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Posted by speckx 12/10/2025

Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration(ankursethi.com)
845 points | 349 comments
Ozzie_osman 12/11/2025|
I was recently (vibe)-coding some games with my kid, and we wanted some basic text-to-speech functionality. We tested Google's Gemini models in-browser, and they worked great, so we figured we'd add them to the app. Some fun learnings:

1. You can access those models via three APIs: the Gemini API (which it turns out is only for prototyping and returned errors 30% of the time), the Vertex API (much more stable but lacking in some functionality), and the TTS API (which performed very poorly despite offering the same models). They also have separate keys (at least, Gemini vs Vertex).

2. Each of those APIs supports different parameters (things like language, whether you can pass a style prompt separate from the words you want spoken, etc). None of them offered the full combination we wanted.

3. To learn this, you have to spend a couple hours reading API docs, or alternatively, just have Claude Code read the docs then try all different combinations and figure out what works and what doesn't (with the added risk that it might hallucinate something).

CSMastermind 12/11/2025||
Some other fun things you'll find:

- The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI.

- The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry logic is basically mandatory.

- API performance is heavily influenced by the whims of the Google we've observed spreads between 30 seconds and 4 minutes for the same query depending on how Google is feeling that day.

hobofan 12/11/2025|||
> The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry logic is basically mandatory.

That is sadly true across the board for AI inference API providers. OpenAI and Anthropic API stability usually suffers around launch events. Azure OpenAI/Foundry serving regularly has 500 errors for certain time periods.

For any production feature with high uptime guarantees I would right now strongly advise for picking a model you can get from multiple providers and having failover between clouds.

downsplat 12/11/2025||
Yeah at $WORK we use various LLM APIs to analyze text; it's not heavy usage in terms of tokens but maybe 10K calls per day. We've found that response times vary a lot, sometimes going over a minute for simple tasks, and random fails happen. Retry logic is definitely mandatory, and it's good to have multiple providers ready. We're abstracting calls across three different APIs (openai, gemini and mistral, btw we're getting pretty good results with mistral!) so we can switch workloads quickly if needed.
jwillp 12/11/2025|||
I've been impressed by ollama running locally for my work, involving grouping short text snippets by semantic meaning, using embeddings, as well as summarization tasks. Depending on your needs, a local GPU can sometimes beat the cloud. (I get no failures and consistent response times with no extra bill.) Obviously YMMV, and not ideal for scaling up unless you love hardware.
duckmysick 12/11/2025||
Which models have you been using?
phantasmish 12/11/2025|||
It'd be kinda nice if they exposed whatever queuing is going on behind the scenes, so you could at least communicate that to your users.
aamoscodes 12/13/2025||
IIRC this is almost exactly the use case for OpenRouter, down to provider fallback https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/best-practices/uptime-opti...
specproc 12/11/2025||||
I have also had some super weird stuff in my output (2.5-flash).

I'm passing docs for bulk inference via Vertex, and a small number of returned results will include gibberish in Japanese.

walthamstow 12/11/2025|||
I had this last night from flash lite! My results were interspersed with random snippets of legible, non-gibberish English language. It was like my results had got jumbled with somenone else's.
ashwindharne 12/11/2025||||
I get this a lot too, have made most of the Gemini models essentially unusable for agent-esque tasks. I tested with 2.5 pro and it still sometimes devolved into random gibberish pretty frequently.
gfdvgfffv 12/13/2025|||
I’ve gotten Arabic randomly in Claude Code. Programming is becoming more and more like magic.
halflings 12/11/2025||||
"The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI."

This shouldn't be surprised, e.g. the model != the product. The same way GPT4o behaves differently than the ChatGPT product when using GPT4o.

akhilnchauhan 12/11/2025||||
> The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI.

This difference between API vs UI responses being different is common across all the big players (Claude, GPT models, etc.)

The consumer chat interfaces are designed for a different experience than a direct API call, even if pinging the same model.

DANmode 12/11/2025||||
So, not something for a production app yet.
ianberdin 12/11/2025||||
Even funnier, when Pro 3 answers to a previous message in my chat. Just making a duplicate answer with different words. Retry helps, but…
YouAreWRONGtoo 12/11/2025||
[dead]
te_chris 12/11/2025|||
The way the models behave in Vertex AI Studio vs the API is unforgivable. Totally different.
prodigycorp 12/11/2025|||
Also, usage and billing takes a DAY to update. On top of that, there are no billing caps or credit-based billing. They put the entire burden on users not to ensure that they don't have a mega bill.
paganel 12/11/2025|||
> there are no billing caps or credit-based billing.

Was really curious about that when I saw this in the posted article:

> I had some spare cash to burn on this experiment,

Hopefully the article's author is fully aware of the real risk of giving Alphabet his CC details on a project which has no billing caps.

nacozarina 12/11/2025||
there's prob a couple ppl out there with an Amex Black parked on a cloud acct, lol
logankilpatrick 12/13/2025|||
Usage updates much quicker in the AI Studio UI, near realtime (but can take ~5 min in edge cases).

We are working on billing caps along with credits right now. Billing caps will land first in Jan!

te_chris 12/11/2025|||
Trying to implement their gRPC api from their specs and protobufs for Live is an exercise in immense frustration and futility. I wanted to call it from Elixir, even with our strong AI I wasted days then gave up.
logankilpatrick 12/13/2025||
We are updating the API to be REST centric. Very fair feedback, see the new Interactions API we just shipped, very REST centric and all future work we do will be REST centric : )
thecupisblue 12/11/2025|||
Oh man let me add onto that!

4. If you read about a new Gemini model, you might want to use it - but are you using @google/genai, @google/generative-ai (wow finally deprecated) or @google-ai/generativelanguage? Silly mistake, but when nano banana dropped it was highly confusing image gen was available only through one of these.

5. Gemini supports video! But that video first has to be uploaded to "Google GenAI Drive" which will then splices it into 1 FPS images and feeds it to the LLM. No option to improve the FPS, so if you want anything properly done, you'll have to splice it yourself and upload it to generativelanguage.googleapis.com which is only accessible using their GenAI SDK. Don't ask which one, I'm still not sure.

