Handing Off Conversations When Antigravity Slows Down

TL;DR

Antigravity gets sluggish during long sessions.
Splitting work across multiple sessions helps, but carrying context over becomes the next problem.
Asking Antigravity itself how to hand off led me to the “brain directory.”
With the brain directory, you can resume cleanly in a fresh session.

What Happened

Long conversations slow things down

I was working on a longer implementation task in Antigravity.

The agent was handling a sizable chunk of work, and gradually the responses started getting slower. The UI became unresponsive, and the agent was clearly lagging. A look at Activity Monitor showed memory usage was way up.

The cause: token budget pressure

Digging in, I learned Antigravity has roughly a 200,000-token budget per conversation. As the conversation grows, that budget gets consumed and processing load climbs.

On top of that, conversation history fills up local storage. Antigravity stores screenshots, recordings, and other “Artifacts” locally, which likely contributes to the slowdown.

Splitting Sessions Helps

Basic mitigations

A few things worked for me:

1. Delete old conversation logs

In the Agent Manager history, delete conversations you no longer need. Once you have dozens of accumulated sessions, IDE-wide responsiveness can take a hit.

2. Split long work across sessions

Instead of pushing one conversation to the limit, switch to a new conversation at natural breakpoints. The token budget resets and things feel snappy again.

The remaining problem: handing off context

Splitting sessions fixed performance — but introduced a new problem.

How do you bring the previous work’s context into the new session?

Re-explaining “we got this far last time” and “we were going with this approach” every time is tedious. And in the middle of a complex implementation, it’s easy to leave something out.

Antigravity has a Knowledge Items feature that learns automatically, and the accumulated knowledge does carry over. But the docs aren’t clear about scope (workspace? directory?) or how much actually carries. Sometimes you specifically want to hand off the tasks and files from one conversation.

A Lucky Find: Antigravity’s Own Answer

Before switching sessions, I asked Antigravity:

“How should I hand this off to a new conversation?”

The answer:

“When you start a separate conversation, just say ‘continue from the previous conversation (a1b2c3d4-…)’ and I can pick up the work by referencing these documents. In particular, current_issues.md has a detailed summary of what the next session should tackle.”

Wait, that’s a thing?

What is current_issues.md? Where does it live? I poked around and found an unfamiliar folder in my home directory:

ls ~/.gemini/antigravity/brain/

This is where the per-session Artifacts were being stored.

What Is the Brain Directory?

Overview

The brain directory (~/.gemini/antigravity/brain/) is where the Antigravity agent stores the records it generates while working.

~/.gemini/antigravity/brain/
├── a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-1234567890ab/
│   ├── task.md
│   ├── implementation_plan.md
│   ├── walkthrough.md
│   ├── current_issues.md
│   ├── uploaded_image_1234567890123.png
│   └── uploaded_image_1234567890456.png
├── b2c3d4e5-6789-01bc-def0-2345678901bc/
│   └── ...
└── ...

Each UUID-named folder corresponds to one conversation session.

What gets saved

File	Contents
`task.md`	Task progress (checklist format)
`implementation_plan.md`	Technical details of the implementation plan
`walkthrough.md`	Summary of changes after implementation
`current_issues.md`	Issues to address in the next session
`uploaded_image_*.png`	Images uploaded during the conversation

current_issues.md is the key one for handoffs. It captures what’s unresolved and what the next session should pick up.

Handing Off Conversations Using the Brain Directory

Approach 1: Hand off with a UUID

Start a new conversation and pass it the previous session’s ID:

Continue from the previous conversation (a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-1234567890ab).

The agent reads the matching Artifacts in the brain directory, understands the context, and picks up the work.

Approach 2: Point it at current_issues.md directly

For a more reliable handoff, give it the exact file path:

Check ~/.gemini/antigravity/brain/a1b2c3d4-.../current_issues.md and
resume from the unresolved items.

How to find the conversation ID

Just ask Antigravity directly:

What's the conversation ID (UUID) for this conversation?

Example response:

“This conversation’s ID is a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-1234567890ab.”

Note: I confirmed this in Planning mode with Gemini 3 Pro. Other models or contexts may respond differently.

A Practical Workflow

Antigravity standalone

Start work: Begin a new conversation and assign the task.
During work: The agent automatically generates task.md, implementation_plan.md, etc.
At a breakpoint: When things get sluggish, ask the agent to “bring the Artifacts up to date.” task.md, implementation_plan.md, current_issues.md, etc. all get refreshed.
Capture the UUID: Ask “What’s the UUID for this conversation?” and save it.
Hand off: Start a new conversation and say “continue from the previous conversation (UUID).”

Key point: Update the Artifacts before handing off. If they’re stale, the new session will start from a misaligned picture.

Combined with Claude Code

Brain files are plain Markdown, so other AI tools like Claude Code can read them.

# Inspect brain contents from Claude Code
cat ~/.gemini/antigravity/brain/a1b2c3d4-.../implementation_plan.md

You can hand an implementation_plan.md written by Antigravity to Claude Code and ask it to “review this plan.”

Caveats

The brain doesn’t store full conversation transcripts

Only Artifacts are stored in the brain — not the full back-and-forth. Subtle nuances and the path of the discussion can be lost, so make sure the agent explicitly records important decisions to the Artifacts.

For reference, ~/.gemini/antigravity/conversations/ contains .pb (Protocol Buffers) files, which appear to hold the conversation data in binary form. You can’t read them directly, but the conversation history seems to live there.

Storage usage

Beyond the brain directory, Antigravity also writes evidence files to places like browser_recordings/. Accumulated screenshots and browser recordings can eat through disk space. Periodically cleaning up unused sessions is a good idea.

# Inspect old sessions
ls -la ~/.gemini/antigravity/brain/

# Delete sessions you don't need
rm -rf ~/.gemini/antigravity/brain/<unwanted-uuid>/

Wrap-Up

The Antigravity slowdown is solvable by splitting sessions. And when handing off conversations, you can reference the brain directory by UUID.

Problem: Long conversations consume the token budget and slow everything down.
Solution: Switch to a new session and use the brain Artifacts to carry context forward.
Hidden feature: Just say “continue from the previous conversation (UUID)” and the agent reads the brain Artifacts.

I stumbled into this feature by asking Antigravity itself how to hand off a conversation. There’s a chance the answer was a hallucination — but the brain directory is unambiguously real, and pointing the agent at those files for handoff does work in practice. I couldn’t find any mention in the official docs, so consider this a useful undocumented trick.

If you’re hitting performance issues, give brain-based session management a try.

References

ZSL

AI Engineer

Researching and practicing development workflows powered by Generative AI.