Category: Cloud

We’ve passed the first phase of AI dev tooling. When I first saw AI-assisted code completion and generation, I was wow-ed. Still am. Amazing stuff. Then agentic coding environments went a step further. We could generate entire apps with products like Replit or v0! Following that, we all got new types of agentic IDEs, CLIs, background coding agents, and more. With all these options, there isn’t just one way to work with AI in software engineering.

I’m noticing that I’m using AI tools to command (perform actions on my environment or codebase), to code (write or review code), and to conduct (coordinate agents who work on my behalf). Whether these are done via separate tools or the same one, this seems like a paradigm that will persist for a while.

Let’s see this in action. I’ll first do this with a set of popular tools—Google AI Studio, Gemini CLI, Gemini Code Assist, and Jules—and then do the same exercise with the new Google Antigravity agent-first development platform.

I’ve accepted that I’ll never be a professional baseball player. It’s just not in the cards. But can I use AI to help me pretend that I played! Let’s build an application that uses AI to take an uploaded picture and generate images of that person in various real-life baseball situations.

Build with a set of AI tools

Gemini 3 Pro is excellent at frontend code and Google AI Studio is a fantastic way to get started building my app. I went to the “Build” section where I could provide a natural language prompt to start vibe-coding my baseball app. Here’s an example of “commanding” with AI tools.

After a few seconds of thinking, I saw a stash of files created for my application. Then a preview popped up that I could actually interact with.

Jeez, only one prompt and I have an awesome AI app. How cool is that? The Nano Banana model is just remarkable.

Now I wanted to do more with this app and bring it into my IDE to make some updates before deploying it. In the top right of the screen, there’s a GitHub icon. After I clicked that, I was asked to authenticate with my GitHub account. Next, I had to provide details about which repo to create for this new codebase.

Then Google AI Studio showed me all the changes it made in the local repo. I get one last chance to review things before staging and committing the changes.

A moment later, I had a fully populated GitHub repo. This gave me the intermediate storage I needed to pick up and continue with my IDE and agentic CLI.

I jumped into Visual Studio Code with the installed Gemini Code Assist plugin. I’ve also got the Gemini CLI integration set up, so everything is all in one place.

Here, I can command and code my way to a finished app. I could ask (command) for a summary of the application itself and how it’s put together. But even more useful, I issued a command asking for how this app was authenticating with the Gemini API.

Very helpful! Notice that it found a config file that shows a mapping from GEMINI_API_KEY (which is the environment variable I need to set) to the API_KEY referred to in code. Good to know.

Here’s where I could continue to code my way through the app with AI assistance if there were specific changes I felt like making ahead of deploying it. I wrote a mix of code (and used the Gemini CLI) to add a Node server to serve this static content and access the environment variable from the runtime.

Let’s do some conducting. I didn’t feel like writing up a whole README and wanted some help from AI. Here’s where Jules comes in, and its extension for the Gemini CLI. Notice that I have Gemini CLI extensions for Jules and Cloud Run already installed.

I can go ahead and ask Jules to create a better README, and then continue on my work. Agents working on my behalf!

After doing some other work, I came back and checked the status of the Jules job (/jules status) and saw that the task was done. The Jules extension asked me if I wanted a new branch, or to apply the changes locally. I chose the former option and reviewed the PR before merging.

Finally, I was ready to deploy this to Google Cloud Run. Here, I also used a command approach and instructed the Gemini CLI to deploy this app with the help of the extension for Cloud Run.

Using a natural language request from me, the Gemini CLI crafted the correct gcloud CLI command to deploy my app.

That finished in a few seconds, and I had my vibe-coded app, with some additional changes, deployed and running in Google Cloud.

So we commanded Google AI Studio to build the fundamentals of the app, used Gemini Code Assist and the Gemini CLI to code and command towards deployment, and Jules to conduct background agents on our behalf. Not particularly difficult, and the handoffs via a Git repo worked well.

This process works great if you have distinct roles with handoffs (designer –> developer –> deployment team) or want to use distinct products at each stage.