6. Nice, it works. Let's try using live video. Open the docs, you get it mentioned a bunch of times but 0 documentation on how to actually do it. Only suggestions for using 3rd party services. When you actually find it in the docs, it says "To see an example of how to use the Live API in a streaming audio and video format, run the "Live API - Get Started" file in the cookbooks repository". Oh well, time to read badly written python.

7. How about we try generating a video - open up AI studio, see only Veo 2 available from the video models. But, open up "Build" section, and I can have Gemini 3 build me a video generation tool that will use Veo 3 via API by clicking on the example. But wait why cant we use Veo 3 in the AI studio with the same API key?

8. Every Veo 3 extended video has absolutely garbled sound and there is nothing you can do about it, or maybe there is, but by this point I'm out of willpower to chase down edgy edge cases in their docs.

9. Let's just mention one semi-related thing - some things in the Cloud come with default policies that are just absurdly limiting, which means you have to create a resource/account, update policies related to whatever you want to do, which then tells you these are _old policies_ and you want to edit new ones, but those are impossible to properly find.

10. Now that we've setup our accounts, our AI tooling, our permissions, we write the code which takes less than all of the previous actions in the list. Now, you want to test it on Android? Well, you can:

- A. Test it with your account by signing in into emulators, be it local or cloud, manually, which means passing 2FA every time if you want to automate this and constantly risking your account security/ban.

- B. Create a google account for testing which you will use, add it to Licensed Testers on the play store, invite it to internal testers, wait for 24-48 hours to be able to use it, then if you try to automate testing, struggle with having to mock a whole Google Account login process which every time uses some non-deterministic logic to show a random pop-up. Then, do the same thing for the purchase process, ending up with a giant script of clicking through the options

11. Congratulations, you made it this far and are able to deploy your app to Beta. Now, find 12 testers to actively use your app for free, continuously for 14 days to prove its not a bad app.

At this point, Google is actively preventing you from shipping at every step, causing more and more issues the deeper down the stack you go.

egorfine 12/11/2025|||
12. Release your first version.

13. Get your whole google account banned.

davidmurdoch 12/11/2025||
14. Ask why it was banned and they respond with something like "oh you know what you did".
short_sells_poo 12/11/2025||
Ha, bold of you to assume they'll respond!
alisa_fortin 12/15/2025||||
Hi there! I am the PM for Veo on the Gemini API. I wanted to check with you on Point 8 - getting garbled sound when extending the video. Veo 3.1 is limited to the last 24 frames, 1s of video for the extension feature so sometimes dialog and audio are lacking continuity. We are working on this limitation. If you are experiencing a different issue altogether, would you be able to share the prompt so I can debug on my end? Thank you!
logankilpatrick 12/13/2025|||
> 4. If you read about a new Gemini model, you might want to use it - but are you using @google/genai, @google/generative-ai (wow finally deprecated) or @google-ai/generativelanguage? Silly mistake, but when nano banana dropped it was highly confusing image gen was available only through one of these.?

Yeah, I hear you, open to suggestions to make this more clear, but it is google/genai going forward. Switching packages sucks.

> Gemini supports video! But that video first has to be uploaded to "Google GenAI Drive" which will then splices it into 1 FPS images and feeds it to the LLM. No option to improve the FPS, so if you want anything properly done, you'll have to splice it yourself and upload it to generativelanguage.googleapis.com which is only accessible using their GenAI SDK. Don't ask which one, I'm still not sure.

We have some work ongoing (should launch in the next 3-4 weeks) which will let you reference files (video included) from links directly so you don't need to upload to the File API. We do also support custom FPS: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/video-understanding#cu...

> 6. Nice, it works. Let's try using live video. Open the docs, you get it mentioned a bunch of times but 0 documentation on how to actually do it. Only suggestions for using 3rd party services. When you actually find it in the docs, it says "To see an example of how to use the Live API in a streaming audio and video format, run the "Live API - Get Started" file in the cookbooks repository". Oh well, time to read badly written python.

Just pinged the team, we will get a live video example added here: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/live?example=mic-strea... should have it live Monday, not sure why that isn't there, sorry for the miss!

> 7. How about we try generating a video - open up AI studio, see only Veo 2 available from the video models. But, open up "Build" section, and I can have Gemini 3 build me a video generation tool that will use Veo 3 via API by clicking on the example. But wait why cant we use Veo 3 in the AI studio with the same API key?

We are working on adding Veo 3.1 into the drop down, I think it is being tested by QA right now, pinged the team to get ETA, should be rolling out ASAP though, sorry for the confusing experience. Hoping this is fixed by Monday EOD!

> 8. Every Veo 3 extended video has absolutely garbled sound and there is nothing you can do about it, or maybe there is, but by this point I'm out of willpower to chase down edgy edge cases in their docs.

Checking on this, haven't used extend a lot but will see if there is something missing we can clarify.

On some of the later points, I don't have enough domain expertise to weight in but will forward to folks n the Android / Play side to see what we can do to streamline things!

Thank you for taking the time to write up this feedback : ) hoping we can make the product better based on this.

thecupisblue 12/15/2025||
Didn't catch in the updates that the custom FPS was released, amazing. Seems like the limit is just 20MB, but can use custom splitting for larger ones.

Trying to split all videos into frames was a PITA mostly due to weird inputs from different Android phones requiring handling all kinds of edge cases, then uploading each to Upload API with retry was also adding a lag + complexity, so doing it all in one go will save me both time and nerves (and tokens).

Thanks for listening and all the great work you do, since you came in the experience improved by an immeasurable amount.

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025|||
Will take a pass with the team to see what we can do to tighten up this experience, very valid feedback on the confusion between the three APIs.
marqueewinq 12/12/2025||
What stack are you using?
dannyobrien 12/10/2025||
The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting the same treatment as more faceless, distant big businesses.

I have a friend that says Google's decline came when they bought DoubleClick in 2008 and suffered a reverse-takeover: their customers shifted from being Internet users and became other, matchingly-sized corporations.

cortesoft 12/10/2025||
I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things.

I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk to someone before I can buy.

