We have a limited budget and we have had apps built for us in the past using offshore developers. It has always turned out more difficult and more expensive than initially thought as well as taking too long. Then off course there have been the ongoing support costs when things go wrong, and they do. The apps need updating but we are reluctant to bear the additional financial and time cost that this will require.
I came across Antigravity last week and have embarked on redeveloping those apps and am currently 70%-80% complete. The core functionality is done, all that remains are the small tweaks. Here are my thoughts as a non developer.
It is fast.
It is cheap.
It produces better working apps.
The apps look more professional.
The apps are cheaper and easier to support (I anticipate).
The apps are cheaper and easier to run (google cloud run vs dedicated servers).
I expect the apps to be cheaper and easier to develop further.
In 12 months when I want to make a change or fix a bug, the agent who built the app who has all of the knowledge will not have left to work elsewhere.
Does it produce the best and most efficient code out there - I really do not know, probably not but I can assure you neither did my offshore developers.
I feel empowered by a team of really smart developer and architect agents from the point of view of understanding my requirements and translating them into a coherent set of working apps.
My learnings so far.
Be prepared to fail a few times it will teach you a better approach.
Don’t just say - ‘build me this’. Have a discussion ‘I want to build an application/component that will do this…..discuss with me the best approaches with the pros and cons of each. What other things do you think I should consider that I may have missed?’
Don’t build one big application, break it down into smaller ones. If you do not know how to do this, as I didn’t, ask the agent it will explain.
Work within the smaller applications to prevent unwanted code changes elsewhere.
Learn to test and use the browser developer tools so rather than saying xxx doesn’t work, you can say these are the errors we received from the console and the api payloads.
If you are having a problem fixing something, ask for console and cloud run logs to be created to identify where the failure is.
Learn and use GitHub, sometimes it is better to go back and start again.
Sure, it is not perfect, but for me it is light years away from my only viable alternative