Build with Google Antigravity

Google Antigravity isn’t a code editor. It’s not an IDE. It’s something more. Yes, you can edit code and do classic IDE things. What’s different is that it’s agent-first, and supports a rich set of surfaces in a single experience. I can kick off a series of agents to do work, trigger Computer Use in a dedicated browser, and extend behavior through MCP servers. Basically, I can do everything I did above, but within a single experience.

I fed it the same prompt I gave to Google AI Studio. Immediately, Google Antigravity got to work building an implementation plan.

I love that I can review this implementation plan, and add comments to sections I want to update. This feels like a very natural way to iterate on this specification. Right away, I asked for Node server host for this app, and am building it that way from the start.

The AI agent recognizes my comments and refreshes its plans.

At this point, the agent is rolling. It built out the entire project structure, created all the code files, and plowed through its task list. Yes, it creates and maintains a task list so we can track what’s going on.

The “Agent Manager” interface is wild. From here I can see my inbox of agent tasks, and monitor what my agents are currently doing. This one is running shell commands.

The little “drawer” at the bottom of the main chat window also keeps tabs on what’s going on across all the various agents. Here I could see what docs need my attention, which processes are running (e.g. web servers), and which artifacts are part of the current conversation.

The whole app building processed finished in just a few minutes. It looked good! And because Google Antigravity has built-in support for Computer Use with a Chrome browser, it launched a browser instance and showed me how the app worked. I can also prompt Computer Use interactions any time via chat.

Antigravity saved the steps it followed into an artifact called Walkthrough. Including a screenshot!

How about fixing the README? In the previous example, I threw that to a background task in Jules. I could still do that here, but Antigravity is also adept at doing asynchronous work. I went into the Agent Manager and asked for a clean README with screenshots and diagrams. Then I closed Agent Manager and did some other things. Never breaking flow!

Later, I noticed that the work was completed. The Agent Manager showed me what it did, and gave me a preview of the finished README. Nice job.

I wanted to see the whole process through, so how about using Google Antigravity to deploy this final app to Google Cloud Run?

This product also supports extension via MCP. During this product preview, it comes with a couple dozen MCP servers in the “MCP Store.” These include ones for Google products, Figma, GitHub, Stripe, Notion, Supabase, and more.

We don’t yet include one for Cloud Run, but I can add that myself. The “manage MCP servers” is empty to start, but it shows you the format you need to add to the configuration file. I added the configuration for the local Cloud Run MCP server.

After saving that configuration, I refreshed the “manage MCP servers” screen and saw all the tools at my disposal.

Sweet! I went back to the chat window and asked Google Antigravity to deploy this app to Cloud Run.

The first time, the deployment failed but Google Antigravity picked up the error and updated the app to start on the proper port and tweak how it handled wildcard paths. It then redeployed, and worked.

Fantastic. Sure enough, browsing the URL showed my app running and working flawlessly. Without a doubt, this would have been hours or days of work for me. Especially on the frontend stuff since I’m terrible at it. Instead, the whole process took less than an hour.

I’m very impressed! For at least the next few years, software engineering will likely include a mix of commands, coding, and conducting. As I showed you here, you can do that with distinct tools that enable distinct stages and offer one or more of those paradigms. Products like Google Antigravity offer a fresh perspective, and make it possible to design, build, optimize, and deploy all from one product. And I can now seamlessly issue commands, write code, and conduct agents without ever breaking flow. Pretty awesome.

My favorite movie is Tommy Boy. I apologize for nothing. You won’t find this flick listed on the top 100 movies of all time, and some people think it’s a dumb movie. That’s ok. Look, I don’t really get the Dave Matthews Band. They seem like nice chaps, but it’s not my thing. But they have a massive following of superfans. Everything isn’t for everyone. Not every product is built for you.

I recently looked at which AI coding tool was the right fit for a given situation. But what about Google’s hefty portfolio of products for those who want to vibe code and let AI take the wheel? In that case, it’s not just about the given situation, but also the type of person. Not every product is for each type of user.