Workaccount2 12/11/2025|||
The number one rule of business that should just be passively reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field:

1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.

the_snooze 12/11/2025||
Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.
StilesCrisis 12/11/2025|||
They get paid more if you get a parking ticket.
deinonychus 12/11/2025|||
i'm currently disputing a bill with a parking company. there's a kiosk at the movie theater served by the parking lot, so that you can get free parking if you see a movie. the kiosk has an option for you to describe your car if you forgot your license plate number. i did that and they sent me a bill for unpaid parking.

customer service is unable to acknowledge why that feature is offered and can only assert that if you park you gotta pay. after threatening to complain to the BBB and my state AG they have graciously offered to drop the ticket to $25.

thank you for listening to me vent :)

petesergeant 12/11/2025|||
The RyanAir model of technically legal, but actively playing a zero-sum game against their consumers' diligence.
dbspin 12/11/2025||||
At least in my country they face no competition. For a given location, only one app will work.
Workaccount2 12/11/2025||||
Plenty of people on here looking to disrupt a market with tech...c'mon guys, get on it

Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work (and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money), which is issuing government enforced fines.

wlesieutre 12/11/2025||
The crappy apps that replaced parking meters are the people who disrupted the existing market with tech
Mashimo 12/11/2025||||
Huh, where I live you often can use many different parking apps, and the one i tried is very simple and user friendly.

Start app, wait for gps, turn time wheel, press start.

edwinjm 12/11/2025||
Turn time wheel? How do you know in advance how long you stay? Where I live, you start and when you leave, you click stop. You also get reminders in case you forgot to stop.
deificx 12/11/2025||
Not GP, but I guess I'm using the same app. You guess (and then it gives you the price up front). 10 minutes before it expires it asks you if you want to extend it. There might also have been a detect if you drive away and stop feature (don't recall).

Mostly these days all paid parking has registration camera's, and it just starts and stops parking for you automatically. However, there are like 3 or so apps that compete here so you need a profile with all of them for this to work and you also need to enable this on all the apps.

baobun 12/11/2025||
There is no way this is not a degradation compared to a physical meter accepting cash plus whatever. My country doesn't really have parking apps yet here and paying for parking is never a friction.
Mashimo 12/12/2025||
> There is no way this is not a degradation compared to a physical meter accepting cash plus whatever.

Well you can extend the parking time while not at your car. That is a big plus.

baobun 12/12/2025||
Or just pay whetever's due when you return to exit. Having to schedule and reschedule sounds unnecessary to begin with.
Mashimo 12/12/2025||
You can only do that at a dedicated and fenced of garage or parking lot. You can't do that at the curb in the inner city. You have to pay upfront.

Without the app you have to find the meter, pay, print the receipt and get back to your car to put in in the window. Remember the time and get back.

With the app you can just start walking towards your destination while you start the metering.

prasadjoglekar 12/11/2025||||
There's also the unfortunate stick of a much larger parking ticket that is even more trouble to contest.
CamperBob2 12/11/2025|||
(Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a good walk anyway.

There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking. If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to spend some quality time at your next city council meeting making yourself a royal PIA.

vel0city 12/11/2025|||
You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion dollars. The private company made it back in the first decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the parking as revenue compensation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Parking_Meters

This doesn't apply to private pay lots though, so there's still some amount of "choice".

harikb 12/11/2025|||
Sometimes I think, it should be illegal for these government contracts to last beyond 5 years for exactly this reason. Who know what kind of deals are being made. Some administration could sign away the whole country on their last day.
specproc 12/11/2025|||
It's straight up corruption, pure and simple. The UK is also full of this crap. The officials and executives who've facilitated and profited from this robbery should be jailed.
YouAreWRONGtoo 12/11/2025|||
[dead]
jacquesm 12/11/2025|||
So, the officials that signed that deal went to jail, right?
542354234235 12/11/2025||||
I don’t think a monopoly requires literally every possible option to be controlled by the monopolistic entity.

Also, I only have time for so many hills on which to die. I’m not sure parking reform, while worthy, makes the cut.

cyberax 12/11/2025|||
LOL. All the city parking spots around here are managed by PayByPhone, and pretty much all private parking spots are DiamondParking paid through ParkMobile.

I raised the issue with my local city council rep. She didn't care.

biglyburrito 12/11/2025||||
My previous company was like this, and it boggles the mind.

Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it. Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a demo & a price quote.

My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product (with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired) without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go, as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get more traction in their market.

eitally 12/11/2025||
My current employer offers three tiers of licensing with clearly articulated prices & benefits (the lowest of which is free), but also offers a "Custom - let's talk" option because the reality is that sometimes customer situations are complicated and bespoke contracts make sense, but at least the published pricing provides directional guidance heading into a discussion. I think this is reasonable.
sh34r 12/10/2025||||
> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer

You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.

pooper 12/10/2025|||
> You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.

Does segmentation also count as dynamic pricing?

--

    The IT guy at Podunk Lutheran College has no money: Gratis.
    The IT guy at a medium-sized real estate agency has some money: $500.
    The IT guy at a Fortune 100 company has tons of money: $50,000.


https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/
Terr_ 12/11/2025|||
Not parent poster, but I think a more practical approach is to ban secret discriminatory pricing.

If everybody can see the prices that would be quoted in other circumstances, that exerts a strong moderating force against abuse.

It won't help you if there's a monopoly, but I consider that a separate problem needing separate solutions.

transcriptase 12/11/2025||||
The entire lab supply industry is disgusting in this respect. The funding (and recent grants) that a given professor or research lab has is generally publicly available information that vendors will buy in easily digestible formats from brokers and companies that scrape the websites of major granting agencies.

All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much money you’ve received recently and even has an outline what research you plan to do over the next few years since even the detailed applications often get published alongside funding allocations.

The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically spend.

lokar 12/11/2025||
A group of research universities should start a non-profit co-op to produce this for them.

Getting just the university of California should be enough critical mass.

xmcqdpt2 12/11/2025||
Depends on the product. Some products just have a single supplier for the whole world over, because they are extremely specialized.

It's not uncommon though for eg departments to have common equipment that they negotiate together.

sh34r 12/12/2025|||
While I can certainly think of ways in which ordinary segmentation can be stretched beyond the limits of what’s reasonable, the example you give is categorically different.

