Ditching Cursor for Google Antigravity: And I'm Absolutely Not Going Back

You know, for a while there, the whole idea of AI coding assistants felt like something out of a sci-fi movie that was suddenly, actually, here. And naturally, I was eager to jump on board. Like many developers, I heard the buzz about Cursor – that AI-first IDE built on VS Code – and thought, "This could be it. This could truly change how I work." The promise was huge: an intelligent partner right there in my editor, ready to help me write, refactor, and debug. So, I gave it a real shot.

Initially, I was genuinely impressed, at least with the concept. Cursor offered features that, on paper, sounded revolutionary. Imagine: a chat interface right in your IDE, capable of generating entire functions, explaining complex legacy code, or even tackling tricky refactoring tasks with a simple prompt. The allure of having an always-on assistant that could understand your codebase and offer insightful suggestions was incredibly strong. It felt like unlocking a new level of productivity, a glimpse into the future of software development.

But, as is often the case with bleeding-edge tech, the reality didn't quite live up to the hype for very long. My experience with Cursor quickly devolved into a series of frustrating encounters. The context window, for instance, felt perpetually tiny; it would "forget" previous instructions or important parts of the codebase far too often. Then there were the hallucinations – code that looked perfectly plausible but was fundamentally flawed or simply incorrect. Performance was another headache: slow responses, UI lag, and the ever-present cost implications of relying on external OpenAI API keys. Trying to integrate local models? That was often a buggy, convoluted mess that rarely delivered the promised performance. Honestly, it started feeling less like a powerful co-pilot and more like a somewhat unreliable intern.

Then, I landed at Google, and everything changed. That's where I met Antigravity. Now, Antigravity isn't some public-facing tool you can download from an app store. It's an internal, deeply integrated AI coding assistant, baked right into Google's proprietary development environment (which, for what it's worth, is heavily based on JetBrains products). From the moment I started using it, I realized this wasn't just another AI tool; it was an entirely different species of assistant, one designed from the ground up for a specific, massive ecosystem.

The difference is night and day. Antigravity doesn't just "understand" code; it understands Google's code. It has been trained on literally petabytes of Google's internal codebase, documentation, best practices, and API specifications. This means its context awareness is unparalleled. When I ask it to generate a new feature, refactor a complex module, or even explain an obscure internal library, it just gets it. The responses are lightning-fast, incredibly accurate, and seamlessly integrate with Google's unique frameworks and internal tools. It's like having a hyper-intelligent colleague who knows every single line of code ever written at the company, instantly available to help.

To put it bluntly, using Cursor now feels like fiddling with a toy after having experienced a professional-grade power tool. Cursor, with all its good intentions, was constantly fighting an uphill battle with generic models and limited context. Antigravity, on the other hand, is a native speaker of the codebase it operates within. It's not just generating code; it's contributing code that aligns with established patterns, passes internal tests, and leverages the right APIs. I mean, it’s not perfect – no AI is – but the sheer jump in utility, reliability, and sheer "wow" factor is simply astounding. There's genuinely no going back for me.

This experience has really hammered home a crucial point: the true future of AI in software development isn't just about general-purpose large language models. It's about highly specialized, deeply integrated AI systems that are custom-trained on an organization's specific, massive, and proprietary codebase. Companies that invest in building these bespoke AI assistants will gain an incredible competitive advantage. It's not just about writing code faster; it's about maintaining quality, enforcing best practices, and navigating increasingly complex systems with an unprecedented level of intelligent assistance. And after using Antigravity, I can confidently say that the age of truly transformative AI coding is here, but it's starting from within.