August 2026

Introduction

Welcome to the August 2026 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! This month, Gradle goes agentic, and Isolated Projects graduates to incubating in Gradle 9.7 with IDE syncs up to 2.3x faster.

From the Community #

WHAT ARE YOU SYNCING ABOUT? #

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.

👉 Read the post

ONE LINE LESS ANDROID #

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.

👉 Read the post

From Gradle #

GRADLE IS GOING AGENTIC #

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.

👉 Read the post

GRADLE 9.7.1 #

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. 👉 Read the post
2. Configuration Cache gets three quality-of-life wins. 👉 Read the docs
3. Resilient sync keeps your IDE working, even when your build fails. 👉 Read the post
4. The Best Practices chapter adds new entries on not hardcoding task names, keeping the Project instance out of task actions, wiring lazy outputs with map and flatMap, and not running ./gradlew on untrusted projects. 👉 View the docs
5. And a new DPE University course covers securing the supply chain that your build depends on. 👉 Take the course

There are plenty more goodies in there too: performance, security, and problem-reporting enhancements. Update your wrapper to get them:

./gradlew :wrapper --gradle-version=9.7.1 --distribution-sha256-sum=acd53f1edaf02f1a8ff99879f8a34b302661a057d9b063ae9e35b552f804d20a

👉 See the release notes

From Develocity #

HOW DEVELOCITY FOUND A BUG IN THE JAVA COMPILER #

Two Build Scans, same commit, same branch, both green, 24 seconds apart, and one of them a Build Cache miss. compileJava showed zero input differences, but two class files came out with different cache keys, which means javac produced different bytes from identical inputs. Przemek Bielicki recounts the hunt down to a hex diff: two swapped bytes in one class out of roughly 1,700, in the permits clause of a sealed interface. Invisible to the JVM, fatal to a hash, and unreported since sealed types were finalized in Java 17.

Filed as JDK-8322477, called “in the area of ‘impossible’” by Oracle’s compiler team, and fixed in JDK 23 and backported to 21.0.4.

👉 Read the post

Upcoming events #

Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you to discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE), or AI’s evolving impact on software development and delivery.

• Deadline September 30 — DPE Summit 2027 Call for Speakers — the summit returns February 2–3, 2027 at The Midway in San Francisco. Build and test acceleration, CI observability, failure impact analysis, and DORA metrics are all on the topic list. Speakers get accommodation covered and free admission.
• September 1–3 — DroidKaigi 2026 — Tokyo, Japan. Japan’s flagship Android developer conference, deeply relevant to anyone building with Gradle and AGP.
• September 2–3 — JavaZone 2026 — Lillestrøm, Norway. The biggest community-driven Java conference in the Nordics, organized by JavaBin.
• September 8–9 — IntelliJ IDEA Conf 2026 — free and online. Worth a look for build folks: Maarten Mulders on accelerating Maven builds, September 9 at 14:00 CEST.
• October 5–9 — Devoxx Belgium 2026 — Antwerp, Belgium. The largest JVM developer conference in Europe: Deep Dive days October 5–6, conference days October 7–9, under the theme “From Developer to Builder.”
• October 7–9 — droidcon Berlin 2026 — Berlin, Germany. Now running inside next.app devCon, with 120 Android sessions across three days.

Spread the word #

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The Call for Proposals for the September edition is now open!

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