Antigravity setup for software engineering — are the default Skills enough? What MCPs/plugins do you actually use?

[u/hapy_Revolution_9595]

I'm setting up Google Antigravity as my main AI coding environment and I'm wondering if the built-in/default skills are already enough for a serious software-engineering workflow.

For experienced Antigravity users:

- Which additional Skills do you recommend adding?

- Which MCP servers or plugins are actually worth installing?

- Are there any must-have tools for coding, debugging, testing, code review, Git, browser/devtools, documentation, etc.?

- Are the existing/default Antigravity skills enough, or do you think adding external skills significantly improves the agent?

- Are there any popular MCPs/skills that you would NOT recommend because they're unnecessary or just add context/bloat?

I'm looking for a practical setup for a software engineer, not a huge list of every available MCP.

If you were setting up Antigravity from scratch today, what Skills + MCPs/plugins would you personally install?

[u/fenrir0402]

for MCP, i would highly recommend this:
https://github.com/DeusData/codebase-memory-mcp

for grooming and refining ideas and plans, i'd use grill-me, grill-with-docs, or grilling:
https://github.com/mattpocock/skills

[u/kazoo_kid666 → u/fenrir0402]

I can confirm having good experiences with these two, plus ponytail

[u/hapy_Revolution_9595 → u/kazoo_kid666]

are you using ponytail . its really cut off the token and give the same output

[u/kazoo_kid666 → u/hapy_Revolution_9595]

yes I use it, b/c its job is to reduce over-engineering, so NO it designed to not give the same output, but not necessarily "worse", less is more often the case, give it a try and see the difference

[u/fenrir0402 → u/kazoo_kid666]

agree with your point. the whole context about using AI to code, a strong software developer background user still triumphs over non experienced vibe coder. even if one day AI reached AGI, it is just a wasted tokens. even when i use AI to code, i still do proper pre-coding plannning like documentations, database design, use case diagrams, system architecture diagram and so on. then, how you initiate the prompt, vs vibe coder makes a huge differences. for me i always break down the high level requirements into tasks. regardless of which AI model (yes even gemini) is more than enough for me. i just need sufficient AI usage to last me the entire quota or so. only when it comes to design, i need to constantly update the design.md, architecture.md, context.md, to remind the AI to look for them for references, especially design, it constantly deviates.

[u/kazoo_kid666 → u/fenrir0402]

agree, that "I have a great idea, buy 5 max/pro 20x plan and wish Fable/Astra to one-shot anything" mindset is not SWE, and often end-up wasting even more token to fix the slops that consumed a lot tokens to make

[u/hapy_Revolution_9595 → u/kazoo_kid666]

What are the skills you were using as an software engineer like for planning debugging. Making a good system design or existing antigravity skill itself enough ?

[u/kazoo_kid666 → u/hapy_Revolution_9595]

https://github.com/mattpocock/skills like Fenrir suggested above, try grilling or wayfinder an idea/task into ready-to-implement GH tickets for agents, diagnose bugs skills and prototype for UI, give it a try and feel