God, Aliens, and Infinite Loops: Pushing Google Antigravity to the Breaking Point
Google Antigravity is a powerhouse. As an agentic development platform, it’s remarkably capable of remembering context and executing complex instructions. But after using it to build a turn-based algorithmic simulation of Genesis, I realized something critical: The platform is only as smart as the architect directing it. If you aren’t a developer, you’ll find yourself staring at a “perfect” piece of software that doesn’t actually work. Here is how I used my engineering intuition to bridge the gap between Antigravity’s potential and a finished, accessible game.
1. The Monitoring Gap: Building My Own “Eyes.”
Antigravity itself is built on a VS Code-style architecture. For a screen-reader user, the IDE itself isn’t fully accessible yet. I didn’t let that stop me. I didn’t need to “read” the platform’s internal logs because I could intuitively visualize where the logic was tripping up.
However, I needed a way to verify the simulation’s state independently. I prompted the agents to install a custom log-viewer directly into the webpage of the game. I engineered a window into the machine’s soul so I could monitor the simulation in an environment I could actually navigate.
2. The “Stateless” Trap
Antigravity remembers everything you tell it, but the agents it deploys don’t instinctively build software with its own “memory.” Initially, the simulation was stateless. The agents would generate a brilliant turn of scripture and then immediately “forget” the genealogical data or world-state for the next turn.
A non-developer would have been baffled as to why the AI was “losing its mind.” I knew the problem was architectural. I had to instruct the agents to design a system where the event logs were fed back into the AI’s prompt as a persistent state-bridge. The platform was capable, but it took a human to tell the agents to build a nervous system for the software.
3. Theology Meets Sci-Fi: “Let There Be Aliens.”
The simulation took a wild turn when I issued the command: “Let there be aliens.” Suddenly, the theology shifted. The agents interpreted the “Sons of God” as “Star-Beings.” In my logs, Cain wasn’t just jealous of Abel—he was envious of the aliens’ freedom.
But then, the loop happened. From Year 121 down to Year 9, the narrator got caught in a recursive trap, repeating the same “Star-Being” revelations over and over. I didn’t need a visual debugger to tell me the context window was being flooded by its own previous outputs. I knew exactly how to restructure the prompt to flush the buffer and force the simulation to progress.
4. The API Key Swapper
To keep the project within Google’s free tier while using the high-performance Gemini 2.5 Flash model, I had to be smart about infrastructure. I had the agents build a hot-swappable API key uploader with a built-in test feature. It’s the kind of practical “dev-ops” move that a casual user would never think to ask for, but it’s what kept the project alive and cost-effective.
The Verdict
Google Antigravity is excellent. It is a robust, memory-capable platform that can spin up code at a staggering pace. But it isn’t a “replacement” for a developer.
A normal person without development experience would have hit a wall the moment the simulation became stateless or the IDE became inaccessible. They wouldn’t have known how to “see” the errors or how to give the software a memory. Antigravity provides the muscle, but the Senior Engineer provides the intuition. I could visualize how the system should work and knew exactly why it wasn’t—and that’s something no agent can replicate.
