Terminal-First vs Visual Workspace
Claude Code is a CLI agent through and through, while Antigravity is a VS Code-based IDE with an agent manager and visual workspace. Nate Herk, Eric Michaud, Jay E from RoboNuggets, and Luke J Byrne all land on that same framing.
The setup experience tells you a lot. Antigravity opens with a workspace view and is noticeably easier to get started with. Claude Code throws multiple setup options at you, and out of the box it needs an /init command to generate a memory file. Jay E and Luke J Byrne both call Claude Code's onboarding less beginner-friendly.
There's a practical downside hidden in Claude Code's newer desktop app: it makes inspecting files in the working folder harder and doesn't provide good previews. For frontend-heavy work, that's a real drag.