Everyone presses the elephant button; almost nobody knows what it does. Aurimas Liutikas walks through an Android Studio sync end-to-end; the IDE drives Gradle over the Tooling API, initialization, configuration, the occasional task execution, and finally model building.

Android library modules have carried a debug build type nobody asked for. Tony Robalik's new DeDebug settings plugin removes it in one line and adds --tests support to the test lifecycle task.

Coding agents are running Gradle builds whether or not Gradle is ready for them. Tom Tresansky and Laura Kassovic lay out Agentic Gradle, the project to make that go well, in two parts: official Gradle Skills and a benchmarking harness.

There's a new #agentic-gradle channel on the Gradle Community Slack if you want to follow along or push back.

Gradle 9.7.0 landed on August 6, and 9.7.1 followed on August 19, bringing a number of updates and fixes:

1. Isolated Projects graduates from experimental to incubating, taking median IDE sync on Gradle's own 300-subproject build from 84s to 47s.