Recipe 003
Vibe Coding for Gemini Subscribers: Google Antigravity Is Your New Kitchen
Google's Antigravity is a full agent workbench you download like any app — and your Google AI subscription already covers it. From download to a working app in one sitting.
Start Cooking is a three-part series for people who already pay for an AI chat subscription and want to taste vibe coding before reading any theory. This is the Gemini edition — if you subscribe to ChatGPT or Claude instead, jump to your edition.
If you pay for Google AI Pro (or just live inside Gemini), Google built you a whole separate kitchen: Antigravity. Unlike the other two guides in this series, there's no VS Code and no extension here — Antigravity is its own app that you download and open like Chrome. It even has a free tier, and your Google AI Pro subscription unlocks the comfortable usage limits.
The mental model: Gemini is where you talk. Antigravity is where things get built.
What you'll have in 15 minutes
A folder on your computer containing a real web app — files an AI wrote while you watched — running in your browser. Taste first, theory later.
The setup
1. Download Antigravity. Go to antigravity.google/download and grab Antigravity 2.0 — on Windows choose Download for x64 (most PCs), on Mac choose your chip (Apple Silicon for anything recent). Run the installer.
Windows note: if a blue SmartScreen warning appears, click More info → Run anyway. It's Google's installer; Windows is just being cautious with new apps.
2. Sign in with your Google account. First launch opens your browser to log in. Use your personal @gmail.com account — the one with your Google AI subscription on it (work/school Workspace accounts are famously fussy here). Pick a theme when asked, and you're in.
3. Create a project. In the left sidebar, hit New Project and point it at a brand-new empty folder — something like Documents/first-dish. A project is your countertop: the agent works inside this folder and shows you everything it does there.
Before you type anything
Antigravity looks less like an editor and more like a mission control for agents — that's by design. Two things to know:
- When you give it a task, it may ask Local Mode or Worktree Mode. Pick Local Mode — "just work in my folder, right here."
- Inside your project folder, the agent reads and writes files freely. The moment it wants to run a terminal command or touch the web, an approval card pops up and waits for your Allow. That card is your hand on the stove dial.
Now cook
Type this into the chat box and press Enter:
Create a single file called index.html containing a complete little web app: a digital fortune cookie.
- Show a cookie in the middle of the page that cracks open with a fun animation when clicked, revealing a random fortune.
- Write 20 original fortunes about technology, building things, and beginner's luck.
- After showing a fortune, offer a "one more cookie" button.
- Warm, cozy design. Everything — HTML, CSS, JavaScript — must live in this one file, no external libraries.
- When you're done, tell me exactly how to open it and what to try.
Now watch — Antigravity does something the other kitchens don't: it writes itself a task list and an implementation plan first, like a chef laying out mise en place, then works through it. When it finishes you'll get a little walkthrough of what it built. Find index.html in your folder and double-click it. Your browser opens. Click the cookie.
That app didn't exist ten minutes ago, and no human typed it.
What just happened
You described an outcome. The agent planned, wrote every line into a real file on your disk, and reported back like a colleague. The plan and walkthrough it produced aren't decoration — they're how you check the work without reading code. That's the skill to grow here: judge the plan, judge the result, let the agent sweat the syntax.
Second helpings
Ask for changes in plain words, one at a time:
- "Make the cookie look more realistic and add a crumb explosion when it cracks."
- "Add a button to copy the fortune to my clipboard."
- "Keep a counter of how many cookies I've opened, saved between visits."
Describe, taste, adjust. When a change goes wrong, say what you saw ("the button overlaps the cookie on my screen") — precision in complaints, not in code, is the beginner superpower.
Cooking with a different subscription? The same recipe exists for ChatGPT subscribers (Codex) and Claude subscribers (Claude Code) — same fortune cookie, different kitchen.