The GitHub Pull Requests Extension Doesn't Work in Antigravity, So I Learned gh

I installed Antigravity IDE recently and reached for the GitHub Pull Requests extension out of habit. It installed. It just never worked — the PR panel wouldn’t load my pull requests, and none of the review actions did anything useful.

This is a known problem with Antigravity, not something wrong with my setup. The extension leans on VS Code extension APIs that Antigravity hasn’t implemented yet, so it loads but sits there half-broken. Nothing I could fix on my end.

So I uninstalled it and installed the GitHub CLI instead. This post is the flow I ended up with, including the one I used to ship this post.

Four commands, no browser

Branching, staging and committing still happen in the editor’s source control panel. That part was never broken, and I click through it like everyone else. Everything after the push is gh.

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gh pr create

It prompts for the title, opens your editor for the body, and asks for the base branch, so there are no flags to memorize. It prints the PR URL when it’s done, which is the last time I saw a github.com address that day.

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gh pr status

The PR for the current branch, anything you opened, and anything waiting on your review. Immediately after creating, mine said Checks pending.

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gh pr checks --watch

This blocks until CI finishes and then prints the result table. Netlify takes about 26 seconds on this site, so I get a deploy preview link in the terminal without ever loading the Actions tab:

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All checks were successful
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0 cancelled, 0 failing, 1 successful, 3 skipped, and 0 pending checks

It exits non-zero when something fails, which is what makes it scriptable. Run it, and when it returns you already know whether to merge or go read logs.

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gh pr merge

This is the one I underestimated. It asks for the merge method, asks whether to delete the branch, and then does all of the cleanup: merges on GitHub, fetches, fast-forwards local main, deletes the branch locally and on the remote, and switches you back to main.

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✓ Deleted local branch blog/github-cli and switched to branch main
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✓ Deleted remote branch blog/github-cli

In the browser flow, that’s a button click followed by git switch main, git pull, and git branch -d. Here it’s one prompt.

The one for other people’s code

If you review PRs from forks, this is worth the install on its own:

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gh pr checkout 123

By hand, that means finding the contributor’s fork, adding it as a remote, fetching the branch, then creating a local branch that tracks it. gh does it from the PR number, and it works the same whether the branch lives in your repo or a stranger’s.

Where the browser still wins

Reading a diff. That’s it, but it’s a big one.

gh pr review --approve and gh pr comment exist, and I don’t use them. Approving code from a terminal with no diff in front of me is a good way to approve something I didn’t read. On a repo with actual reviewers, I’d still open the PR page to review, then come back to gh to merge.

This blog is a solo repo, so there’s nobody to review it, and the browser adds nothing but a tab.

What I settled on

Git operations in the editor’s source control panel, everything PR-shaped in gh, and the GitHub website only when there’s a diff someone needs to actually read.

The extension isn’t part of it, and I haven’t missed it enough to check whether it’s been fixed.