Today is Children's Day — the final day of Japan's Golden Week.
Counting from Showa Day on April 29, that's seven consecutive days of holiday. No travel plans, no family commitments. I spent most of this stretch building with Antigravity, and I'm not sure I'd have it any other way. For me, days when I'm writing code and finishing up app features feel more like a real break than anything else. It's the same feeling artists get when they're painting — being in the middle of making something doesn't feel like work, regardless of what day it is.
This article is an honest record of those seven days.
What I Set Out to Build
Before Golden Week, I had two clear goals: add a "Wallpaper of the Day" feature to my existing wallpaper app and submit it to App Store Connect. If time allowed, I also wanted to improve the accuracy of my site's automated article generation.
Both had been sitting on my backlog for weeks with "I'll get to it eventually" energy. A solid week of uninterrupted time felt like the right moment to finally close them out.
Days One and Two — Finding the Rhythm
April 29 and 30 were slower than expected, if I'm honest.
I launched an Antigravity Agent and kicked off with "let's start by designing the Wallpaper of the Day feature." The first response came back with a proposal much larger than I'd imagined — widget extension, CloudKit sync, push notifications, the whole package.
Not a bad proposal. But what I actually wanted was "something that works, right now."
That's when I realized something: when working with agents, it's more effective to describe where you want to be by the end of today rather than the final vision. I rephrased the task as "just get the core Wallpaper of the Day feature working, no widgets yet," and two hours later, a beta build was running.
Days Three Through Five — A Rhythm That Clicked
May 1–3 were probably the three most focused days I've had in a while.
I'd drop a task to the background agent — "fix yesterday's build errors and add tests" — then go make breakfast. By the time I came back, the fixes were waiting for me. That loop became second nature.
The biggest help was the SwiftData migration work. Moving from Core Data to SwiftData involves a lot of looking things up — migration plans, type consistency checks, edge cases in the new APIs. Antigravity kept pulling in the relevant sections from Apple's documentation and pairing them with concrete examples for my specific types. It felt less like a tool and more like a patient collaborator who'd already read everything I needed.
By the end of day five, the "Wallpaper of the Day" feature was implemented and widget support was about 80% complete.
If you're working through a similar migration, Building an Offline-First App with SwiftData and CloudKit covers the patterns I used.
Day Six — Stuck on "Beauty"
May 4 was widget UI day.
The feature worked. The layout didn't break. But every time I looked at the screen, something felt off. Font sizing, spacing, the visual weight of the icons — I kept telling Antigravity "make it feel more polished," and it kept asking me "in which direction?"
That's the boundary I ran into. Antigravity is excellent at questions with correct answers. But when the question is "does this feel right," the agent can't quite get there yet.
Aesthetic adjustments — a little more breathing room here, slightly lighter font weight there — are faster to dial in by touching the code directly and checking Simulator than by describing the feeling in words. I ended up spending the entire afternoon doing exactly that: direct edits, Simulator preview, repeat.
It clarified something for me: Antigravity handles judgments about correctness. Judgments about beauty are still mine to make.
Day Seven (Today) — Build Submitted to TestFlight
This morning, I pushed the build to TestFlight.
The moment it entered review, I felt the seven days click into place. It's not perfect, but "Wallpaper of the Day" works. The widget works. The article generation improvements I'd also planned didn't make it into this window — that's next week's work.
Having a solid block of uninterrupted time surfaced something more valuable than any single feature: a clearer sense of how to work with Antigravity rather than around it.
What Seven Days Taught Me
What I can now hand off to the agent:
- Bug fixing and root cause investigation (crash log → pinpointed code)
- API documentation lookup with concrete implementation examples
- Writing and running test cases
- Git diff management and commit message drafts
What's still mine to do:
- Aesthetic adjustments to UI (spacing, typography, color balance)
- Breaking work into chunks and deciding where today ends
- Prioritizing features and deciding what ships first
- Release judgment — "is this quality good enough?" is a call I make
Antigravity agents are often described as tools that "do everything." In practice, they're exceptional at work that has a correct answer, and they're still learning the work that requires judgment. Seven days made that distinction much clearer than any single session ever had.
When the TestFlight review clears, I'll report back honestly. Happy end of Golden Week.