If you’ve been following my recent posts, you know I finally bid adieu to WordPress. After years of running this site and speaking at various WordCamps, the stance Automattic took on the whole WP vs WP Engine brouhaha was turning so toxic, that I finally decided to move on. So, naturally, the itch to build something of my own started to creep in. But with how things are at work, my free time is pretty much non-existent between back-to-back meetings and the usual Mumbai commute hustle.
I wanted a clean, fast, custom blog without the bloat, and Laravel was the obvious choice of framework. But starting from scratch? That usually means weeks of weekend-stealing boilerplate work.
Enter Antigravity.
I’d been hearing chatter about this AI-powered coding tool, and I decided to put it to the test. My goal was simple: get the barebones of a Laravel-based blog up and running over a single cup of filter coffee.
The Setup
Honestly, my expectations were pretty tempered. We’ve all seen AI tools spit out generic, broken snippets. But within the first 15 minutes of prompting, I realized this was different.
I started with Herd, and created a Laravel project.
Prompting Through the Boilerplate
What absolutely blew my mind was the ease of generating the actual logic. Instead of context-switching between the terminal, documentation, and the IDE, I was just having a conversation with the tool.
- “Create a controller to handle the blog index and single post views.” Done.
- “Add a middleware to restrict the admin dashboard to specific user emails.” Handled perfectly.
- “Generate the Blade templates using Tailwind CSS for a clean, readable UI and copy the theme on kidakaka.com.” Boom. Responsive, accessible, and it even generate curl requests to read the existing markup.
From Zero to Blog in 60 Minutes
Within an hour—literally less than 60 minutes—the basic structure was alive. I had a working admin panel, a frontend that displayed posts, a functional tagging system, and a robust backend.
In the old days, getting to this point would have easily taken a full weekend of grinding out routes, controllers, and views, not to mention the CSS headaches. Antigravity removed the friction of starting. It felt less like coding and more like curating and architecting.
Is AI coming for our developer jobs? I don’t think so. A strong engineering culture still needs human empathy, system design, and security foresight. But as a tool to accelerate the mundane? It’s an absolute game-changer. If you are into tech, then its time to focus on these things instead of just dishing out DS problems!
Now, if only I could prompt it to brave the Mumbai traffic for me.