It's kind of bizarre in that it's not like this is an optimal interface, either. I mean, it's fine, but why not try something different?

I also don't really get why TUI's have become such a big deal, other than maybe nerd bait. The only time I want a TUI is when I'm SSH'd into a machine, which isn't very often? TUI's have so many downsides. Selecting text is inconsistent, copy paste is inconsistent, mouse behaviors.. it's all kind of jagged.

Nobody gets fired largely copying eachother. Releasing something new and risky often isn't worth it, sadly.

I did a review of all of them recently (OK, there are way too many to review all...but, all the official and semi-official ones), and my favorites were Reasonix and MiMo Code, partly because they're the least like Claude Code, while everyone else is a mostly direct copy.

Reasonix is not great on all fronts, but it shows how much money you've spent at all times, it's fast, it's not a direct copy of Claude Code, and it is designed specifically to maximize DeepSeek caching, so it's free real estate...like a buck a day to use DeepSeek models hard.

MiMo Code is just cute as hell. It's got (mostly tasteful) animations and emojis and such, it's fun to use. It also is not a direct copy of Claude Code. It almost feels like a GUI app. MiMo Pro is an underappreciated model, too, at least for some classes of problem. It's very good at security vulnerability research, and very cheap. It's slower than DeepSeek and more easily confused by tools, but it's uncannily good at reading code and identifying security bugs (rough parity with Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 at more than an order of magnitude lower price); and with fewer false positives than most models, including the frontiers. And, to keep it on topic, Antigravity refuses security work of any sort, so it's unfit for purpose. Gemini 3.6 Flash is pretty good at security work via the API, so it's not the model rejecting, it's the agent, which is extra annoying.

When NLP is the interface the natural reflex is to cut the visual interface.

I don't know how Google with all the training data possible still can't have a good coding model. It's actually impressive how badly behind they are

Curious if you've seen firstmate, built by a former bigtech principal engineer. It's like a sane version of gastown, essentially a meta-harness of sorts.

https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate

Not affiliated, just started using a few weeks back and am pleasantly surprised how well it works even with rather dumb agents.

Gemini CLI was utter shit and always had delayed model release on top of it. I'm not kidding when 1 hour automated vibe-coding led to an agent 30% cheaper and faster on 1:1 tasks with the SAME Gemini models (re-ran on 50 past tasks), genuinely shameful that Google even released this, it was so buggy, trapped in infinite loops as well and so-on.

Antigravity is a whole different product, the only way I use it currently is to abstract the OAuth mechanism so we can leverage Google subscriptions within our own agents.

2.5 was recently released https://antigravity.google/changelog

They got a new user.

Their marketing materials emphasize inter-agent communication, but that's hardly unique to Antigravity. Either way, it's not BYOK, so there's already a substantial reason not to use it if you're deploying multiple agents.