Green squares

For a few years, my GitHub graph was pretty quiet. The occasional commit, almost all of it through work. I’d moved into managing a team a while back, and between that and life, the time to sit down and build something had mostly evaporated. My list of personal projects just kept getting longer and my GitHub graph grayer.

It’s not that the tools weren’t there. I’d had my first real experiences with agentic coding about eighteen months earlier, and at work the assistants kept getting better. They were good for single tasks, but they often lacked the context to know what you actually wanted, or had to be told exactly how to solve a problem before they could solve it. They hallucinated a lot. Most of the engineers around me reached for them for research and the occasional bug fix, but when it was time to write something real, they closed the agent and wrote it themselves.

Coding was probably the best-supported use case at that point. Support for other things like drafting an email or writing a doc was worse. Often wrong, sometimes not even in the right ballpark, and they sounded like robots. You could always tell when something had been written by one. It had no soul. There were tells like “Great question!” There was flowery padding and relentless enthusiasm. It felt a little like the thing took about as much time away as it saved.

Still, you could stand up a proof of concept in an afternoon, in a language you’d never touched, and actually learn something. In the early, uncertain phase of a project, that was helpful.

Then 2025 began. The pace picked up, a new capability every quarter or so. Then every couple of months. Then every month. By the end of the year it felt like it was every week. I heard more than one senior engineer say, only half-joking, that they’d given up trying to keep up. I knew the feeling.

Then, in November, Antigravity landed alongside Gemini 3. It wasn’t a better autocomplete; it was actually a useful collaborator. It could hold a session long enough to do real work. You still had to dance around its rough edges, mostly context bloat, but it was workable in a way that it hadn’t been before. Reddit was a wall of discussion about Cursor, Claude, Codex and Antigravity. Watching it all happen in front of me, I realized the tools had crossed from interesting to useful.

The list of projects I’d been meaning to build for years suddenly didn’t feel so out of reach. Antigravity looked genuinely good. The planning mode, the inline comments, the whole shape of it looked like something I’d enjoy working on. So one evening I stopped watching and opened it up. It all came back quickly, and I remembered how much I loved seeing my ideas come to life as I built them.

The graph was about to get a lot greener.