In your example, you’re paying extra for additional capabilities. Doesn’t really matter if it’s a nonlinear increase in cost with the number of seats. Two companies buy 500 seats and pay the same price.

What I object to is some sales bro deciding I should pay 5x more for those same licenses because of who I am, what I look like, where I’m from, etc. It’s absolutely repulsive. Why can’t you simply provide a fair service at a fair price and stop playing these fuck-fuck games? You’re making a profit on this sale either way. Stop trying to steal my profit margin.

Instead of trying to scam me by abusing information asymmetry, why not use your sales talents to upsell me on additional or custom services, once you’ve demonstrated value? Honest and reliable vendors generally get continued (and increasing) business.

Conversely, these Broadcom/private-equity/mafia tactics generally have me running for the exits ASAP. Spite is one hell of a motivator.

nicbou 12/11/2025||||
Certain purchases (like health insurance in my country) should be a conversation, because the options are fiendishly complex and the attributes people typically use for comparison are wrong. The consequences are lifelong.
cortesoft 12/11/2025|||
Every time I go to a presentation about the health care options I have, it ends up just being the representative reading off a slide with the actual information. All the information I need is in print. I have never received a single piece of valuable information that wasn’t easier to get just reading the docs myself.
nicbou 12/12/2025||
We might live in a different country and serve a different demographic.

My guy saved a lot of people from making dumb mistakes. Then again he's good at his job, and if he was not I would wipe his business. Aligning incentives was very important for me. Most brokers are just bad.

sceptic123 12/11/2025||||
I thought thees things were complex on purpose to make it hard for people to easily understand and compare so you have to speak to a sales person who can do the upselling
nicbou 12/11/2025||
Nope. I built a calculator for that last year and ooooh boy. Now I pipe half the requests to a human because of all the possible mistakes a person can make. It's crazy complicated.

Finding that human is also hard because of the perverse incentives to sell more lucrative products.

sceptic123 12/11/2025||
That's my point, you need to be a specialist to understand it, but the specialists are incentivised to upsell you.

A simpler product would be better for consumers, but won't happen because there are industries (and a lot of lobbying) built up around keeping the money train rolling.

nicbou 12/12/2025||
Not really. Some things are just complex.
Hendrikto 12/11/2025|||
But not a conversation to a sales rep who will just push whatever gives them the largest commission.
xboxnolifes 12/11/2025|||
Pricing tiers are a form of dynamic pricing. Service free tiers basically couldn't exist without dynamic pricing, as they are subsidized by the paying tiers.
kldg 12/11/2025||||
Bless you and your family for all time and beyond. Having to talk to someone before I even get a price to compare, or a demo, drives me mad, and then a week later you get their contract and find they claim ownership of everything your company uploads to them -- all that time down the drain, and the salesperson never read the contract so they don't know what to say. Then there are the smaller companies with unwritten policies -- we used to get call metric software from a small Swiss outfit, but I discovered we were billed based on how many employees we've ever had, not based on current employees, with no method to delete terminated employees from the database -- on what planet do you expect someone to pay a recurring expense in perpetuity for someone who showed up for training one day 5 years ago and was never heard from again? I was so mad when they gave us the renewal price, we made our own replacement software for it.

Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.

AznHisoka 12/11/2025||||
You are also a developer though, and developers are notorious for wanting self serve.

Someone who works in finance or conpliances might want a demo, or views those things as signals the product is for serious use cases.

dpkirchner 12/11/2025||
Sure, and they should have that option. But in my experience business-folks ask techies to evaluate services all the time, and ideally we can just start out in the low-/no-touch tier to feel things out. If that tier isn't available, us techs might just try a different service.
timr 12/11/2025||
The kind of products hidden behind sales calls are generally the sort where the opinion of IC-level tech staff is next to irrelevant. With these kinds of products, the purchase decision is being made at a group level, the contract sizes are large, and budgetary approvals are required. It’s a snowball the size of a house, and it started rolling down the mountain months (or years) before it got to your desk. Literally nobody cares if you buy a single license or not, and if you (personally) refuse to try it because it doesn’t have self-service, you’ll be ignored for being the bad stereotype of an “engineer”, or worse.

About the only time you’ll be asked to evaluate such a product as an IC is when someone wants an opinion about API support or something equivalent. And if you refuse to do it, the decision-makers will just find the next guy down the hall who won’t be so cranky.

TheTaytay 12/11/2025|||
I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a “small/medium” startup can easily sign contracts for single services for $100k+, and in my experience, salespeople really do care about commissions at those price points. A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software. Github and Slack are good examples of services who make very good use of their ability to self-serve their customers out of the gate, in spite of also supporting very large orgs.

In these conversations, I never ever see the buyers justifying or requesting a sales process involving people and meetings and opaque pricing.

It’s true that complicated software needs more talking, but there is a LOT of software that could be bought without a meeting. The sales department won’t stand for it though.

timr 12/11/2025||
> A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software.

Not really. Even if we keep the conversation in the realm of startups (which are not representative of anything other than chaos), ICs have essentially no ability to take unilateral financial risk. The Github “direct to developer” sales model worked for Github at that place and time, but even they make most of their money on custom contracts now.

You’re basically picking the (very) few services that are most likely to be acquired directly by end users. Slack is like an org-wide bike-shedding exercise, and Github is a developer tool. But once the org gets big enough, the contracts are all mediated by sales.

Outside of these few examples, SaaS software is almost universally sold to non-technical business leaders. Engineers have this weird, massive blind spot for the importance of sales, even if their own paycheck depends on it.

cortesoft 12/11/2025|||
This is really not true in my experience. In fact, all my experience has been with products that aren’t THAT expensive, and the individual dev teams do decide. These are SaaS products, and sometimes the total cost is under $1000 a year, and I still can’t get prices without contacting sales.

Also, it isn’t just ICs. I have worked as a senior director, with a few dozen people reporting into me… and I still never want to talk to a sales person on the phone about a product. I want to be able to read the docs, try it out myself, maybe sign up for a small plan. Look, if you want to put the extras (support contracts, bulk discounts, contracting help, etc) behind a sales call, fine. But I need to be able to use your product at a basic level before I would ever do a sales call.

makeitdouble 12/11/2025||||
> sales people

> talk to people

There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to not do that.

