Concept 6 min read

# Antigravity Governance

As agents move from autocomplete to autonomous task execution, governance must move from human code review into the execution path.

By Theo Valmis·May 2026

Definition

Antigravity governance is the practice of applying architectural constraints, decision provenance, and verification checks to agent-first development workflows where coding agents operate across editor, terminal, and browser surfaces.

## Why it matters

Google Antigravity is one of the clearest expressions of the agent-first IDE category: autonomous agents that plan, execute, and verify work across editor, terminal, and browser, with Mission Control / Agent Manager for overseeing multiple agents and Artifacts for reviewable plans and verification outputs.

That shape changes what surrounding infrastructure has to do. The developer is no longer guarding each line of code; the agent is. The governance layer therefore has to operate at agent speed, across all the surfaces the agent touches, deterministically enough to be trusted as a release gate.

## Key claims

- Agent-first IDEs increase execution surface area. Editor, terminal, and browser are now all places an agent can act. Each surface is a place architectural intent can survive or break.
- Multi-agent workspaces increase coordination complexity. Mission Control puts many agents in parallel; without a shared enforcement layer, their choices can compound into inconsistency.
- Artifacts improve reviewability, but they do not enforce architectural invariants. Provenance is what happened; governance is what is allowed.
- Governance must be deterministic, repo-native, and tied to ADRs. Same input, same verdict, every time. Rules that travel with the repository, not with the policy team or the prompt.

## Relationship to the broader concept

Antigravity governance is the Antigravity-specific specialization of agentic IDE governance. Same discipline, applied to the specific surfaces Antigravity exposes — editor, terminal, browser, Mission Control, Artifacts.

Reviewability is not enforcement. Artifacts make agent work inspectable. Governance makes it constrainable.

## Related concepts

- Agentic IDE Governance — the broader category
- Architectural Governance — the general discipline
- Governance Propagation — how rules reach every agent surface
- Verification Contracts — the predefined checks that produce structured verdicts
- Agentic Development — the development paradigm Antigravity exemplifies
- Architectural Drift — what the absence of this discipline produces
- Runtime Governance — the runtime-time complement at the agent execution layer
- Artifact Provenance — the trail that complements (but does not replace) governance