Three New Ways to Build Software With AI in 2026

Cursor, Windsurf, and Google Antigravity are now fully agentic.

Six months ago, picking an AI code editor was straightforward: Cursor if you wanted the best, GitHub Copilot if you wanted the safest. Windsurf existed but felt like a scrappy alternative.

In the span of two weeks, Cursor shipped major updates to its command-line tool with cloud handoff and parallel agent evaluation. Windsurf, now owned by Cognition (the company behind the AI coding agent Devin), made its fastest model free and released support for multi-agent sessions. And Google’s Antigravity, which launched in November alongside Gemini 3, has moved from intriguing announcement to thing developers are actually using, complete with third-party guides on how to work with its parallel agent system.

For anyone paying attention to how software gets built, this matters, because these aren’t just better autocomplete tools—they represent a shift in what AI coding assistance even means.

What’s Actually Going On Here

To understand the shift, it helps to know what these tools used to do versus what they do now.

The first wave of AI coding tools, with GitHub Copilot being the most famous, worked like very smart autocomplete: you’d start typing a function, and the AI would suggest how to finish it. Useful, but you were still doing the driving.

The new generation flips this: you describe what you want built (like “add user authentication to this API”), and an AI agent plans the work, makes changes across multiple files, runs terminal commands, checks if things work, and fixes what breaks. The developer becomes less typist, more reviewer, which is why some people call this “agentic” coding—the AI has agency to act, not just suggest.

All three major tools now work this way, but they execute the vision differently.

Cursor remains the power user’s choice. Version 2.0 introduced multi-agent workflows where you can run up to eight AI agents in parallel, each working in an isolated environment. The mid-January update added Plan mode (map out your approach before coding), Ask mode (explore a codebase without changing anything), and the ability to push conversations to “Cloud Agents” that keep running while you step away. Cursor also shipped Debug Mode, a workflow where the AI instruments your code with logging, generates hypotheses about what’s wrong, and checks with you before applying fixes.

Their philosophy revolves around maximum control and capability: Cursor assumes you know what you’re doing and gives you every lever to pull.

Windsurf bet on speed, with their SWE-1.5 model running at 950 tokens per second, about 13x faster than comparable models by their measurements. (Tokens are roughly word-fragments; faster token generation means the AI responds more quickly.) Their January release brought support for working on multiple branches simultaneously and viewing several AI sessions side-by-side.

The bigger story, though, is ownership. Cognition acquired Windsurf in July 2025, bringing together Windsurf’s polished editor with Devin’s autonomous agent technology, and the combined pitch is compelling: describe what you want, delegate the work to a “team of Devins,” and get results assembled in one place. At $15/month versus Cursor’s $20, Windsurf is positioning as the fast, well-funded option, and Cognition hit a $10.2 billion valuation in September.

Google Antigravity takes the most different approach: built on Visual Studio Code but redesigned around agents as the primary workers, Antigravity introduces something called “Manager View,” an interface for orchestrating multiple AI agents working on different tasks across different parts of your project, all at once.

Instead of chatting with an AI sidebar, you dispatch agents like a manager delegating to a team, and each agent generates “Artifacts,” meaning not just code but task lists, implementation plans, even screenshots and browser recordings showing what they tested. You review these deliverables, leave feedback, and the agent incorporates your notes without stopping.

It’s free during public preview, powered by Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, and supports other models like Claude as alternatives, though Google hasn’t announced pricing for when preview ends.

The Acquisition Story Behind Windsurf

Windsurf’s recent history is worth a brief aside, because it helps explain why the market looks the way it does.

In July 2025, OpenAI was close to acquiring Windsurf for $3 billion, but that deal collapsed over intellectual property concerns related to Microsoft. Within hours, Google hired Windsurf’s CEO, co-founder, and key researchers in a $2.4 billion talent-and-licensing deal, and Cognition then swooped in over a single weekend to acquire the remaining team, product, and customer base.

The upshot is that Windsurf’s original leadership now works at Google, presumably on Antigravity-related projects (though Google hasn’t confirmed this), and the product you download today is being built by a different team under Cognition’s roof.

This doesn’t mean Windsurf is worse, since Cognition has resources and ambition, but it’s context worth having. Cursor, by contrast, has been the same company building the same product throughout, with reportedly $500 million in annual recurring revenue.

Which Tool Is Right for You?

All three tools are good enough that you won’t go badly wrong, but the differences are real.

Cursor makes sense if you want the most mature feature set, since it’s had more than two years to refine its agentic capabilities and the depth shows: custom hooks, sophisticated debugging workflows, the ability to run parallel agents and have the system recommend which result is best. It’s built for people who already code and want AI to make them faster.

Windsurf makes sense if speed matters most to you, or if you’re drawn to the Cognition/Devin ecosystem. The 13x speed advantage is noticeable on large tasks, the lower price point helps, and Cognition’s scale suggests the product will keep getting investment.

Antigravity makes sense if you’re comfortable adopting something newer and want to try Google’s more radical vision. The Manager View concept, which treats AI agents like a team you’re coordinating, is genuinely different from anything else available, and if you find yourself wanting to describe outcomes rather than write code, Antigravity pushes that idea further than the others.

One practical note: all three are built on Visual Studio Code, so your extensions and settings transfer between them, making the switching cost essentially zero. You can download all three, try each on a real project, and see which approach clicks.

Looking Ahead

Cursor’s CEO recently predicted that 20% of coding workflows will be handled by agents by the end of 2026, and whether that’s right or optimistic, the direction is clear: AI coding tools are moving from “helps you write code faster” to “writes code while you supervise.”

The interesting question is whether this market consolidates around one winner or remains competitive. Google has vast resources but sometimes loses focus on developer tools, Cognition has momentum but is a younger company, and Cursor has the market lead but is smaller than both.

For now, the best news is simply that there are three serious options pushing each other forward, since competition tends to produce better tools. And unlike a year ago, there’s no obviously wrong choice, just different ones.