As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc. but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a fundamental bit.

Hendrikto 12/11/2025||
> sales wanting direct contact with clients

But what do the clients want? Your business should not be structured to make sales people happy.

arjie 12/11/2025||||
That's just a disqualification process. Many products don't want a <$40k/annual customer because they're a net drain. For those, "talk to sales" is a way to qualify whether you're worth it as a customer. Very common in B2B and makes sense. Depends entirely on the product, of course.
pmontra 12/11/2025||||
If it's only pay and go why have Sales at all? At the very best you need only a slimmed down Sales Department, so being against pay and go is self preservation.
hrimfaxi 12/11/2025||
For enterprise deals.
brightball 12/11/2025||||
It depends on the environment.

If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go, it can work well.

If an application is complicated or it’s a tool that the whole business runs on, often times the company will discover their customers have more success with training and a point of contact/account manager to help with onboarding.

Arainach 12/11/2025||||
Instant self signup died with cryptocurrency and now AI: any "free" source of compute/storage/resources will be immediately abused until you put massive gates on account creation.
kijin 12/11/2025||
Who said anything about free? OP wanted to pay Google $100.
Arainach 12/11/2025||
OP wanted "instant self signup". That doesn't work when malicious actors are trying to register accounts with stolen credentials. The verification flow is required because of the amount of pressure from malicious actors against both free and newly-created accounts.

"Give access now, cancel if validation fails" doesn't work either - so long as attackers can extract more than 0 value in that duration they'll flood you with bad accounts.

kijin 12/11/2025||
Well, then give me self-signup with a clearly outlined verification flow that I can follow from A to Z.

If you give me a form where I can upload my passport or enter a random number from a charge on my card, that counts as "instant" enough. On the other hand, if you really need to make me wait several days while you manually review my info, fine, just tell me upfront so I can stop wasting my time. And be consistent in your UI as to whether I'm verified yet. It's all about managing expectations.

Besides, Amazon hands out reasonable quotas to newly created accounts without much hassle, and they seem to be doing okay. I won't believe for a second that trillion-dollar companies like Google don't know how to keep abuse at a manageable level without making people run in circles.

SecretDreams 12/11/2025||||
> use their sales skills

Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI can replace.

satvikpendem 12/11/2025|||
You're not the target customer.
Sevii 12/10/2025|||
That has definitely changed. Google AdWords today is one of the most unfriendly services to onboard I've ever encountered. Signing up is trivial, setting up your first ad is easy, then you instantly get banned. Appeals do nothing. You essentially have to hire a professional just to use it.
LiamPowell 12/10/2025|||
Yet it's still absolutely inundated with scams and occasionally links that directly download malware[1] that they don't action reports on. I don't think the process needs to be easier if they already can't keep up with moderation.

[1]: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR129387695568...

Workaccount2 12/11/2025||
It might seem vindictive, but these are the ads that google shows people who block all of Googles tracking or are new/blank profiles. Hear me out...

When Google has a bad/empty profile of you, advertisers don't bid on you, so it goes to the bottom feeders. Average (typically tech illiterate) people wandering through the internet mostly get ads for Tide, Chevy, and [big brand], because they pay Google much more for those well profiled users. These scam advertisers really don't pay much, but are willing to be shown to mostly anyone. They are a bit like the advertiser of last resort.

All of that is to say, if you are getting malware/scam ads from Google, it's probably because (ironically) you know what you are doing.

dekhn 12/10/2025||||
The thing to understand about google services is that they see so much spam and abuse that it's easier for them to just assume you are a spammer rather than a legitimate customer, unless you go through other channels to establish yourself.
binsquare 12/10/2025||||
Also adding onto this, it is impossible to get human support!

One of my co-workers left with an active account and active card but no passwords noted. The company gave up and just had to cancel + create a new account for the next adwords specialist.

fersarr 12/10/2025||||
My attempts always had validation issues that stopped the ads from running but I never figured it out and stopped trying
josefresco 12/11/2025|||
I sell managed Google Ads services and have never had issues with my clients being banned. Google Ads sucks for 1000 other reasons.
smagdali 12/12/2025||
Hi, as the original-thought-haver here (and a buyer of DoubleClick's services on various projects 1998-2003), I should clarify -the problem with Google's acquisition of DoubleClick wasn't just about customer scale, or even market power, it was that DoubleClick was already the skeeziest player on the internet, screwing over customers, advertisers and platforms at every opportunity, and culturally antithetical to Google at the time. And there wasn't any way that "Don't Be Evil" was going to win in the long run.

Look how quaint this seems now: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/consumer-gro...

rozap 12/11/2025||
I wasted several hours this week going around in the exact same circles. We have a billing account, but kept hitting a gemini quota. Fine. But then on the quota page, every quota said 0% usage. And our bill was like $5. Some docs said check AI studio, but then the "import project from google cloud to AI studio" button kept silently failing. This was a requests per minute quota, which was set at 15 (not a whole lot...) but wouldn't reset for 24 hours. So then I kept making new projects so I could keep testing this thing I'm building, until eventually I ran out.

The only way we could get it resolved was to (somehow) get a real human at google on the phone because we're in some startup program or something and have some connection there. Then he put in a manual request to bump our quota up.

Google cloud is the most kafkaesque insane system I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Every time I use it I can tell the org chart is leaking.

jacquesm 12/11/2025||
For the last decade or so I get a second $0.85 monthly bill from google. Nobody at google knows why, but they recommend to leave it because who knows what could be disabled if I block those payments. Interesting detail here is that this is on a bank account that we stopped using in 2017, so the only reason we are keeping that account alive is for these stupid google payments. In the cloud environment there is an invoice for the amounts, but no way to change the billing info to our current account and also no way (not by us, not by google support) to figure out what these payments are actually for...

Calling it kafkaesque is giving it too much credit.

gikkman 12/11/2025|||
I recently got an email saying a project I got is at the risk of being disabled because my payment information is invalid. But the card I got registered for it is the same I've had the last two years, and it's still valid cause I used it yesterday. Also, there is no amount due as far as I can tell. I haven't done anything with the project for 6 month, it's just sitting there. No API usage, nothing.

