# Antigravity is Dead Long Live Antigravity.

> Source: <https://dev.to/turingsoracle/antigravity-is-dead-long-live-antigravity-186m>
> Published: 2026-05-20 00:14:21+00:00

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.
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:
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.
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"
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.
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).
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/
:
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.
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:
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.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:
~/.gemini/antigravity-ide
before touching anything else.// settings.json
{
"update.mode": "manual"
}
~/.gemini/antigravity
and ~/.gemini/antigravity-ide
weeklyrsync
from ~/.gemini/antigravity-backup
(exclude mcp_config.json
)update.mode
to manual
if you depend on the IDEAntigravity 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.
