Jaime’s build context: A Flutter developer’s thoughts about Antigravity + Tips!

Hi, I’m Jaime Wren, a long-time developer tooling software engineer on the Flutter team. I’ve seen many shifts in the software industry over the years, but the whole industry has just stepped into a new Wild West at breakneck speed and this is both exciting and nerve-wracking.

In my opinion, we developers are complicated creatures driven by two forces: the need for productivity with our tasks and our inherent joy of programming itself. We thrive when we can slip into a fast, uninterrupted loop. To realize our full potential as developers, we need our entire toolchain to come together without introducing friction. As we transition into the Agentic Era, this need for a cohesive loop is non-negotiable; this is where Flutter has a distinct advantage.

I’ve tested a lot of AI tools these last few years, waiting for something that actually will save Flutter developers time rather than just shifting where time is spent. Nothing turned the corner for me until Antigravity, Google’s new Agentic IDE. It bridges the gap between raw model capability and actual engineering utility. I can finally see all of the infrastructure and tooling around the LLMs coming together to remove friction, rather than adding to it.

From my own testing, Flutter isn’t just “compatible” with AI tools like Antigravity; it is uniquely equipped to power them. Why? It comes down to Flutter’s strict structures and robust tooling. A core philosophy of Antigravity is a reliance on verification to know if a piece of code actually works. Flutter’s tools provide the immediate feedback that Antigravity’s agents need to validate these actions. All it takes to get started are a few settings to configure extensions and the MCP server.

Some cool things you can do

There are several cool things that I and other members of the Flutter community have learned to do with Antigravity to speed our development process. I’ve listed a few of them below, but I request that if you have any additional tips, please add them in the comments attached to this post.

Run tests & fix the problematic code

You can use Antigravity to run existing tests, fix any problematic code that is breaking your tests, and then verify that the tests are passing again. Here is the prompt that I use:

Execute the full test suite with `flutter test`. If failures occur,
fix them one by one. After applying each fix, re-run the full suite one
last time to ensure no regressions.

Fix errors and warnings

To prepare a PR before pushing it, you can use Antigravity to fix your errors, warnings and lints. Here is my prompt for this:

Run `flutter analyze` over my project. If it fails, fix any errors and
warnings, then validate that they are fixed.

Discover lints and use them

There are a lot of lints out there but I don’t have time to research them all and figure out which ones are best for each project. I discovered that this cool prompt helps Antigravity quickly scan my project, suggest, and enable lints that make sense for it:

Read https://dart.dev/tools/linter-rules and identify rules I am
implicitly following but haven't enabled. Add them to analysis_options.yaml,
run flutter analyze, and fix any resulting violations.

Discover good pub.dev packages for my project

There are tons of pub.dev packages out there, and like the lints, researching them takes time and effort. I wanted a way to figure out which ones might be best for my projects while not leaving my IDE. This prompt worked well for me:

I need preferences to be shared from one instance of my app to the next,
please go search for this feature in https://pub.dev/, then run
`flutter pub get`, validate that the pub status is in a good status.
Then, find an example in my project to use this new package,
fix any issues that appear from `flutter analyze`, and fix them.
Finally, add a test for the new feature.

Thoughts about my journey with Flutter over the years and why I’m excited

I remember when Flutter entered the scene about 10 years ago. From the beginning and in my opinion, Flutter brought together the right language, framework and tools to be usable-by-default. An often overlooked factor in Flutter’s success is that these pieces weren’t bolted together from different vendors. Instead, the framework, rendering engine, CLI tooling, IDE tooling, language and ecosystem have always been driven by the same organization that has enabled these teams to coordinate to enable the usable-by-default cohesive vision. It’s because of this that I believe there is a “I finally get Hot Reload” moment for every new Flutter developer that makes them excited and hopeful because:

• The Flutter infrastructure is capable of patching code in milliseconds.

• The errors and warnings appear as you type and ensure that code is valid before a save occurs.

• The language helps prevent syntax errors and frictions.

• Obvious overflow errors are displayed as yellow and black stripes that signal layout issues that need to be addressed.

In the past year, the promise of generative AI in software development has been akin to the Wild West–demos and products have shown a lot of progress, but have not followed the usable-by-default mantra that has been core to Flutter’s success. With model improvements such as larger context windows that allow a model to actually read a project, and with concepts in the space converging, frameworks like Flutter have had an entry point to add value to agents and workflows. The Flutter team followed suit this year with the GenUI effort, the Dart and Flutter MCP Server, and AI rules suggestions.

Now, with Antigravity entering the arena, we have something that is more than a chatbot built into a window in your IDE. Antigravity inhabits the IDE, running commands and using knowledge about other Flutter and Dart projects to correctly follow your direction and take actions on your behalf in the project space.

As Flutter engineers, we take for granted the ability to know how to immediately run static analysis (dart analyze) or launch an app (flutter run) in a project we’ve never seen before. While none of these restrictions have limited what developers could create with Flutter, the natural consequence with LLMs and agentic tooling is that our collective uniformity gives these interfaces a huge leap forward in understanding and acting on the structure of our projects.

To reap the benefits of LLM tooling, agents require a verification through a positive feedback loop. If a model is producing value on every tenth piece of output and hallucinating the other nine instances, I might be amused, but I won’t be using the tool again. With Antigravity, verification is a core philosophy designed to give agents a feedback loop, allowing them to iterate before finishing work. This is where the benefit of existing robust Flutter tools comes into play, when using Antigravity to assist in writing code, the agent literally iterates until analysis is clean, formatting is consistent, tests pass, and the output from flutter run confirms that pixels are being drawn.

In summary

Without a doubt, these new AI tools are redefining how we identify as productive developers who enjoy the practice of programming. Equally without doubt, a robust, fast, uninterrupted loop will continue to be the centerpiece of that experience.

Antigravity doesn’t replace the programmer; it removes the drudgery that stands between your idea and reality. The loop is getting faster, the ramp is already built, and the future of Flutter is more usable — and more joyful — than ever.