From Google Antigravity to Claude: A frustrating UX downgrade, and missing web debugger

Google Antigravity
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Hey everyone. I just need to vent and share my experience migrating from Google Antigravity to Anthropic’s Claude ecosystem, because the transition has been incredibly rough.

For context, I was using Antigravity inside my IDE and it was honestly a dream. The visual integration was top-notch: I could drag and drop screenshots of UI bugs directly into the chat, and it had a built-in headless browser/debugger to troubleshoot frontend issues (like reading console errors on my portal).

Unfortunately, Antigravity’s service turned into an absolute joke. Out of nowhere, they throttled my quota renewal time from 5 hours to a ridiculous 12 hours. The worst part? I am on their $250 ULTRA tier. I technically still have 15,000 credits left, but with this new system, I am burning through them at an incredible speed just trying to get things to work! Because of this horrible treatment, I decided to jump ship, pay for a Claude subscription, and use Sonnet 3.5/3.7, which everyone praises for coding.

The model itself might be smart, but the UX and tooling have been a nightmare:

1. The “Blind” CLI Experience: I quickly realized the official Claude Code tool is strictly a CLI agent. Coming from a fully integrated GUI, this is a massive step backwards. I couldn’t paste images of UI glitches, and if I wanted the agent to test a login flow, it just blindly fired curl commands into my API instead of actually interacting with the DOM.

2. Silent Failures with Wrappers: Trying to get a GUI back, I installed a third-party VS Code extension. It just hung indefinitely on “Claude is working…” without throwing UI errors. I had to dig into the Extension Host logs just to find out it was silently failing or hitting 503 MODEL_CAPACITY_EXHAUSTED errors behind the scenes.

3. The Final Boss: Bun, AVX, and Proxmox: When I finally got the official CLI running (npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code), it instantly crashed with an Exit code 3. The log output? CPU lacks AVX support... panic: attempt to use null value... Bun has crashed. Since Claude Code runs on Bun instead of Node, it strictly requires AVX instructions. I develop on a Windows VM inside Proxmox, and Proxmox’s default CPU type (kvm64) hides AVX support. I had to shut down my environment, change the VM’s processor type to host, and reboot just to get the CLI to say “Hello”.

4. Escaping the terminal doesn’t bring back the web debugger: I eventually managed to get a GUI back by moving to Cursor/Roo Code. Great, I can paste screenshots again! But the frustration continues: unlike Antigravity, these environments lack a native headless Chrome integration. If I need the agent to test a login state or read a frontend console error, it can’t do it out of the box. You have to jump through hoops manually configuring third-party MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers like Puppeteer just to get basic web debugging back.

Conclusion: Sonnet might be a great model, but if you are used to the seamless, “it just works” visual and web-debugging workflow of tools like Antigravity, be prepared for a very fragmented, DIY experience with Claude.

Has anyone else felt this downgrade in the developer experience when moving away from fully integrated IDE agents?

2 Likes
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Both Google and Anthropic GUI are absolutely horrible. ANtigravity is buggy and slow and glitch but when it works properly you can get a lot done. Claude AI itself is pretty top notch, but the GUI is so buggy and limited that you constantly hit walls that no human should hit in 2026, ever.

I have been saying, and still do not understand:
Why don’t these companies FIX their GUI and make sure BASIC FEATURES are implemented?

It’s like they are all running gogogogo and not actually fixing mistakes as they go, but they are all racing to the bottom.

The first big AI company that has a good AI with a good non buggy GUI

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If the Claude code UI was more like Antigravity/VS Code and I could intuitively have the same global and workspace rules and workflows, I would have migrated over fully already, but as it is right now Claude Code just seems like a very simple agentic wrapper for Claude that is lacking a lot of genuinely helpful development features, like multiple integrated terminals with splitting capabilities that the agent can read so that I don’t have to attach logs or copy and paste the output…. that is one of the few UX things Antigravity has over CC right now, while completely ignoring the vast knowledgebase AG has created for me over the span of me using it that CC won’t have true native access to.

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The AG GUI regardless of what auto accept settings I enable, makes me accept every file change and script run, so I use the auto accept extension, but then it never stops and asks me “hey i have a question, should we do 1 or 2 or 3), it just asks it then immediately picks one.

Either way the work flow is broken and not really usable.

If anthropic had a working GUI barely any developers would use AG.

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Actually you can paste screenshots in cli. As for me it works pretty well (mac os, iTerm, latest CC release)

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But what are the facts?

  • A large number of Google AI Ultra subscribers, myself included, have been hit with what appears to be risk-control-triggered 503 errors (“high load”).
  • Conversation history gets lost.
  • Login sessions get lost.
  • Every new version introduces all kinds of new bugs.

I’m paying for a more stable and better service, but Antigravity has given me a terrible user experience instead (as described above).

In terms of pure user experience alone, Claude Code has been better for me. At the very least, it isn’t stuck being “high load” all the time.