Bob Browning's blog

After spending a year building fintechbenchmark.com the traditional way—writing code, testing it, iterating—I’d grown comfortable with GitHub Copilot as my AI assistant. It delivered a significant productivity boost, though I’d learned when to trust it and when to ignore its suggestions and push forward on my own.

Then, weeks before our soft launch, our lead contractor dropped a demo of Google Antigravity (Project IDX) that made our entire workflow look like stone tools and campfire stories.

The Antigravity Demo

The demonstration was genuinely impressive. Our contractor claimed to have recreated large sections of our system in minutes using this tool. The speed was remarkable—watching AI autonomously plan, code, test, and even generate UI mockups felt like seeing the future of software development.

But I was suspicious.

My Copilot experience had taught me that while AI can accelerate development dramatically, it can also lead you down blind alleys. Sometimes the best approach is to ignore the AI’s suggestions entirely. With just weeks until our soft launch, we couldn’t afford to bet our entire development philosophy on an unproven tool.

I needed to understand what we’d be getting into.

What is Antigravity, Really?

Antigravity isn’t a plugin; it’s a takeover. It’s a heavily customized fork of VS Code designed for “agent-first” development.

• The Workflow: You describe a requirement; a fleet of autonomous agents implements it.
• The Shift: You stop being a coder and become a high-level architect overseeing a digital labor force.

It sounds like a dream, but for a production environment, the “Red Flags” started piling up.

The Dealbreakers: Why Antigravity Stayed in Sandbox

1. The “Preview” Tax: Google’s documentation is honest about “significant growing pains.” In Fintech, “instability” is a synonym for “catastrophe.”
2. The Walled Garden: Antigravity is a proprietary ecosystem. Moving to Antigravity meant abandoning our proven toolkit for Google’s “blessed” (and limited) versions.
3. The “Google Graveyard” Risk: From Google Reader to Stadia, we’ve all been burned. If Google sunsets Antigravity in 24 months, our entire development infrastructure vanishes.
4. The Rate-Limit Ceiling: Nothing kills a sprint faster than a “Quota Exceeded” error. Being locked out of your own IDE because of cloud-side rate limits is a non-starter for a professional team. There are many examples of this being an issue on Reddit.

Enter Claude Code: The Pragmatic Alternative

There are a couple of alternative products by major suppliers. CODEX from Openai and Claude code from Anthropic. CODEX requires all the code to be uploaded to their servers and wait 5-30 minutes for the changes to be made. They have an app, but only on Apple macs. Somehow it didn’t look attractive.

I shifted my focus to Claude Code (Anthropic’s CLI and agentic offering). The philosophical difference was immediate and refreshing.

Feature	Antigravity (Project IDX)	Claude Code
Environment	Proprietary Fork / Cloud-based	Standard VS Code / Local CLI
Autonomy	High (Does it for you)	Collaborative (Does it with you)
Control	“Black Box” implementation	Inline Diffs & Permissions
Lock-in	High (Proprietary platform)	Low (Standard files/tools)

I downloaded Claude Code and asked it to add a revised initialisation routine to older modules that didn’t follow the standard.

• It identified all the relevant files correctly
• It mapped the architecture, identified the impact, and showed me a color-coded diff of every single line it intended to change.
• It waited for my y/n before touching the disk.

This felt like the natural evolution of coding—increasing my leverage without stripping away my agency.

Lessons Learned

The promise of AI-powered development is real, but the implementation matters enormously. For established projects, especially in regulated industries like fintech, the conservative choice is often the right one:

• Incremental adoption beats revolutionary change
• Exit strategies matter as much as capabilities
• Production stability trumps cutting-edge features
• Contractor compatibility affects long-term maintenance

Google Antigravity represents the future of software development. But for teams managing production systems with real users and real deadlines today, Claude Code offers a more pragmatic path forward—enhancing what works rather than replacing it entirely.