So I got no idea what to do to address it. I feel my best option is wait for it to get disabled and try to address it afterwards.

kyrra 12/11/2025|||
Chargebacks or disputes will lock your account, so definitely stay away from that path.

But just closing the bank account will stop auto billing (it's considered a decline). So if you closed the account, it would just stop paying for whatever it is, and then cloud may lock the gcp account until it's paid. (I'm not 100% sure what cloud does with unpaid invoices).

MrOrelliOReilly 12/11/2025|||
I have been fighting the same bizarre quota demon. Scripts kept timing out due to quota limitations, but I haven't been able to find any indication of a limit in the console. Finally gave up and switched to Claude, since they at least have a sane interface for API keys and billing!
alexp2021 12/11/2025|||
Exactly the same for me. Quote usage is something like 2%, but constantly experience the quota limit error.
Filligree 12/11/2025||
The trick here is that they describe internal loadshedding as quota limits.

There’s a quote for your general class of query, and there’s a quota for how many can be in flight on a given server. It’s not necessarily about you specifically.

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025|||
That should not be the case, if so it is a bug, if we load shed (which does happen some what frequently given the demand our systems are under) we should be returning a 503, not 429. If you suspect something is amiss and you get a 429 even though your limits don't show it in https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days&tab..., pls email me: Lkilpatrick@google.com
rozap 12/12/2025|||
This was the vibe I got, that they were actually just load shedding but writing it as a 429 with a message about the quota being hit. And if they need to load shed, fine, I get it, but it is a waste of time for me to go in circles trying to figure out wtf is wrong when they're just too cowardly to admit it because it might impact whatever SLA some PM has.

It just leaves a bad taste, and the second a competitor comes along that has an acceptable offering, then I'll move. Just ridiculous gaslighting behavior.

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025||
We built a new rate limit and quota experience right inside Google AI Studio, along with a way to see your details logs: https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days&tab...

pls send feedback if this is helpful!

asim 12/11/2025||
Unfortunately Google's problem is the product is dictated by the architecture of the APIs and this is an issue for anything they do. At one point long ago every Google product was disjointed and Larry Page told everyone they needed to be unified under a single theme and login. Then over time with the scale of the company you become entirely dependent on the current workflows. To work around it, all of a sudden there's a new UI for a new product and it looks super clean right until you try do something with that login or roles or an API key that has to effectively jailbreak the flow you're in. Painful. It's why startups win. Small, nimble, none of that legacy cruft to deal with. Whoever is working hard to fix these problems at Google KUDOS TO YOU because it's not easy. It's not easy to wrangle these systems across hundreds of teams, products and infrastructure. The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve and the issue is entirely about operating within the limitations of the system but for good reason.

I hope they figure out a lot of the issues but at the same time, I hope Gemini just disappears back into products rather than being at the forefront, because I think that's when Google does it's best work.

dbuxton 12/11/2025|
> The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve

It does make you wonder, why not just be a lot smaller? It's not like most of these teams actually generate any revenue. It seems like a weird structural decision which maybe made sense when hoovering up available talent was its own defensive moat but now that strategy is no longer plausible should be rethought?

asim 12/11/2025|||
Two reasons. 1 - they print cash through Ads which means there's opportunity or desire to do more things, or even a feeling like you should or can. So new products emerge but also to try diversify the revenue stream. 2 - the continuous hiring and scale means churn, people get bored, they leave teams, they want to do something new, it all bifurcates. It keeps fragmenting and fragmenting until you have this multilayered fractal. It's how systems in nature operate so we shouldn't think corporation's will be any different. The only way to mitigate things like this is putting in places limits, rules and boundaries, but that also limits the upside and if you're a public company you can't do that. You have to grow grow grow and then cut cut cut and continue in that cycle forever or until you die.
BozeWolf 12/11/2025|||
And yet google generates around $1.9miljon revenue per employee per year. Which is a lot, almost as good as competitors.
plaidfuji 12/10/2025||
> The “Set up billing” link kicked me out of Google AI Studio and into Google Cloud Console, and my heart sank. Every time I’ve logged into Google Cloud Console or AWS, I’ve wasted hours upon hours reading outdated documentation, gazing in despair at graphs that make no sense, going around in circles from dashboard to dashboard, and feeling a strong desire to attain freedom from this mortal coil.

100% agree

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025||
we will have this fixed soon : ) thank you for the patience, have wanted this in AI Studio directly since the day I joined Google!
avereveard 12/10/2025||
[flagged]
levocardia 12/11/2025||
Add me to the list of "saw nano banana pro, attempted to get an API key for like 5min, failed and gave up." Maybe I am a dummy (quite possible) but I have seen many smart people similarly flummoxed!

You can walk into a McDonalds without being able to read, write, or speak English, and the order touchscreen UI is so good (er, "good") that you can successfully order a hamburger in about 60 seconds. Why can't Google (of all companies) figure this out?

andy99 12/11/2025||
I tried at some point to sign up for whatever IBMs AI cloud was called. None of the documentation was up to date, when you clicked on things you ended up in circular loops that took you back where you started. Somehow there were several kinds of api keys you could make, most seemingly decoys and only one correct one. The whole experience was like one of those Mario castle levels where if you don’t follow the exact right pattern you just loop back to where you started.

It makes sense for IBM, seems like google is just reaching that stage?

JohnMakin 12/11/2025|||
because the bubble in which googlers exist is inherently user-hostile, even to their own detriment. been like this for a while
CGamesPlay 12/11/2025||
The difference here is that many of Google's users are cost centers, but in this case Google is being hostile to their profit centers as well.
antonvs 12/11/2025||
I wonder if they actually see their current users as profit centers. The tech is still being built out, to some extent they just need users to find out how it gets used and to get experience in the space. The real appeal of this entire space is its future potential, so they just may not care that much about providing a good consumer-grade experience at this stage.
drak0n1c 12/11/2025|||
I use a third party API aggregator/forwarder (VeniceAI) for this reason.
mrieck 12/11/2025||
At least Google models like Nano Banana Pro release Day 1 on https://fal.ai

I made a free Chrome extension that uses Fal api key if you want a UI instead of code

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-slop-canvas/dogg...

obmelvin 12/10/2025||
I don't understand the multiple posts / comments I've seen about this.

