When a Fast Model Feels Slow, Look at Reasoning Effort Before Switching Models
Antigravity lets you pick a reasoning effort level per model. Here is how I decide between Low, Medium, and High based on the shape of the task, what to check when changing it makes no difference, and a small script for correcting your own judgment with records instead of memory.
I Stopped Eyeballing Agent Diffs, and the 2.8.0 View Limits Are Why
Version 2.8.0 caps how much of a file and how much of a large history diff you can view. Losing the ability to scroll to the end forced a better split: let a script decide what machines can catch, and spend human attention only on what they cannot. Includes a working script and the defects it found in a real repository.
2.6.0 Changed How Hooks Wait. A Triage Order for Turns That Never Finish
When an agent turn never finishes, the cause is often a hook you wrote rather than the model. Here is what changed in IDE 2.6.0, an audit script that finds hooks capable of stalling a turn, and how to give a hook its own cutoff.
Guarding the Turn Boundary in Non-Interactive Runs: A Command Table and a Fail-Closed Gate
A scheduled job meant only to record usage was calling the model on every run. Here is how I split commands into ones that start a turn and ones that do not, built a gate that refuses anything unclassified, and measured it against real scripts.
The Hooks That Get Rejected Are the Cheap Ones: Measuring Matcher Reachability
Hook configurations that can never execute are now rejected at load time. But when I checked my own config against all 21 tool names, the real problems were on the side that passed. A static reachability checker, plus measured numbers on what over-matching actually costs.
I Asked the Agent to Pick Tests From My Diff and It Said "None" Nine Times Out of Ten
Change-based test selection returned zero tests for most edits. Measuring how far an import graph actually reaches across three repositories, and rebuilding the selection contract around it.
I Measured Before Writing a Number: MCP Connect and Tool Calls Differed by 486x
Antigravity 2.4.3 lets you set a timeout per MCP server. To find a defensible number I built a stdio server, measured each boundary separately, and found why a single value cannot cover both.
I Copied the Same agent.md Into Another Repo and It Quietly Did a Different Job
CLI 1.1.6 lets you carry agent definitions around as files. I dropped one definition into eight repos, built a preflight that resolves its declared capabilities before the agent runs, and measured it against a naive checker.
The Date Column Was the Most Expensive Part of My Sales CSV — Measuring What Attachments Really Cost
2.4.3 lets you attach .json, .md, and .csv files directly. I rendered the same table eight ways, priced every column in tokens, and boiled it down to a 1,062-token digest. Every number here came from a run on my own machine.
The Flaky Hook Started Failing Every Time — Migrating to Declarative Sessions in the Antigravity SDK
Registering hooks after session init is gone, replaced by declaration at session creation. Here is what happened when I moved four agent definitions across, plus the harness I used to measure ordering non-determinism over 2,000 runs.
Half My Tasks Went to Pro — and So Did Only 61% of the Tokens
A singular model setting became a models collection, which means routing across models is now something you define yourself. Here is how I re-measured a task-type routing rule against the actual context-size distribution of 67 tasks in my own repository.
A Typo in agent.md Quietly Widened My Permissions — Writing a Strict Frontmatter Lint
Misspelled keys in agent.md frontmatter do not raise errors. They fall back to defaults, and for permission fields that fallback points the wrong way. Here is the failure I hit, the lint I wrote to catch it, and what the measurements showed.