Vibe coding is expanding the pool of people who build apps. It seems to consist of consumers who are non-tech folks who want to bring ideas to life. There are tech-adjacent professionals who do “knowledge work” and might be business analysts, product managers, program leads, and executives. And then you have software developers who have deep understanding of tech, and want to quickly produce new software.

What are we vibe-coding? To me, it seems like we’re building throwaway prototypes to just try something out quickly. We’re creating personal software that’s meant to improve our own productivity. And we’re delivering multi-user apps that are intended for legit use by others. So in my mind, it’s a grid like this, with my take on which Google tech fits where:

Vibing as consumers

I’m not sure consumers are interested in throwaway prototypes. My non-tech friends wouldn’t want to geek out on tech. They have some sort of goal to solve a problem.

What about consumers building “personal software” that acts as a web app, agent, or tool? Sure. Gemini Canvas seems like a good choice for this. And, for building simple apps to share with others. Gemini Gems are a tool for building personal AI assistants without needing to be a tech expert. Some are creating fun consumer-grade demos with Google AI Studio, so I wouldn’t complain if you added that product into this row as well.

Let’s look at Gemini Canvas. You activate this in Gemini when you choose to “build.”

Let me provide it a simple prompt:

Beautiful exercise tracking app that lets me record the exercises I did in a given day, and for how long. I can also view past days and see trends over time.

When I enter that prompt, Gemini gets to work. It creates a single-file app where the code is not the focus. You can see the code, but it quickly switches the UI to a preview of the app. I can make changes via the chat and get a live look at the changes.

This is a fun to use, simple interface that’s consumer friendly. It’s easy to trigger, very fast at generating apps, has basic abilities to rollback changes, and offers sharing via a public link. It’s very opinionated on the tech stack, the code is all stuffed into a single artifact, and you don’t get many legit deployment options. Great for consumers who are building personal software or simple apps for a small group to use.

Vibing as tech-adjacent professionals

I think it’s awesome that anyone within a company can be a builder. It doesn’t matter if the HR person, executive assistant, program manager, or VP doesn’t know how to code. They can use Gemini Canvas as I showed above, along with other tools.

Some who have some tech familiarity might jump to Google AI Studio. It’s free to use and fantastic for builders. From the “build” menu, you can trigger a vibe coding experience that keeps the focus on the outcome, not the code.

I’ll use the same prompt as above, but you also get a few other configuration options, including the ability to choose between React or Angular.

Once I submit the prompt, Google AI Studio gets to work thinking through a plan and building out the components. The interface is terrific here. What’s different from Gemini Canvas is that you get a professionally structured project with code arranged across files. It takes longer to get to a Preview because it’s doing more (responsible) work, but it’s still very fast.

I like the suggestions offered for the app (above chat box), easy ability to download the app, GitHub integrations, and one-click deploys to Google Cloud Run. The code editor is basic, so I wouldn’t use this for sophisticated builds, but that’s not what it’s for.

Opal is a new Google experiment for building “mini-AI apps” and isn’t a standard vibe coding tool. Think of it as a way to build apps that are focused on generating content with AI.

My exercise tracking tool doesn’t make a ton of sense here. One use case for Opal could be to generate text for sharing content on each social media site.

Opal lets you define what you need to collect from the user, assets you have available (YouTube videos, documents, and more), can perform web searches, generate all sorts of media, and aggregate results.

It’s simple to preview and share these apps, and I like the concept. It’s not a traditional “vibe coding” tool, but I can see where non-developers would like using it to bring ideas to life.

You could also consider Agentspace a vibing tool for office workers. Agentspace is a unique platform for those who want a more useful and effective internal experience for getting work done. Besides offering a AI-enabled search and research, it also has an agent-building experience for those who want personal agents.

The agent builder interface is entirely no-code, and lets you tap into public internet searches, along with private enterprise data sources and tools. This is super helpful for those who want to automate repeatable tasks or build personal productivity solutions.