I google `gemini API key` and the first result* is this docs page: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key

That docs page has a link in the first primary section on the page. Sure, it could be a huge CTA, but this is a docs page, so it's kinda nice that it's not gone through a marketing make over.

* besides sponsored result for AI Studio

(Maybe I misunderstood and all the complaints are about billing. I don't remember having issues when I added my card to GCP in the past, but maybe I did)

leopoldj 12/10/2025||
As the article states, generating the key itself is easy. But getting credit and billing are the issues.
knollimar 12/11/2025|||
I have it running and calling but it's not showing the usage and I set it up the day gemini 3 came out
logankilpatrick 12/13/2025||
You can check your usage, inclusive of Gemini 3 here: https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days just make sure you have the right project selected
kro 12/11/2025|||
Agree, Google made it really easy here, compared to using service account certificates like with some of their other APIs.
yawnxyz 12/10/2025|||
I've to this day never been able to pay for Gemini through the API, even though I've tried maybe 6-7 times

If you bring it up to Logan he'll just brush it off — I honestly don't know if they test these UX flows with their own personal accounts, or if something is buggy with my account.

pants2 12/11/2025|||
This is my experience as well in my personal account, however at work given we were already paying for Google Cloud it was easy enough to connect a GCP account.

But somehow personally even though I'm a paying Google One subscriber and have a GCP billing account with a credit card, I get confusing errors when trying to use the Gemini API

altbdoor 12/11/2025||||
To Logan's credit though, his team made and drove a lot of good improvements in AI studio and Gemini in general since the early days.

I feel his team is really hitting a wall now in terms of improvements, because it involves Google teams/products outside of their control, or require deep collaboration.

bobviolier 12/11/2025|||
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1978897746921693572?s=20
TheTaytay 12/11/2025||
Yes, I get the impression he has been fighting this fight internally since the day he arrived. He can’t exactly talk about how infuriating it must be, but I look forward to his memoir.
BoorishBears 12/11/2025|||
As the other comments pointed out, that's not covering billing...

But also the (theoretical) production platform for Gemini is Vertex AI, not AI Studio.

And until pretty recently using that took figuring out service accounts, and none of Google's docs would demonstrate production usage.

Instead they'd use the gcloud CLI to authenticate, and you'd have to figure out how each SDK consumed a credentials file.

-

Now there's "express mode" for Vertex which uses an API Key, so things are better, but the complaints were well earned.

At one point there were even features (like using a model you finetuned) that didn't work without gcloud depending on if you used Vertex or AI Studio: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/how-can-i-use-fine-tuned-mod...

obmelvin 12/11/2025|||
I could've made my comment more clear. Definitely missing a statement along the lines of "and then after creating, you click 'set up billing' and link the accounts in 15 seconds"

I did edit my message to mention I had GCP billing set up already. I'm guessing that's one of the differences between those having trouble and those not.

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025|||
AI Studio is meant to be the fast path from prompt to production, bringing billing fully into AI Studio in January will make this even faster! We have hundreds of thousands of paying customers in production using AI Studio right now.
jiggawatts 12/11/2025|||
Every aspect is at least partially broken several times a day, and even when there isn't a temporary outage of something somewhere, there are nonsensical "blocks" for things that ought to just work.

I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse, just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am paying for and can use elsewhere.

Simultaneously, I'm trying to convince my company to pay for a corporate account of some sort so that I can use API keys with custom tools and run up a bill of potentially thousands of dollars that we can charge back to the customer.

My manager tried to follow the instructions and... followed the wrong ones. They all look the same. They all talk about "Gemini" and "Enterprise". He ended up signing up for Google's equivalent of Copilot for business use, not something that provides API keys to developers. Bzzt... start over from the beginning!

I did eventually find the instructions by (ironically) asking Gemini Pro, which provided the convenient 27 step process for signing up to three different services in a chain before you can do anything. Oh, and if any of them trigger any kind of heuristic, again, you get a hand in face telling you firmly and not-so-politely to take a hike.

PS: Azure's whatever-it-is-called-today is just as bad if not worse. We have a corporate account and can't access GPT 5 because... I dunno. We just can't. Not worthy enough for access to Sam Altman's baby, apparently.

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025||
> I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse, just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am paying for and can use elsewhere.

Passing along this feedback to the CLI team, no clue why this would be the case.

verdverm 12/10/2025|||
Most of them are correlating gemini-cli experience (trash) with the broader access to Gemini via studio or cloud (not at all a problem)
amluto 12/10/2025|||
> Gemini via studio

Excuse me? If you mean AI Studio, are you talking about the product where you can’t even switch which logged in account you’re using without agreeing to its terms under whatever random account it selected, where the ability to turn off training on your data does not obviously exist, and where it’s extremely unclear how an organization is supposed to pay for it?

rezonant 12/11/2025|||
Yes, much like admin.google.com (the GSuite admin interface), which goes ahead and tries to two-factor your personal GMail account every single time you load it instead of asking you which of the actual GSuite accounts you're signed into you'd like to use...
amluto 12/11/2025|||
I love how the two factor screen has no obvious way to tell it that you want a different account.

Hint: you can often avoid some of this mess by adding the authuser=user@domain to the URL.

verdverm 12/11/2025||||
Yeah, with multiple chrome profiles, you have to be mindful of which one you last had focused before clicking a link from an external application (i.e. tailscale), so that it opens the new tab in the right instance so the account(s) you use in it are available

Def use multiple chrome profiles if you aren't. You can color code them to make visual identification a breeze

rezonant 12/11/2025||
I'm aware of multiple Chrome profiles and I do not want to use them. Google should simply make their account switching consistent across their apps and work sensibly in these corner cases.
verdverm 12/11/2025||
"simply" is doing a lot of work, profiles is the outcome of addressing the problems you are talking about. Many people enjoy them and find them useful. Why are you against using them?
rezonant 12/11/2025||
Simply isn't doing much work, account switching works just fine on GMail, search, maps, calendar etc. The issue is that some Google apps do not follow the standard of the overall fleet. Google gives us the account switching feature, it's obviously an intended way to use their products. Otherwise they would not give you that and tell you to use browser profiles.

