Agents Built an OS Kernel That Runs Doom — Kevin Hou, Google DeepMind
Kevin Hou details the evolution of agentic coding tools, introducing Antigravity 2.0, Google's agent coding product. The core principle is 'scaling with intelligence,' meaning product primitives must evolve as LLMs improve. The future (2026 era) is defined by 'agent teams' or 'swarms,' which are powered by three new primitives: dynamic subagents, sidecars, and generative UI. These tools allow for complex, parallelized tasks, demonstrated by building an entire OS kernel that runs Doom using 93 subagents in 12 hours.
Key takeaways
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The Agentic Evolution
5:20
Coding tools have progressed from deterministic autocomplete (2022) to agent-based systems (2024) and parallel agent managers (2025). The next phase (2026) is focused on agent teams/swarms, which decouple the IDE from the agent manager for greater flexibility.
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The Three Core Primitives
10:25
The future of agent teams relies on: 1) Dynamic Subagents (specialized, parallel roles); 2) Sidecars (a new plugin protocol for listening to external triggers like webhooks or cron jobs); and 3) Generative UI (rendering interactive UIs on the fly, bypassing fixed templates).
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Demonstrated Capability
18:10
Antigravity successfully built a complete OS kernel from scratch and ran Doom. This feat required 93 subagents over 12 hours, utilized 2 billion tokens, and cost under $1,000.