Antonio Cardenas for Turing's Oracle

Posted on May 20

Antigravity is Dead. Long Live Antigravity.

#ai #antigravity #gemini #agents

Google just dropped Antigravity 2.0 at I/O 2026—and in the same breath, it killed Gemini CLI, stranded a lot of chat histories in a backup directory, and shipped three new surfaces sharing the same brand. If you opened the app this morning and panicked because your conversations are gone, keep reading. We'll fix it.

What just happened at I/O 2026

On May 18, 2026, Google rebranded Antigravity from a "cursor competitor" into a full agent-first development platform powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash. The brand now spans four products:

Antigravity 2.0 — the new standalone desktop app with multi-agent orchestration
Antigravity CLI — a Go-based terminal tool replacing Gemini CLI
Antigravity SDK — programmatic access to the same agent harness Google uses internally.
Antigravity IDE — the original VS Code-style app from November 2025, still alive And here's the deadline you can't ignore: Gemini CLI sunsets on June 18, 2026 for AI Pro, AI Ultra, and free-tier users. Enterprise on Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise keeps access — everyone else has 30 days to migrate.

The Four Faces of Antigravity

Antigravity 2.0 (Desktop App)

The flagship. Runs multiple agents in parallel, ships dynamic subagents for parallelized workflows, schedules tasks in the background, and integrates natively with AI Studio, Firebase, and Android. Export a project from AI Studio on your phone and open it locally, full context intact. Voice command support is in too — you can talk to your agents instead of typing.

Antigravity CLI

Rebuilt from scratch in Go. Same agent harness as the desktop, terminal-native, and noticeably faster than its predecessor. If you live in Gemini CLI today, this is your migration target — and you have until June 18 to switch.

# Verify your install once you migrate
antigravity --version
antigravity agent new "refactor the auth module"

Antigravity SDK

For building custom agents on top of Google's coding infrastructure, optimized for Gemini models. You define the behaviors; you host wherever it fits — Google Cloud, your own infra, your choice. Custom agent templates are available in AI Studio for enterprise use cases.

Antigravity IDE (the original)

Still maintained. Still the VS Code fork from November 2025. This is the one most of us got hooked on — and it's the one with the migration trap (more on that below).

The immediate pain: your chat history is in the wrong directory

If you updated to 2.0 and your conversations are gone, your data is not lost — the migration stranded it in a backup folder.

Antigravity 2.0 uses three directories under ~/.gemini/:

Directory	Owner
`~/.gemini/antigravity`	Live data for the standalone 2.0 app
`~/.gemini/antigravity-ide`	Live data for the original IDE
`~/.gemini/antigravity-backup`	Snapshot the migration created — often more complete than the live dir

After the update, the standalone app's antigravity/ dir frequently ends up missing brain entries, scratch space, and conversation files. The antigravity-backup/ next to it has the full set. We just need to put the right one in front of the app.

The fix: rsync from backup into the live dir

macOS / Linux

# Dry-run first — see exactly what would change
rsync -avhn --exclude='mcp_config.json' \
  ~/.gemini/antigravity-backup/ \
  ~/.gemini/antigravity/

# Looks right? Run it for real (drop the -n flag)
rsync -avh --exclude='mcp_config.json' \
  ~/.gemini/antigravity-backup/ \
  ~/.gemini/antigravity/

Why exclude mcp_config.json? It's usually a symlink pointing at your local MCP server configuration — overwrite it and you break your active MCP connections.

Windows (PowerShell)

$src  = "$env:USERPROFILE\.gemini\antigravity-backup"
$dest = "$env:USERPROFILE\.gemini\antigravity"

# Robocopy mirror, excluding mcp_config.json
robocopy $src $dest /E /XF mcp_config.json

After running:

Fully quit Antigravity — kill the process, don't just close the window.
Reopen the app.
Verify the side panel now shows your threads. If anything looks off, your antigravity-backup/ is untouched — you can re-run the sync or copy specific files manually. For peace of mind, snapshot antigravity-backup/ to an external location before you start poking at it.

How to install just the IDE (skip 2.0)

The good news: the IDE and the standalone 2.0 app keep their data in separate directories (antigravity-ide/ vs antigravity/), so your IDE history doesn't get clobbered when 2.0 installs alongside it.

The bad news: the installers conflict at the OS level. Install both and the IDE binary refuses to launch — dependencies are coupled. Uninstalling 2.0 doesn't fully heal the IDE either; you have to reinstall the IDE cleanly, which wipes your IDE settings.

If you want to stay on the IDE only:

Uninstall Antigravity 2.0 completely if you already installed it.
Back up ~/.gemini/antigravity-ide before touching anything else.
Grab the IDE installer from the releases page: antigravity.google/releases
Pick a version that predates the 2.0 split — 1.23.2 is the safest landing pad.
In Settings, switch updates to manual so the app doesn't silently jump back to 2.0.

// settings.json
{
  "update.mode": "manual"
}

Migration checklist

[ ] Migrate Gemini CLI workflows to Antigravity CLI before June 18, 2026
[ ] Pick one: 2.0 desktop or the original IDE — never install both
[ ] Back up ~/.gemini/antigravity and ~/.gemini/antigravity-ide weekly
[ ] If history disappeared post-update, rsync from ~/.gemini/antigravity-backup (exclude mcp_config.json)
[ ] Set update.mode to manual if you depend on the IDE
[ ] Evaluate the new $100 AI Ultra tier if you run multi-agent workloads (5× the Pro limits) ## TL;DR

Antigravity 2.0 + CLI + SDK shipped at I/O 2026. Gemini CLI dies June 18, 2026. Lost your chat history? Your data is sitting in ~/.gemini/antigravity-backup — rsync it into ~/.gemini/antigravity (excluding mcp_config.json), restart the app. Want the old IDE only? Uninstall 2.0, install 1.23.2 from the releases page, set updates to manual. Pick one — don't run 2.0 and the IDE side by side.

The king is dead. Long live the king. Migrate carefully.

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