This is a submission for the Google I/O Writing Challenge
I watched the Google I/O 2026 developer keynote twice.
The first time, I got swept up in it. Antigravity 2.0. The Managed Agents API. Gemini 3.5 Flash running four times faster than comparable frontier models. The pitch was clean and intoxicating: from prompts to action. Spin up an autonomous agent — one that reasons, writes code, browses the web, and executes in a secure sandboxed Linux environment — with a single API call. I felt the same thing I imagine a lot of developers felt: the sense that we are standing at a genuine inflection point.
The second time, I started doing the math.
And that's when some questions started to surface — the ones nobody on the I/O stage addressed, and the ones I think matter most for the majority of the world's developers.
