acts as your frontend developer or design co-founder, while Opus 4.5 is your backend systems architect. Antigravity itself serves as the project manager, keeping everything aligned.
Beyond Chat: The Power of Artifacts
Antigravity doesn’t just reply in a chat thread. It produces artifacts—actual, working documents that track its progress.
- Task List: See what it’s doing, what’s done, and what’s next.
- Implementation Plan: A spec it writes for itself before touching your code.
- Walkthrough: A final report complete with screenshots, tests, logs, and a clean summary.
The loop is simple:
- You describe the task.
- The agent researches and proposes a plan.
- You skim, tweak, or approve the plan.
- The agent executes and returns a detailed walkthrough.
This process feels less like chatting with a bot and more like reviewing a pull request and design document from a junior engineer.
Let’s Build: A 3D Gesture-Controlled Particle Playground
For this demo, we’re going to build a 3D gesture-controlled particle playground. The idea is straightforward:
You stand in front of your camera, and the app tracks both of your hands, turning their position and gestures into motion. Closing your hands scales and expands a 3D particle cloud in real-time. You can pick a preset shape for the cloud—hearts, flowers, Saturn, a Buddha statue, or fireworks—and tweak the particle color with a simple picker. It all lives in a clean, modern web UI.
Imagine live 3D visuals that you can control with your hands. This is perfect for performances, product demos, interactive art on a landing page, or just feeling like a superhero.
The Build Process: From Prompt to Product
After a quick onboarding in Antigravity, I created a new workspace called 3D-showroom and linked it to a fresh local folder. The main screen presents the agent manager, which looks like an inbox for tasks. Each card represents an agent working on a specific goal.
I started a new conversation and described the app in a single, detailed prompt.
You are an expert web developer specializing in 3D graphics. Your task is to build a fully working web application in a single HTML file using Three.js and standard JavaScript.
Do not use any build tools or external frameworks other than CDN links for libraries. Everything must be self-contained in one file so it can be run directly in the browser.
The application should feature a 3D particle system controlled by hand gestures via the user's webcam. Implement hand tracking using MediaPipe. The user should be able to change particle colors and switch between different preset particle shapes (e.g., sphere, cube, fireworks).
I gave the agent full access and set it to “fast mode.” And then, it started working. No follow-up questions. It went straight into the repository.
The agent opened the editor window automatically, with tabs on the left and the file tree ready. The preview pane was waiting. We could see the breadcrumbs of its thought process, which was an alien yet fascinating experience. The agent wasn’t talking to me; it was working.
For several minutes, it wrote code, reshuffled functions, structured utilities, pulled in CDN links, and checked for browser compatibility. It stitched the MediaPipe hand model into the main loop and generated particle templates from scratch. I watched as the index.html file updated line by line, transforming from an empty document into a fully scaffolded application.
The final HTML file was massive, but it was also beautiful. It was a single, self-contained document where everything was wired together.
- Three.js Scene
- Shader-Free Particles
- Gesture Interpreter
- MediaPipe Integration
- UI Panel
- Color Controls
- Template Mapping
- Smooth Transitions
- Render Loop
- Fallback States
There was no scaffolding, no TODO comments, no broken imports, and no dependency hell. It was just a working 3D product, all generated from a single, well-written prompt.
The Final Verdict: A Glimpse into the Future
This is the point where Antigravity stops being merely interesting and starts feeling like a cheat code. The application worked exactly as described.
If you’ve ever built a 3D interactive experience manually, you know this would normally take days of research, hours of fiddling with MediaPipe, debugging particle math, handling device permissions, tuning UI values, and wrestling with endless CSS quirks. But with Antigravity, the process was: conversation, plan, execution, test. And it was done. All without touching a build tool.
It’s easy to dismiss this as just another coding agent. But once you feel the power of integrated browser testing, see the artifacts form, watch multiple agents work in parallel, and run Gemini and Opus in the same environment, you’ll realize something profound. We’re not in autocomplete land anymore. We’re in small-virtual-engineering-team land.
And this is just version one. This first look at Antigravity and the experience of building a 3D showroom with it has been nothing short of revelatory.