The final option I put into this row is Firebase Studio. This is a service that’s completely applicable to software developers, but also friendly to those who aren’t professionals in this space. Unlike most of the options I’ve listed so far, this isn’t only for front-end solutions. I can build backend Go or Java apps too. It also offers a vibing UI where you can start with a prompt and build the app. I’ll use the same prompt I did earlier.

When you start vibe coding here, Firebase Studio shares an app blueprint and then gets to work. I wouldn’t give this to a consumer persona—there’s still technical know-how you’d need to have—built it’s approachable to those who aren’t full-on software developers.

Vibing as software developers

If you’re a developer, you can use any of the options above. You might love the simplicity of Gemini Canvas, or prefer the opinionated Google AI Studio environment. Sounds good, live your life.

Many software people want to vibe code with tools already in their toolchain. Your best bets with Google are the Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist.

The Gemini CLI is a command line interface that’s free to use. You can authenticate with your Google ID (as an individual or corporate user), bring a Google AI Studio API key, or use Google Cloud Vertex AI. It has built-in tools (Google Search, shell, reading files, etc), supports MCP, has configurable memory, and can run anywhere. We recently added a supporting GitHub Action so that you can use it in your code repo. And Zed just integrated it into their next-gen code editor.

The Gemini CLI is a great vibe coding tool. I could use the same prompt above, but also ask for a technical spec first, define my language/framework preferences, and generally steer the build the way I want.

When I want maximum power during my vibe coding sessions (like I had yesterday), i use a combination of Gemini Code Assist with the Gemini CLI rolled in. Killer combo, as I get the conversational AI mode of Gemini Code Assist in my IDE/editor, but also the rich agentic power of the Gemini CLI with shared context. Yesterday I vibe coded a complete “travel app” after using the CLI to generate a spec and then incrementally implementing it with the CLI, and taking over control in the editor when I needed to.

Wrap up

There’s no wrong answer here. Use what fits your situation, and the role you’re playing. If you’re goofing around and just want a frontend app, anyone should use things like Google AI Studio. If you only want a code-centric experience for every situation, stay with IDE-style tools and CLIs. But I love that it’s so much simpler for people of any skill level to realize their ideas through software thanks to a range of vibe coding tools that suit each person’s taste.

Where you decide to run your web app is often a late-binding choice. Once you’ve finished coding something you like and done some localhost testing, you seek out a reasonable place that gives you a public IP address. Developers have no shortage of runtime host options, including hyperscalers, rented VMs from cheap regional providers, or targeted services from the likes of Firebase, Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Fly.io, and a dozen others. I’m an unapologetic fanboy of Google Cloud Run—host scale-to-zero apps, functions, and jobs that offer huge resource configurations, concurrent calls, GPUs, and durable volumes with a generous free tier and straightforward pricing—and we just took the wraps of a handful of new ways to take a pile of code and turn it into a cloud endpoint.

Vibe-code a web app in Google AI Studio and one-click deploy to Cloud Run

Google AI Studio is really a remarkable. Build text prompts against our leading models, generate media with Gemini models, and even build apps. All at no cost. We just turned on the ability to do simple text-to-app scenarios, and added a button that deploys your app to Cloud Run.

First, I went to the “Build” pane and added a text prompt for my new app. I wanted a motivational quote printed on top of an image of an AI generated dog.

In one shot, I got the complete app including the correct backend AI calls to Gemini models for creating the motivational quote and generating a dog pic. So cool.

Time to ship it. There’s rocket ship icon on the top right. Assuming you’ve connected Google AI Studio to a Google Cloud account, you’re able to pick a project and one-click deploy.

It takes just a few seconds, and you get back the URL and a deep link to the app in Google Cloud.

Clicking that link shows that this is a standard Cloud Run instance, with the Gemini key helpfully added as an environment variable (versus hard coded!).

And of course, viewing the associated link takes me to my app that gives me simple motivation and happy dogs.

That’s such a simple development loop!

