You hand a long task to an agent, wait it out, and come back to find the Walkthrough panel empty. Clicking it just spins on "Loading..." forever. If you've been there even once, you know the particular discomfort of watching changes land in your codebase without any record of why.
Walkthrough is the backbone of Antigravity's trust model. When it breaks, you're effectively left with "the AI did something, somewhere." The good news is that in practice, Walkthrough failures almost always fall into one of a handful of patterns. This guide walks through them in order, starting with the cheap fixes that solve most cases before moving into deeper diagnosis. I'll focus on the actual signals to check rather than generic "restart and hope" advice, because knowing which layer is failing saves real time.
Start with three quick checks
About seventy percent of the time, one of these resolves the issue on its own. Before you reach for anything more invasive, give these a shot in order.
1. Confirm the task actually finished in Manager Surface
Walkthrough entries are only generated after a task completes. If Manager Surface (left sidebar) still shows the task as In Progress, there's simply nothing to display yet. A spinning status icon almost always means "the agent is still working," not "something is broken" — it's easy to miss when you're impatient. In particular, tasks that involve multiple tool calls or long-running terminal commands can appear idle for minutes while they actually continue in the background.
2. Reload the panel
Open the command palette with Cmd + Shift + P (macOS) or Ctrl + Shift + P (Windows) and run Antigravity: Reload Walkthrough Panel. Under the hood this just remounts the React component tree, but that's enough to clear most rendering-layer glitches. If you've recently switched themes or toggled extensions, this step resolves a surprising percentage of "blank panel" complaints.
3. Restart Antigravity itself
If the reload didn't help, fully quit Antigravity and relaunch it. On macOS, use Cmd + Q — closing the window from the dock leaves the process alive, which defeats the purpose. On Windows, check Task Manager to confirm no Antigravity or Antigravity Helper processes are still running before you relaunch.
If you've tried all three and the panel is still stuck, move on to the next section. The deeper patterns below require a bit more diagnosis but are still mostly mechanical to fix.
Diagnose by layer
Walkthrough issues break down into three layers. Identifying which layer is failing makes the rest of the fix obvious. Trying fixes from the wrong layer is the main reason troubleshooting drags on.
Pattern A: Corrupted local cache
Temp files pile up under ~/.antigravity/cache/walkthroughs/, and occasionally one ends up half-written after an abnormal shutdown. I've mostly seen this after force-restarting during a macOS system update, or when the disk fills up mid-write. The signature is that the Walkthrough panel shows structural chrome but no content, or throws a silent JSON parse error in the console.
Here's the fix:
# Check current Walkthrough cache size
du -sh ~/.antigravity/cache/walkthroughs/
# Rename (don't delete yet) so you can roll back if needed
mv ~/.antigravity/cache/walkthroughs \
~/.antigravity/cache/walkthroughs.bak.$(date +%Y%m%d)
# Antigravity will recreate the directory on next launchClearing the cache wipes past Walkthrough history, but in-flight tasks and stored memories live elsewhere and aren't affected. The walkthroughs.bak.* rename means you can restore it if the real problem turns out to be something else. If everything still works a week later, feel free to delete the backup directory permanently.
Pattern B: Desync between Manager Surface and the Walkthrough store
Walkthrough task metadata and Walkthrough content are stored separately, so one can go missing while the other survives. The telltale sign: Manager Surface lists your task, but clicking it shows a blank Walkthrough. Sometimes the title bar even displays the task name while the body stays empty.
Right-click the affected task and select Regenerate Walkthrough. Internally this reconstructs the Walkthrough from the task's execution log — tool calls, diffs, and conversation turns. It takes a few seconds, and as long as the raw log still exists, recovery is usually successful. You may notice that regenerated Walkthroughs are slightly less polished than the originals (fewer inline annotations, for instance), but they preserve the essential audit trail.
If the underlying log itself has been purged, regeneration isn't possible. To keep this from happening again, review the log retention settings in the Manager Surface operations guide — the default retention is shorter than most people assume, especially on smaller disks where Antigravity aggressively reclaims space.
