Plenty of developers have tried Antigravity as an experiment. But using it every day, with real deadlines and production apps on the line, is a different experience entirely. This post is my honest record of three months doing exactly that — six feature releases, one developer, and one AI coding partner.
The short version: Antigravity genuinely works. But it works best when you're strict about the division of labor — you handle design decisions, Antigravity handles implementation. That sounds obvious. Living it is harder than it sounds.
Month One: Speed Impresses, Then Design Drift Appears
The first month was full of genuine surprises. "Improve the transition animation when users open the app from a widget" — I described the requirement, got working code in 30 minutes. That task had previously taken half a day.
Then, near the end of month one, I noticed something I'd later call "design drift." Across multiple sessions, Antigravity's suggestions were subtly diverging from my project's architectural decisions.
The concrete problem: my project used Redux Toolkit for state management, but in one session Antigravity started proposing useState and useContext for a piece of logic that should have been global state. The code worked, so I merged it. The next session continued in that direction, and soon I had a patchwork of inconsistent patterns.
The fix was adding design principles to .agents.md:
# Design Principles (.agents.md)
## State Management
- Global state: Redux Toolkit (RTK) only
- Local UI state: useState is allowed, but do not cache server data locally
- Context API: authentication data only
## Component Design
- UI components must not contain business logic
- Extract logic into custom hooks
- File naming: PascalCase (components) / camelCase (hooks/utils)Design drift dropped significantly after this. Antigravity reads existing code well and picks up on patterns — but it re-reads from scratch each new session. Explicit written rules are more reliable than expecting it to infer your preferences every time.
Month Two: Fighting Context Pollution
The second month's main challenge was context pollution. In long sessions covering multiple topics, the quality of suggestions degraded noticeably toward the end.
The trap I kept falling into: trying to accomplish too much in a single session. "First implement feature A, then while we're here fix this bug in B, and then let's start on C" — by the end of that session, Antigravity was mixing up the requirements for A and B.
The solution was enforcing a "one session, one task" rule:
Good:
Session 1: Redesign the login screen UI
Session 2: Improve error handling in the auth flow
Session 3: Implement the user profile screen
Bad:
Session 1: Login UI + auth error handling + profile screen + push notification settings
I also started every session with a single-sentence declaration of scope:
Opening message template:
"Today's task: Improve validation in src/screens/Profile/ProfileEditScreen.tsx.
Scope is limited to this file and its test file. No other files should be modified."
Stating the task and change scope upfront reduced the frequency of Antigravity proposing unsolicited refactoring elsewhere in the codebase.
Mid-Month Two: Loop Bugs and How to Escape Them
Occasionally Antigravity gets stuck in what I call a loop bug — proposing the same incorrect fix multiple times in slightly different forms. This happens most often with complex TypeScript type errors.
My worst case: a Promise<void> vs Promise<undefined> type mismatch where Antigravity made five consecutive attempts, each a different variation of the same fundamental mistake.
The escape that worked was forcing analysis before implementation:
Less effective: "There's an error. Please fix it."
More effective: "I'm getting this TypeScript error.
Before writing any fix, analyze why this error is occurring and explain it.
Only after explaining the root cause, propose a solution."
Requiring an explanation first gets Antigravity to actually understand the problem rather than pattern-matching to a fix. This consistently resolved loop situations.
Month Three: Sharper Understanding of AI's Strengths
By month three, I had a clear and concrete picture of what Antigravity genuinely excels at versus where I needed to stay in the driver's seat.
Antigravity handles well:
- Boilerplate generation (CRUD, form validation, API response types)
- Test code, especially happy-path unit tests
- Refactoring existing code (extracting functions, improving names, adding type annotations)
- Debugging error messages
- Writing documentation comments
Human judgment required:
- Architecture decisions (which library to use, directory structure)
- UX tradeoffs (speed vs. safety, simplicity vs. flexibility)
- Decisions that significantly affect existing users
- Security requirement verification
- Performance optimization strategy
Whenever I tried to delegate architecture decisions to Antigravity, I ended up weeks later unable to reconstruct why the structure was shaped the way it was. Design decisions need a human author — not because AI can't generate a design, but because accountability and understanding need to live somewhere.
Three Months Later: Numbers and Feel
Work completed over three months:
- Feature releases: 6 (vs. 4 in the same period the previous year)
- Bugs fixed: 32 (Antigravity detected and fixed 18 of them independently)
- Tests added: 61
- Code review rejections: down ~40% from before
But the most meaningful change was psychological. There used to be features I'd mentally label as "that'll be hard, I'll do it later." Now my default reaction is "Antigravity can handle the implementation — let me design this properly and start today."
One risk I've noticed, though: heavy AI-assisted development can quietly erode your understanding of your own codebase. If Antigravity writes code you don't fully understand and you merge it anyway, you accumulate a kind of "comprehension debt" alongside any technical debt. To counter this, I now deliberately spend one day per week coding without Antigravity — just to keep my own understanding sharp.
Three Things to Set Up Before You Start
Based on three months of daily use, here's what I wish I'd configured from the beginning:
1. Write .agents.md on day one. It's annoying to write upfront, but far less costly than correcting design drift two months in. State management rules, naming conventions, testing approach — write these before you write your first feature with AI assistance.
2. Define your task granularity. "One session, one task" from the start prevents context pollution from ever becoming a problem. Large tasks should always be broken down before you begin.
3. Keep a decision log. Important design decisions made in Antigravity sessions disappear into chat history. I created a DECISIONS.md file at the project root and copy the reasoning behind significant architectural choices there. Future-you will be grateful.
The next three months will focus on using Antigravity's hook capabilities for deeper CI/CD integration — automating the path from code to release further. The foundation built in these first three months makes me confident that's achievable.