Create an .NET app in tools like Cursor and deploy it using the Cloud Run MCP server

Let’s say you’re using one of the MANY agentic development tools that make it simpler to code with AI assistance. Lots of you like Cursor. It supports MCP as a way to reach into other systems via tools.

We just shipped a Cloud Run MCP server, so you can make tools like Cursor aware of Cloud Run and support straightforward deployments.

I started in Cursor and asked it to build a simple REST API and picked Gemini 2.5 Pro as my preferred model. Cursor does most (all?) of the coding work for you if you want it to.

It went through a few iterations to land on the right code. I tested it locally to ensure the app would run.

Cursor has native support for MCP. I added a .cursor directory to my project and dropped in a mcp.json file in there. Cursor picked up the MCP entry, validated it, and showed me the available tools.

I asked Cursor to deploy my C# app. It explored the local folder and files to ensure it had what it needed.

Cursor realized it had a tool that could help, and proposed the “deploy_local_folder” tool from the Cloud Run MCP server.

After providing some requested values (location, etc), Cursor successfully deployed my .NET app.

That was easy. And this Cloud Run MCP server will work with any of your tools that understand MCP.

Push an open model from Google AI Studio directly to Cloud Run

Want to deploy a model to Cloud Run? It’s the only serverless platform I know of that offers GPUs. You can use tools like Ollama to deploy any open model to Cloud Run, and I like that we made even easier for Gemma fans. To see this integration, you pick various Gemma 3 editions in Google AI Studio.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll see a new icon that triggers a deployment directly to Cloud Run. Within minutes, you have an elastic endpoint providing inference.

It’s not hard to deploy open models to Cloud Run. This option makes it that much easier.

Deploy an Python agent built with the Agent Development Kit to Cloud Run with one command

The Agent Development Kit is an open source framework and toolset that devs use to build robust AI agents. The Python version reached 1.0 yesterday, and we launched a new Java version too. Here, I started with a Python agent I built.

Built into ADK are a few deployment options. It’s just code, so you can run it anywhere. But we’ve added shortcuts to services like Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Agent Engine and Cloud Run. Just one command puts my agent onto Cloud Run!

We don’t yet have this CLI deployment option for the Java ADK. But it’s also simple to use the Google Cloud CLI command to deploy a Java app or agent to Cloud Run with one command too.

Services like Cloud Run are ideal for your agents and AI apps. These built-in integrations for ADK help you get these agents online quickly.

Use a Gradio instance in Cloud Run to experiment with prompts after one click from Vertex AI Studio

How do you collaborate or share prompts with teammates? Maybe you’re using something like Google Cloud Vertex AI to iterate on a prompt yourself. Here, I wrote system instructions and a prompt for helping me prioritize my work items.

Now, I can click “deploy an app” and get a Gradio instance for experimenting further with my app.

This has public access by default, so I’ve got to give the ok.

After a few moments, I have a running Cloud Run app! I’m shown this directly from Vertex AI and have a link to open the app.

That link brings me to this Gradio instance that I can share with teammates.

The scalable and accessible Cloud Run is ideal for spontaneous exploration of things like AI prompts. I like this integration!

Ship your backend Java code to Cloud Run directly from Firebase Studio

Our final example looks at Firebase Studio. Have you tried this yet? It’s a free to use, full-stack dev environment in the cloud for nearly any type of app. And it supports text-to-app scenarios if you don’t want to do much coding yourself. There are dozens of templates, including one for Java.

I spun up a Java dev environment to build a web service.

This IDE will look familiar. Bring in your favorite extensions, and we’ve also pre-loaded this with Gemini assistance, local testing tools, and more. See here that I used Gemini to add a new REST endpoint to my Java API.

Here on the left is an option to deploy to Cloud Run!

After authenticating to my cloud account and picking my cloud project, I could deploy. After a few moments, I had another running app in Cloud Run, and had a route to make continuous updates.

Wow. That’s a lot of ways to go from code to cloud. Cloud Run is terrific for frontend or backend components, functions or apps, open source or commercial products. Try one of these integrations and tell me what you think!