DEV Community: Alphonce Oyunga

As someone who is trying to Develop an engineering mindset, this article strongly resonated with the struggles I have faced trying to understand software development from a systems first perspective rather than language first. This is good advice.

Alphonce Oyunga — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:09:43 +0000

Stanley Chege Thuita

May 22

10 First-Principles Strategies to Learn Any Programming Language Deeply

#go #beginners #learning #productivity

Comments

4 min read

OUT WITH THE OLD IN WITH THE NEW

Alphonce Oyunga — Mon, 25 May 2026 09:21:01 +0000

Google I/O happened last week and there are a lot of new products coming from google. The main theme of the conference was based on artificial intelligence. Honestly speaking, in this current time is there anything in the tech world that is not built around AI. We all know of the controversial AI bubble and how its bust will affect the tech ecosystem.

All that aside, I noticed something new from Google. They are integrating Gemini CLI into the Antigravity 2.0 CLI tool. Let me break down what this means. First of all you need to understand that as of June 18, 2026 Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions will stop serving requests for Google AI pro and Ultra, as well as for those using the free version.

The transition is actually smooth. It only takes the simple use of following commands in your terminal depending on the system software you’re using.
Microsoft windows
Windows Powershell;

irm https://antigravity.google/cli/install.ps1 | iex

Windows CMD ;

curl -fsSL https://antigravity.google/cli/install.cmd -o install.cmd && install.cmd && del install.cmd

macOs | Linux

curl -fsSL https://antigravity.google/cli/install.sh | bash

After running the commands on your terminal, you can open the CLI by running the command ‘aggy’ on your terminal. You will follow the simple setup steps and authentication procedures.

TECHNICAL UPDATES

Gemini CLI proved that the terminal is the perfect environment for agentic tasks. This claim can be backed by the millions of users of the tool. The community boasts of over 100,000 GitHub users, 6,000 merged pull requests , and hundreds of contributors. This is according to Dmitry Lyalin Group Product Manager and Taylor Mullen Principal Engineer ; here’s the link https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transitioning-gemini-cli-to-antigravity-cli/link

Migrating from Gemini CLI;
On the first launch of Antigravity CLI, you should see Migration Options where you have a choice of migrating your existing Gemini CLI extensions to the equivalent Plugins.
You should note that some of the features of Gemini CLI cannot be migrated 1 to 1 for example custom themes are not currently supported .

Gemini CLI launched extensions, a way to extend the CLI by sharing capabilities. The industry has now moved to a fancy name “Plugins”. A plugin is just an add-on, for technicality it is a software component that adds new features or custom functionality to an existing program without altering the core software.
Users should be prompted on the first launch of Antigravity CLI to have their extensions mitigated to plugins.
This can also be simply done by running a command on the terminal;
‘agy plugin import gemini’
Running the command will search for each locally installed extension and convert them to an Antigravity plugin.

RULES(context files)
Antigravity CLI supports the following context files:
Workspace Context: It reads both Gemini.md and Agents.md from your active workspace directory.
Global Context:Automatically loads and enforces loads and enforces global constraints located at ‘’~/.gemini/GEMINI.md’

AGENTIC SKIllS
Agentic skills work the same to the way it worked on Gemini CLI. They are managed with the same /skills command and are also converted to slash commands allowing them to be invoked manually.

Global skills for Gemini CLI are shared with Antigravity CLI across all workspaces. There is no action needed for workspaces; they are picked up automatically.
Note that Antigravity CLI workspace-specific skills are stored in ‘.agents/skills’, so if you have any project/workspace skills in a given project in the Gemini CLI ‘.gemini/skills’ folder, it will have to be moved.

MCP Servers
Antigravity supports both local and remote MCP servers and provides the same /MCP command to manage them. The main difference between Gemini CLI and Antigravity CLI is the file location where mcp servers are defined.

Antigravity and Antigravity CLI both store MCP configurations in a mcp_configuration.json file while Gemini CLI stores them inline in the systems settings.json.

Note: All the work presented here has been referenced from the official blog by Google on the migration so its factual research.

Embrace The Struggle

Alphonce Oyunga — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 07:14:36 +0000

I have been struggling with executing what I have learnt especially in the weekly assessment tests that happen every Friday at the company or the record sessions. I was avoiding the real problem with assumption that maybe the constant failure was due to unpreparedness or rather my mood before I go for these sessions. The reality dawned on me during my last checkpoint which I scored a poor 2/10. I remember sitting in that exam room staring at the screen as the cursor kept blinking on the text editor. I had hit the famous Naruto hand sign while thinking to myself how bad I was.

This led me to think to myself how many times I copied my error to a chat bot and proudly read through the solution lying to myself that I had understood where the problem was.That was a big lie, truth is I had skipped a big part of the learning process.This part was what many developers describe as "The struggle". Funnily enough this is a constant part of many disciplines not just software programming. The period where you hit a bottleneck and that error becomes your next lesson.

The reality of the modern developer especially at the beginner level is that artificial intelligence produces most of the code and learning gets hindered in the process. Programming can be hard and with AI doing 80-90% of code one may be tempted to skip the crucial part of understanding coding rather than cramming it.I'm actually a victim of taking the easy way out each time I hit an error, and yeah, I'm now facing my own consequences.

Linus Tovarld in an interview once said that he loves learning new things because he gets to fail and the best part is that through these failures that he actually gets better. Those words have actually stuck with me and have got me thinking how I can do things better.The errors will be lessons and the documentation will become my new point of reference. This does not mean that I will not engaging with AI at all, cause these modern demand constant update on the evolving world of tech.

I want to embrace the struggle even more than before.Maybe we should all do. I love this work and want to become a better programmer even if that means that I have to study the traditional ways of learning to program.

Art of Computer programming.

Alphonce Oyunga — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:08:33 +0000

Well, if you've clicked on this post you might be expecting a deep dive into why computer science or programming is a science. I would like you to hold your horses, this is more of my approach to coding as a rookie at this skill. The thesis of my article is based on my own approach to coding given that I have a great background in artistic fields more than technical based or STEM fields.
I first encountered coding in 2021.Back then coding to me meant nothing, actually I only found interest in it from the fact that one of my friends was a leader in the tech club at my former school.I knew from the start that my aim was to go for functions since as rumors had it, their were fine ladies at these conventions. Well, that changed when I started exploring the world of technology and found out there was more to it than just fine ladies(well I always knew but was bluntly ignorant.)
Last year was the first time I engaged coding for the first time.It was a decision that came from a place of genuine interest and career shift. I came across an advert from a tuition free training institution called Zone01 Kisumu.The same interest drove me to follow the application process. I landed a spot in the piscine a one month selection process.I accredit my growth to that month because of the fact that up until then then only thing I knew about coding was vs code. It is during this one month that I learnt that programming was more than just Hello world.
Honestly, programming is not as easy as some people would like to tell you. During that first month of real programming I realized that up till then I had not done anything remotely hard as programming. I had to shift the way I approached it, That's when I decided to relate this skill to fields that I was used to. That is the only way I could understand the spectacle of writing code on an IDE and it outputs information. I started looking at all these great coders as Picasso's of there field, using the IDE as there canvas and the syntax as there paint.
Well, programming like any art form has its own technicalities, with programming having more. The different coding languages and there various accents(syntax).Honestly, I'm still figuring out a lot of things about coding,with my first language being Golang it has forced to go back to the STEM subjects and borrow ideas from them.It might be hard but what can say 'Do hard things'.