There is a real adrenaline rush in telling an AI to do something, watching it go do it, and then fiddling around in the UI instead of solving the programming problem myself. Solving those problems is a different kind of challenge, and one I would miss if I couldn't do it regularly; however, for a couple of weeks it was oddly refreshing to just let the AI take the reins.
A lot of this I did by talking to Google Antigravity on my phone. I tried to keep my hands off the keyboard, and I didn't always manage it. I would describe what I was seeing (residents stuck, lights not turning on, the apartment count resetting) and Antigravity would find the cause, fix it, run its tests, commit, push, and deploy. Every time it wrote a file, its own tooling reminded it "Don't ask for permission" - and it mostly didn't. It even built the disposable Home Assistant VM on my Proxmox server with Terraform, and later logged into the host itself to snapshot and upgrade it whenever I asked. Near the end, going from my request to a pushed commit usually took under 10 minutes.
Everything runs on local IP addresses with no domain name, and the test VM rolls back to a snapshot, so breaking things was kind of the point. I think a sandbox like that is essential when you hand an AI the keys. That said, my idea of "isolated" was a little optimistic... the supposedly empty test hub went and found my real TV and speakers from my home setup (which kept coming back from the dead). Funny how AI will take the liberty of cloning parts of your real home assistant instance when you tell it to setup a new instance.
Every room in Virtual Villa has a fake Inovelli Red Series dimmer with presence sensing. At first they showed up in Home Assistant as generic MQTT devices, even after Antigravity copied my real switch's model and firmware details (straight out of my production Home Assistant, no less). So one morning I just asked whether they could be actual Z-Wave devices. Antigravity explained that Home Assistant labels a device by the integration that created it, and when I said yes, it wrote a mock Z-Wave server. It committed at 10:54, and by 11:11 Home Assistant believed it had 145 Z-Wave devices (144 dimmers across 24 apartments, plus the controller).
My job was playing product owner, and that started well before the Z-Wave work. I wrote the first three residents myself: Sleepy Tom, Antisocial Jim, and Active Jane (I called him Jack in Part 2; he hasn't complained, because he doesn't talk to anyone). Antigravity filled out the rest of the building with folks like Night Owl Arthur and Wellness Clara. I described their days in plain English: meals take 30 to 60 minutes, bathroom trips 1 to 10, and a trip out anywhere from 10 minutes to 8 hours. Motion turns the lights on just like the real switch, except in the bedroom; nobody wants the light coming on every time Sleepy Tom rolls over.
I also had it read the sun position from Home Assistant so the light sensors would feel real. In my head the bedroom and living room had big windows, the kitchen borrowed light from the living room, and the bathroom was a cave. Antigravity picked its own numbers (living room 100%, kitchen 70%, bedroom 60%, bathroom 8%)... not quite the apartment I pictured, but close enough for a test harness. Honestly, that was the fun of it: I spent my time picturing apartments instead of writing code, which is a nice break from the nitty gritty backend work I usually live in.
The whole point was verification. Another project I work on, a Home Assistant app that reports device changes to an analytics cloud platform for senior care, needed proof that when a simulated light turns on, Home Assistant sees it and the cloud hears about it. During development the tests could hit Home Assistant's local API all day long; the cloud is a different story. A QA tool is more of a cost center than a value add, so I budgeted one check per device per minute, and later cut that back to device adds, hub changes, an hourly sweep, and the Re-verify button.That 144-device stress test found a real limit, too. When devices went missing in the cloud, Antigravity blamed a container restart until I pushed back. Then it found a hard per-location device cap, so a few days later I cut the building to 16 apartments and 96 devices.
I really do think this is where software development is headed. With a team of agents, I can do the work of five or six people. I do have to admit something, though... on this one, Antigravity was grading its own homework. It ran its own tests, pushed straight to main, and no second model reviewed anything, which is not quite the picture I painted in Part 2. I did set up a Claude reviewer in Paperclip partway through, but I never pointed Virtual Villa at it; in hindsight, that is exactly what this project was missing.
The part that worries me is what this does to people early in their careers, which is what Part 3 was all about. If AI becomes a crutch, plenty of developers will ship code like this without knowing if it's any good. I haven't done a deep dive yet, but every task I gave it was focused on one small goal, so I fully expect duplicate logic everywhere (plenty of developers would call it AI garbage, and they might be right). It's fine for a throwaway QA tool - I am nearly positive it is not code I would want running in production.
Anyway, that's all for now. In a future post I want to dig into the performance and the code to see where the AI cut corners; until then, I'm going to keep tinkering.
Later,
SteveO