Last month, Steve Yegge suggested that they are not: https://xcancel.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2043747998740689171
This is a bunch of gabagoo. Wrong on so many layers, it's not even worth reading further.
a) goog has agentic coding in both antigravity & cli forms. While it is not at the level of cc + opus, it's still decent.
b) goog has their own versions of models trained on internal code
c) goog has claude in vertex, and most definitely can set it up in secure zones (like they can for their clients) so they'd be able to use claude (at cost) within their own projects.
Gemini CLI is an absolute joke. I dont know if its the harness, or the Gemini models' poor instruction following, but more than 50% of my sessions gemini turns insane and ends up in thought loops. In another 25% it does far more updating than I asked or is reasonable.
This is why next to no-one talks about either of them. Does Antigravity's agent manager even work yet without crashing and showing zero conversations? In typical google fashion they released AG and appear to have then set it on autopilot with a skeleton crew of less than 1 developer. Clear issues have not been fixed since day 1. Some settings just do not work. Permissions are not respected.
Hoping they can figure it out sooner rather than later.
He made a follow up after the pushback by GDM.
Google’s businesses are very broad and durable. But Google being the only company in the world without access (except for GDM+labs) to a competent coding agent will take a toll.
We’ll see how long Google can hold out hoping for GDM to create something that is competitive.
I’m guess that within 6 months Google will give up on coding and finally let their devs use Claude/Codex.
This isn’t a security problem, this is a GDM issue with GDM’s promises being far beyond their ability.
I doubt it. I use Gemini CLI daily because Gemini is what work pays for, and I have a personal Claude account. The difference is not that great, especially if you're not doing full vibe-coding. It's unlikely to have the kind of effect you're describing.
Gemini will conduct seconds to minutes of work before requesting aid. And it will commonly fall over.
Claude/Codex will commonly do minutes to hours of work.
The difference is one to two orders of magnitude. It is immense.
If you're talking about the ability to churn out low-stakes systems like websites, or variations on existing widely available systems, then perhaps. But once you get to more complex systems, especially large already existing systems, all LLMs today need significant ongoing assistance to prevent them from going off the rails and down rabbit holes. At that point, the advantage you're claiming tends to evaporate.
If internal staff aren't happy with the tools they build, typically that should drive improvements to their own tools