Pattern C: Extensions or network interference
This is the corporate-network pattern: a proxy or VPN is interfering with Antigravity's backend connection. Walkthrough rendering uses Server-Sent Events (SSE) internally, and proxies that aggressively kill long-lived connections are particularly nasty here. Zscaler, BlueCoat, and a few enterprise VPN clients are repeat offenders in my experience.
Developer Tools makes this easy to diagnose. Open it with Cmd + Shift + I, filter the Network tab for walkthrough, and inspect the response.
200with an empty body → backend is answering but has no data. Suspect Pattern B.504or stuck onPending→ proxy-level disconnect. Ask your network admin to allow long-lived SSE connections, or retry briefly on a mobile hotspot to confirm. If mobile works and office doesn't, you've found the culprit.401/403→ auth error. Go toCmd + ,→ Account →Re-authenticate. This often happens silently after an organization-wide SSO token rotation.
In my experience, adding *.antigravity.google to the NO_PROXY environment variable cuts down SSE drops substantially when a proxy is in the loop. If you're on macOS and launch Antigravity from a shell that inherits proxy variables, this one-line change can make the difference between a working Walkthrough and daily frustration.
When Walkthrough shows stale content
A different symptom: you run a fresh task, but Walkthrough keeps showing output from the previous one. This is almost always cache-key collision, and it tends to appear when multiple workspaces share the same folder name — a common trap when you clone the same repo into multiple directories for parallel branches.
Reset the workspace identifier like this:
# Locate your workspace config files
ls ~/.antigravity/workspaces/
# Regenerate the workspace ID by dropping the hash suffix
# (Antigravity reassigns one on next launch)
mv ~/.antigravity/workspaces/my-project-abc123.json \
~/.antigravity/workspaces/my-project.jsonReopen the folder in Antigravity and you'll get a fresh workspace ID. The original my-project-abc123.json still contains your old Walkthrough history, so you can mine it for context if you need to. I keep a ~/antigravity-archives/ directory for exactly this purpose.
Last resort: full profile reset
If nothing above worked, you're looking at a full profile reset. This also wipes memories and custom rules, so export these before you go any further. I cannot stress enough how much work you'll lose if you skip the backup step.
~/.antigravity/memory/— learned context and knowledge~/.antigravity/rules/— custom rules~/.antigravity/snippets/— saved snippets
Once backed up, use "Reset User Profile" from the Antigravity installer, or reset manually:
# Final safety backup
tar czf ~/antigravity-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz ~/.antigravity/
# Wipe profile state
rm -rf ~/.antigravity/cache/
rm -rf ~/.antigravity/state/After the reset you'll re-authenticate and lose all local customization. Getting this far is rare, but environments that have survived many updates tend to accumulate inconsistent state, and an occasional clean slate is honestly a decent preventative habit. Think of it the way you'd think of clearing browser cache every few months — boring, but it prevents weirder problems down the road.
How to keep this from happening again
A few habits meaningfully reduce Walkthrough failures over the long haul.
First, revisit your task granularity before launching a long job. Packing too much into a single task bloats the Walkthrough and slows rendering, sometimes to the point where the panel appears frozen when it's really just parsing megabytes of nested output. Anything I expect to take more than thirty minutes, I split using the thinking in the Manager Surface guide. Smaller tasks also produce Walkthroughs that are easier to review, which is the whole point of the feature.
Second, pair Walkthrough with the habit of reviewing agent changes in Diff View. Even when Walkthrough is down, Diff View gives you a minimum-viable audit trail — you can see what changed even if you can't see the reasoning. Treating them as complementary views, not redundant ones, is the mental model that pays off.
Third, don't conflate Walkthrough failures with the adjacent-but-different symptom where code changes aren't being applied. The former is a display-layer problem; the latter is a write-layer problem. The fixes don't overlap, and misdiagnosing one as the other wastes a surprising amount of time.
Walkthrough is invisible infrastructure — you don't notice it until it stops working, and then you notice it immediately. Hopefully this saves someone a slow afternoon. Start with Manager Surface status and work your way down; the fix is almost always closer than it feels. The next time your Walkthrough goes quiet, open Manager Surface first, check the task status, and move layer by layer. You'll find the cause faster than reinstalling from scratch ever will.