Get Out of the Model's Way — Kevin Hou, Google DeepMind

93 subagents, 12 hours, 2 billion tokens and under $1,000: that's what it took Google's Antigravity to build an operating system kernel from scratch that runs Doom. Kevin Hou, who leads engineering on Antigravity, Google DeepMind's agentic coding product, explains the principle behind it: "Give Messi the ball and get out of the way." Your product should get better every time the model does. Hou traces how coding tools evolved, from autocomplete in 2022 to agents in 2024, agent managers in 2025 and agent teams in 2026. He also shares the lessons from hard calls like removing chat from Windsurf. He then introduces Antigravity 2.0 and the three building blocks of the agent-teams era. The first is dynamic subagents, where Gemini 3.5 Flash leads a team through /teamwork. The second is sidecars, a new plugin protocol that lets agents listen for webhooks, cron jobs and messages. The third is generative UI rendered on the fly. He also shows how DeepMind researchers automated 90% of eval analysis with 100 parallel hypothesis agents. Speaker info: X/Twitter: @kevinhou22 (https://x.com/kevinhou22) Website: https://khou22.com Related links: Google Antigravity: https://antigravity.google Timestamps: 0:00 Intro: give Messi the ball 1:15 What Antigravity is 2:15 Antigravity 2.0 2:50 Scaling with intelligence 3:20 From autocomplete to agent teams 4:25 Battle scars: giving AI a terminal 5:15 Removing chat from Windsurf 5:55 Splitting the agent manager from the IDE 6:25 The 2026 building blocks 7:05 Where new building blocks come from 7:55 Gemini 3.5 Flash leads agent teams 8:15 Agent teams with /teamwork 8:55 Specialized, dynamic subagents 9:25 Generative UI status views 9:50 A photo editor and a messaging app 10:10 An OS kernel that runs Doom 10:45 93 subagents, 12 hours, under $1,000 11:10 Automating research: side-by-side evals 12:25 100 hypotheses in parallel 13:10 Generative UI reports 14:15 Building block 1: dynamic subagents 15:10 Building block 2: sidecars 16:05 Building block 3: generative UI 16:55 Not fixed in plastic 17:30 Wrap-up