The New Forum System

“Google's Antigravity has deleted my entire hard drive”. This how the new forum system started: with a chance reading of a Reddit post. It had become a bit of a meme although from what I understand, the hard drive was actually deleted. This piqued my interest so I decided to find out what Google's Antigravity was. It is an AI-powered vibe coding system based around Visual Studio Code. Which in English means: you give it written instructions in English and it writes the code for you. I was firmly in the "that is not really going to work for any serious application" camp, so I thought I would demonstrate that for myself. How wrong I was.

The old forum system is a bit long in the tooth and has one or two issues that make its administration far more cumbersome than it needs to be. It is slow, partially because of the host it is on, and has regular issues which are difficult to solve. It is under heavy load, with it regularly reporting 1,200 online users.

With that in mind I set Antigravity about solving this problem and implementing a new forum system. I gave it some vague written instructions, which within fifteen minutes, it had turned into a simple forum system. To say I was amazed is an understatement, so I decided to give it more tasks, more complication in the forum system, more features I wanted. It handled most things that I asked it to do with ease. It produces a plan detailing the changes required which I can annotate and change. Once I am happy it makes the changes. The trickiest part was that it had calculation limits so I would regularly have to leave it for a day or two while these reset. These seem to have been widened so it's not as much of an issue now. Within a couple of weeks of sporadic AI prompting I had most of the system you see now.

The old adage of "80% of the work takes 20% of the time" certainly holds in this case. 90% of the work probably only took 2% of the time. Most of the my time was converting the old forum data into the new Markdown syntax. I wrote that so it took quite a long time - I am sure I could have asked the AI to do it but there were thousands of posts and I wanted to check some of them as they went along. The system as it stands now is probably 90% AI code and 10% mine. Most of the 10% I wrote was derived from the AI code anyway. Because it gives you source code, it makes it quite easy to make subtle changes. It's often easier to make small changes than describe it to the AI.

Just as I was writing this post, Kenneth Smith posted some code for plotting complex functions and I thought it would be good if it was easy to post a graphic. I thought about it for a while and then asked Antigravity:

“I am trying to think of a way to allow users to upload photos with their replies in Topic.cshtml. These photos can then be used, somehow, in their reply. If they do not post the reply then the images will need to be discarded.”

It took about a minute to formulate a plan then I said

“Further to this plan, would it be possible to incorporate a pasted image from the clipboard? Is that even possible?”

Two minutes later I had code that you can use right now in the forum to post images! Except that it didn't work… and that takes us back to the Antigravity "deleted my hard disk" meme. For the code it wrote to work there must be a new database table that tracks the images and it had written code to update the database and create the table. These AI systems seem all-knowing but actually they're not. They're not even running on your machine; they're running on a server somewhere so they can't see the forum database and one or two little tweaks I had made had fooled the AI. In the interactions I had with it to get around this issue, I could see it could easily have produced code that could have deleted quite a lot of the database. Fortunately, I spotted this issue and helped the AI solve the problem.

A forum system is actually quite simple; at its heart it's just three database tables: topics, posts and users. So this might have played into Antigravity's sweet spot but there's no doubt it has done a fantastic job. I have used it in a completely different area of programming. I have an iPhone app and it has an issue with the latest iOS versions where the on-screen keyboard could cover up the form that is being typing into. I had spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out what the problem was and had given up several times. I asked Antigravity: I gave it the source code and told it what the problem was. Within 45 minutes and several iterations of me making the changes it suggested ‘we’ had solved the problem!

AI coding isn’t going to go away that is for sure.

Robert,

Thanks for this post. I am not sure what I am reading, but it appears you are making some progress.

I assume that Antigravity is not writing Fortran code !

Thanks also with my new forum problems, which you also solved.

John

In this case AntiGravity is writing C# using Microsoft's MVC framework. It can write Fortran though. I asked it to write a program to display a Mandlebrot set using ClearWin+ and FTN95. The code it produced was approximately what you see below. It got confused about callbacks (who doesn't) and after a few comments from me it got it to work:

      WINAPP
      PROGRAM MANDELBROT
      IMPLICIT NONE
      
      ! Define the WINIO@ function
      INTEGER :: WINIO@, DRAW_MANDELBROT,LW
      EXTERNAL DRAW_MANDELBROT
      INTEGER :: RESULT

      ! Create a window with:
      ! %ca: Caption "Mandelbrot Set"
      ! %gr: Graphics region of size 800x600, calling DRAW_MANDELBROT to repaint
      ! %lw: Leave window open (standard termination)
      RESULT = WINIO@('%ca[Mandelbrot Set]%^gr%lw', &
     &                800, 600, DRAW_MANDELBROT,LW)
      
      END PROGRAM MANDELBROT

! ----------------------------------------------------------------------
! Subroutine to draw the Mandelbrot set
! Called by ClearWin+ whenever the graphics region needs updates
! ----------------------------------------------------------------------
      SUBROUTINE DRAW_MANDELBROT()
      IMPLICIT NONE
      
      INTEGER :: X, Y
      INTEGER :: MAX_ITER
      INTEGER :: ITER
      DOUBLE PRECISION :: CX, CY, ZX, ZY, TEMP_Z
      INTEGER :: COL
      
      ! External ClearWin+ functions
      INTEGER :: RGB@
      EXTERNAL DRAW_LINE@, RGB@
      
      MAX_ITER = 64
      
      ! Loop through each pixel of the graphics region
      ! Note: This simple per-pixel drawing might be slow for very large windows
      ! but creates the correct output.
      DO Y = 0, 599
         DO X = 0, 799
            
            ! Map screen coordinates (0..799, 0..599) to complex plane
            ! Real part (x): approx -2.0 to 1.0
            ! Imag part (y): approx -1.2 to 1.2
            CX = -2.0D0 + (DBLE(X) / 800.0D0) * 3.0D0
            CY = -1.2D0 + (DBLE(Y) / 600.0D0) * 2.4D0
            
            ZX = 0.0D0
            ZY = 0.0D0
            ITER = 0
            
            ! Iterate z = z^2 + c
            DO WHILE ((ZX*ZX + ZY*ZY < 4.0D0) .AND. (ITER < MAX_ITER))
               TEMP_Z = ZX*ZX - ZY*ZY + CX
               ZY = 2.0D0 * ZX * ZY + CY
               ZX = TEMP_Z
               ITER = ITER + 1
            END DO
            
            ! Determine color
            IF (ITER >= MAX_ITER) THEN
               COL = 0 ! Black (inside set)
            ELSE
               ! Generate a color based on iteration count
               COL = RGB@(MOD(ITER * 10, 255), &
     &                    MOD(ITER * 5 + 50, 255), &
     &                    MOD(ITER * 2 + 100, 255))
            END IF
            
            ! Draw the pixel (using line of 0 length)
            CALL DRAW_LINE@(X, Y, X, Y, COL)
            
         END DO
      END DO
      
      END SUBROUTINE DRAW_MANDELBROT