After years on WordPress, the recent licensing disputes and Automattic’s conduct during the WP Engine saga finally pushed me to move on. I’d been meaning to build something lightweight and custom for a while. The question was time.
Work commitments leave little room for long weekend coding sessions. So I decided to test Antigravity — Google’s AI-powered development tool — with a very specific goal: get the barebones of a Laravel-based blog up and running in a single sitting.
What I Built
Through conversational prompting — describing what I needed rather than writing code — Antigravity generated:
- A controller managing blog index views and individual post display
- Middleware restricting admin access to specified user email addresses
- Responsive Blade templates styled with Tailwind CSS
- A basic tagging system and admin panel
The Result
Complete implementation — frontend, backend, admin panel, and tagging — was operational in under an hour. The same work done manually would have consumed a full weekend, and that’s being generous.
The contrast is stark. Not because the code is dramatically different from what I would have written, but because the friction of starting, context-switching, and looking things up simply disappeared.
Where Humans Still Matter
AI is a powerful accelerator for routine development tasks, not a replacement for engineering judgment. Strong engineering culture still needs human empathy, thoughtful system design, and security foresight. What AI eliminates is the mundane scaffolding that gets in the way of those things.
The hour I saved on boilerplate is an hour I can spend thinking about architecture.