The Gate That Stops Visual Damage Before You Hand Bulk Image Optimization to an Agent
When an agent bulk re-encoded a few hundred wallpaper assets, a handful came back with dulled color. Size-reduction alone cannot catch that. Here is how to design a gate that stops bad conversions before merge using three axes — SSIM, ΔE, and file size — with a checker that runs on Pillow and scikit-image.
Before an Agent's .proto Edit Silently Breaks Binary Compatibility: Gating Wire Compat with buf breaking
When an agent edits your .proto files, the text can look perfect while wire compatibility quietly breaks. Here is how to stop field-number reuse and unsafe type changes with a working gate built from buf breaking and reserved.
Paid, but the Ads Won't Go Away — Closing a StoreKit 2 Transaction.updates Launch Race with Antigravity
How I traced a StoreKit 2 launch race that dropped transactions arriving right after startup, pinned the listener to the app's lifetime instead of a view's, reconciled with currentEntitlements, and let Antigravity turn it into a StoreKitTest regression suite.
Catching Download Size Regressions Before Submission Day — A Weekly Agent Gate for AAB/IPA Size Budgets
Mediation SDKs and bundled assets quietly inflate download size. A design for size ledgers, budget gates, and agent-driven delta attribution using bundletool and App Thinning reports.
Before You Let an Agent Own Your Tests — Deciding How Fixtures and Seed Data Live
Agents will happily edit test data until the tests pass. A practical defense built on fixture ownership, deterministic seeds, and anonymized subsets of production data, with working scripts.
When Every Antigravity-Written Test Is Green but the Same Bug Comes Back — Field Notes on Measuring Hollow Assertions
Your AI-written tests all pass, coverage is high, yet the same defect returns to production. The cause is over-mocking and tautological assertions. These are field notes on using mutation testing as ground truth to measure what your tests actually protect, and to fix it operationally.
Adding Mediation Partners Quietly Starved My iOS Attribution — Reconciling SKAdNetwork IDs Across Four Apps
I added mediation partners but iOS revenue barely moved — the cause was missing SKAdNetwork IDs in Info.plist. Here is how I reconciled SKAdNetworkItems across four apps, using an Antigravity agent as the matcher while keeping the revenue decisions by hand.
Hand Over Generation and Shipping, but Never the Signing Key — Designing Key Custody and Handover for an AI-Driven Pipeline
Even in an era where AI Studio and Antigravity take over everything from generation to internal-test shipping, the app signing key is in a class of its own. Lose it, and that app can never be updated again. As a solo developer who has run several apps for years, here is how I design key custody — separating the upload key from the app signing key, storing it, and planning the handover for the worst case.
Green in the Embedded Emulator, Broken on the First Real Device — Putting a Parity Gate on AI-Generated Compose Apps
AI Studio now generates Kotlin/Compose apps from a prompt, runs them in an embedded emulator, and pushes them to a real device over USB — all from one screen. Yet a screen that passed in the emulator can break the first time it lands on a real phone. As a solo developer running several apps, here is how I put a gate that catches device parity issues before they ship.
An Agent Granted 'Watch an Ad to Unlock a Wallpaper' Entirely Client-Side — Re-Verifying Reward Grants with AdMob SSV
I asked an Antigravity agent to wire up 'watch a rewarded ad to unlock a wallpaper,' and it returned an implementation that wrote the unlock flag client-side only. Here is why that is not enough, how I re-verified the reward grant with AdMob server-side verification (SSV), and how I stopped double grants too.
When Xcode Cloud's Free 25 Hours Quietly Run Out at Month's End — Field Notes on Measuring and Defending Compute Time
Before Xcode Cloud's free compute allowance drains at month's end and your builds sit queued, measure where it goes. Practical field notes on pulling usage from the App Store Connect API, stopping wasteful builds early, and trimming test runs to keep CI inside budget.
The Day Generation, Device, and Internal-Test Shipping Became One Step — What I Refused to Hand Over
AI Studio now turns a text prompt into a Kotlin/Compose app and carries it through the emulator, a real device, and Google Play's internal test track from one screen. Behind that convenience sits a question: how much of the moment of shipping do you hand to the machine, and what do you keep in your own hands? Here is where I draw the line as a solo developer running several apps, and the implementation that holds that boundary.