Just to head off the comments: I didn't create this clip, add the text overlay or choose the audio. Sharing strictly for the eagle vs snake outcome.
^(Disclaimer: Before the uproar starts, yes, I am a human and I am admittedly very bad at structured writing (due to a medical condition)****. This is why, after writing the whole content of this post myself manually, I used AI to polish it to make it easier to read and improve the experience for everyone. The purpose of this post is to provide constructive feedback to Google (because I like their services and also their models but I feel there is potential wasted due to the Antigravity harness lock-in) and to open a discussion on this harness lock-in.)
I’m curious to hear how everyone else here is handling the current workflow restrictions with the Antigravity harness.
Like many users, I find Google's current two-track billing and access structure paradoxical and frustrating. For me, the Antigravity harness does not work well for my coding workflow (I described my experience in another comment). Many other users have described a similar experience and expressed the desire to use Gemini models with other harnesses (e.g. in this post).
Why is there such a restrictive and seemingly paradoxical disconnect between Google's subscription tiers and external developer tooling in the first place?
Plugging models into user-chosen harnesses is becoming the standard. Users frequently want a model's weights and reasoning capabilities without being tied to a specific IDE or harness.
Emerging research (like the Harness-Bench study) and independent tests (e.g.,Composio's harness benchmark) show that the harness drastically impacts pass rates, token consumption, and execution speed.
Composio benchmark (same Kimi K3 model, reasoning level, and 25 tasks across harnesses):
| Harness | Tasks passed | Pass rate | Median time | Tool calls | Cost per success |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oh My Pi | 22/25 | 88% | 231.7s | 248 | $0.52 |
| Kimi Code | 21/25 | 84% | 281.9s | 301 | $0.64 |
| Hermes Agent | 20/25 | 80% | 164.0s | 262 | $0.46 |
| Claude Code | 19/25 | 76% | 330.5s | 293 | $1.96 |
| Pi Agent | 18/25 | 72% | 156.2s | 223 | $0.57 |
| OpenCode | 18/25 | 72% | 270.5s | 299 | $0.72 |
| Grok Build | 18/25 | 72% | 196.2s | 402 | $0.66 |
| Codex | 17/25 | 68% | 233.4s | 297 | $0.66 |
Why not allow Google AI Pro subscribers to route their usage via a personal API token or official bridge into whatever harness fits their stack?
Opening this up would make Google AI Pro far more compelling to professional developers and drive broader adoption, rather than frustrating users with an artificial walled garden.
Edit 1: formatting
Edit 2: Short update: As u/DowntownNoLonger pointed out "All subscription services lock their models into their harness. OpenAI is codex, Anthropic is Claude Code, Google AI Pro is Antigravity. If you want API access, you pay API prices, which is generally more expensive than the price you're paying for the subscription. That's the tradeoff."
Edit 2.1: Thanks to u/NicksTechTricks and u/Personal-Try2776 for clarifying and correcting this! Seems that subscription API access depends on the provider (see sources in one of my comments below):
Edit 3: Thank you everyone for your comments so far. I would like to apologize to everyone that I might have irritated by using ai to help me re-phrase parts of the above post body. I agree with u/SomeOrdinaryKangaroo to "Never let AI write your reddit posts again" and u/Kazekage1111 "Just write it poorly, preferable to this ai garbage". For traceability, I will not re-edit the text above and leave it as it is. Now that this is clarified, it would be great if the further discussion could be re-focused on the central topic of the post.