October 2026
Introduction
Welcome to the October 2026 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! This month, the first official Gradle agent skills, Gradle 9.8.2, and Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.6, plus community deep dives on Kotlin daemons, Groovy tricks, and debugging Gradle tasks in Eclipse.
From the Community #
Extra Kotlin Daemon #
Iñaki Villar’s automated benchmarks flagged Kotlin 2.4.21 as about 8% slower than 2.4.20. It looked like a regression until he counted processes: a Kotlin version mismatch in a kotlin-dsl included build had started a second Kotlin compiler daemon in one variant only.
He then works through JIT warm-up, CPU contention, and JFR data, and finds that the slowdown depends on how many Kotlin compilations start at once.
If your build logic and your app compile with different Kotlin versions, check how many daemons you’re actually running.
Beautiful Ugly Groovy #
Aurimas Liutikas uses Groovy’s map access to move constant-like values into a properties file, so changing them no longer invalidates the build cache for build scripts. In his words, he’s “both proud and ashamed.”
Rich Console on NixOS #
Benedikt Ritter shares a small patchelf script that repairs Gradle’s cached native library after wrapper upgrades, so --console=auto works on NixOS again.
Task Debugger for Eclipse #
A new Buildship add-on adds Debug Gradle Tasks to Eclipse’s Gradle Tasks view. It attaches the debugger to every JVM the build forks (run, test, bootRun, …), much like IntelliJ IDEA does.
From Gradle #
Gradle Agent Skills #
The first official Gradle agent skills are here. The team shipped two skills, picked by community vote, and they’re already at version 1.1.0:
gradle-best-practices: audits your build against the official best practices, writes a prioritized report that links each finding to the docs, and can apply the fixes.gradle-wrapper-upgrade: upgrades the wrapper, pins the distribution checksum, and checks that the build still configures. If it doesn’t, it rolls back. It also runswrappertwice, so your scripts and JAR don’t stay on the old version.
At launch, the team evaluated both skills on seven models from five vendors. Every model scored higher with the skills, and with them, cheaper models came close to frontier-model results. Without the skill, no model pinned the checksum during a wrapper upgrade. Try them out:
npx skills add gradle/gradle-skills
Gradle 9.8.2 #
Gradle 9.8.2 is out, and together with 9.8.1, it fixes three high-rated vulnerabilities:
./gradlew :wrapper --gradle-version=9.8.2 --gradle-distribution-sha256-sum=21bd5da2de49b642904077f38c0efdc7778e92b3ed0889392dca61b97e389607
The same security fixes are in Gradle 8.14.6 for teams on 8.x. If you can’t upgrade every time a fix ships, the Gradle Security Subscription backports high-severity fixes to the version you’re already on, with advance notice before vulnerabilities are made public.
Gradle Profiler 0.26.0 #
Gradle Profiler 0.26.0 fixes task-start measurement when the configuration cache is reused. It also adds computed statistics to the benchmark JSON output and lets you pass a Gradle distribution URL to --gradle-version, which is handy for benchmarking against distributions on an internal repository when the machine can’t reach services.gradle.org. The CLI ZIP now ships on GitHub Releases.
From Develocity #
Regression Tests in the Age of Agents #
Will smarter models and formal verification make regression tests obsolete?
Hans Dockter argues the opposite. No AI can guarantee that a change won’t break what worked before, and agents make more changes than ever. He cites a 2025 study in which 7.8% of agent-written fixes that a benchmark counted as correct failed tests the projects’ developers had already written.
Build or Buy Test Selection? #
Anthropic recently described how agentic coding pushed its CI job volume up 25× in six months, and how its homegrown test-selection service kept breaking under the load.
The Develocity team’s response lays out the build-vs-buy trade-off and how Predictive Test Selection handles it. Selection is trained on your own test history, flaky tests are always selected, and every skipped test can be explained from its Build Scan.
Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.6.0 #
Develocity Gradle Plugin 4.6.0 adds two things:
- Artifact Cache visibility: Build Scan now shows which dependencies were served by Develocity Artifact Cache, and from which Edge location.
- Trusted cache reporting: Build Cache can report how many remote entries the Edge node classified as trusted.
A 4.6.1 patch fixes intermittent Build Scan publishing failures and lets Test Distribution run test classes with non-ASCII names remotely.
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.
- November 2–6, 2026: W-JAX, Munich. Enterprise Java, JVM, and DevOps conference, also online.
- November 4–5, 2026: Devoxx Morocco, Casablanca. The 13th edition of the Java and developer conference.
- November 11–12, 2026: J-Fall, Ede, Netherlands. The Dutch Java User Group’s annual conference.
- November 13–14, 2026: devopsdays Barcelona, Barcelona. Workshops on Friday, conference on Saturday.
- December 10–11, 2026: droidcon London, London. Android and Kotlin, where Gradle is the default build system.
- February 2–3, 2027: DPE Summit 2027, San Francisco. Hosted by Develocity, this year’s summit is about the delivery side of the AI-native SDLC: builds, tests, CI, and code review at agent scale.
- Early bird: tickets are $349 until October 30, then $449. Get tickets
- Call for Speakers: open until November 13. Submit a talk
Spread the word #
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The Call for Proposals for the November edition will open soon on the gradle/community issue tracker. Drop your suggestions there!