for normal dependency management you shouldn't need to write code. I've never done any android dev, so I can't comment on that. declaring a dependency is literally like this:

dependencies { compile group: 'commons-collections', name: 'commons-collections', version: '3.2' testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.+' }

But I am not going to be the great gradle defender :) I have many complaints..... I would have much preferred that Rake became the default build system for java. Sadly that approach never took off....