I don't want my history, bookmarks, open tabs and login sessions at every website divided among my 5 GSuite workspace accounts and my 1 personal Gmail. That adds a bunch of hassle for what? The removal of a minor annoyance when I use these specific Google apps? That is taking a sledge hammer to a slightly bent nail.

If it works for you, great, that's why it's there. But doing this for anything more than the basic happy path setup of "I have one personal account and 1 GSuite work account" is nuts in my opinion.

andoando 12/11/2025||||
I always have a buggy ass hell experience with having multiple google accounts pretty much across all their services. I've been wondering if its just me or how the hell this is normal.
Marsymars 12/11/2025|||
I long ago concluded that trying to mix multiple google (or MS) accounts in the same browser profile is a path to madness.
verdverm 12/11/2025||
seriously, just use different chrome profiles, but part of the issue is that they are so interwoven you pretty much have to do this
verdverm 12/11/2025|||
Don't get me wrong, aistudio is pretty bad and full of issues, but getting an apikey was not hard or an issue itself. Using any auth method besides personal account oauth with gemini-cli never worked for me after hours of trying
Leynos 12/10/2025||||
They could always just use OpenCoder, Crush or Goose with OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview)
verdverm 12/11/2025||
Google has the ADK project, which is really good.

Python is the primary implementation, Java is there, Go is relatively new and aiming for parity. They could have contributed the Typescript implementation and built on common, solid foundation, but alas, the hydra's heads are not communicating well

These other "frameworks" are (1) built by people who need to sell something, so they are often tied to their current thinking and paid features (2) sit at the wrong level. ADK gives me building blocks for generalized agents, whereas most of these frameworks are tied to coding and some peculiarities you see there (like forcing you to deal with studio, no thanks). They also have too much abstraction and I want to be able to control the lower level knobs and levers

ADK is the closest to what I've been looking for, an analog to kubernetes in the agentic space. Deal with the bs, give me great abstractions and building blocks to set me free. So many of the other frameworks want to box you into how they do things, today, given current understanding. ADK is minimal and easy to adjust as we learn things

quleap 12/18/2025|||
ADK is anything but minimal. It indeed has too much abstraction. It's certainly designed to promote Google's own services. If you are looking for lightweight frameworks, consider smolagents or Pydantic AI. Even OpenAI Agents SDK is simpler. LangChain/LangGraph are the epitome of incompetent designs.
FeepingCreature 12/11/2025|||
openrouter just gives you prompt in, result out in standard openai api format.
verdverm 12/11/2025||
These projects are all a level above open router, they call the same standard APIs, or even custom ones and manage the translation. They do a lot more as well

ADK has an option to use litellm (openrouter alternative), among many options

https://google.github.io/adk-docs/agents/models/#using-cloud...

arthurfirst 12/11/2025|||
I have a claude max subscription and a gemini pro sub and I exclusively use them on the cli. When I run out of claude max each week I switch over to gemini and the results have been pretty impressive -- I did not want to like it but credit where credit is due to google.

Like the OP others I didn't use the API for gemini and it was not obvious how to do that -- that said it's not cost effective to develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why you would? Sure you need API for any applications with built-in LLM features, but not for developing in the LLM assisted CLI tools.

I think the issue with cli tools for many is you need to be competent with cli like a an actual nix user not Mac first user etc. Personally I have over 30 years of daily shell use and a sysadmin and developer. I started with korn and csh and then every one you can think of since.

For me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible. To say nothing of the physical aliments associated with excessive mousing.

Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights me the whole time.

verdverm 12/11/2025||
> it's not cost effective to develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why you would

My spend is lower, so I conclude otherwise

> I think the issue with cli tools for many is...

Came from that world, vim, nvim, my dev box is remote, homelab

The issue is not that it is a CLI, it's that you are trying to develop software through the limited portal of a CLI. How do you look at multiple files at the same time? How do you scroll through that file

1. You cannot through a tool like gemini-cli

2. You are using another tool to look at files / diffs

3. You aren't looking at the code and vibe coding your way to future regret

> or me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible.

vim is a "gui" (tui), vs code has keyboard shortcuts, associating GUI with mouse work

> Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights me the whole time.

Anecdotal "vibe" opinions are not useful. We need to do some real evals because people are telling stories like they do about their stock wins, i.e. they don't tell you about the losses.

Thousands of hours sounds like your into the vibe coding / churning / outsourcing paradigm. There are better ways to leverage these tools. Also, if you have 1000+ hours of LLM time, how have you not gone below the prepackaged experience Big AI is selling you?

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025|||
Added a big button on: https://googledevai.devsite.corp.google.com/gemini-api/docs/... to make this more clear
politelemon 12/10/2025||
I did this same thing and this was my first result too. I am just not seeing how the author ended up where they did, unless knowing how to use Google search is not a core skill.
mediaman 12/11/2025|||
Read the full post. Partway down you will see they agree with you that getting an API key is not hard.

Paying is hard. And it is confusing how to set it up: you have to create a Vertex billing account and go through a cumbersome process to then connect your AIStudio to it and bring over a "project" which then disconnects all the time and which you have to re-select to use Nano Banana Pro or Gemini 3. It's a very bad process.

It's easy to miss this because they are very generous with the free tier, but Gemini 3 is not free.

malfist 12/10/2025|||
I did notice in their post instead of searching for answers, they asked Gemini how to do things, and when that didn't work, they asked Claude.

I often see coworkers offload their work of critical thinking to an AI to give them answers instead doing the grunt work nessecary to find their answers on their own.

dugidugout 12/10/2025||
This rhetoric worries me. If you insist on degrading others at least fix it to something like:

> [They seemingly] can't think on their own without an AI [moderating]

They _literally_ can think on their own, and they _literally_ did think up a handful of prompts.

A more constructive way to make what I assume to be your point would be highlighting why this shift is meaningful and leaving the appeal to ego for yourself.

malfist 12/11/2025|||
I agree with your assessment, I am in the wrong here. It's easy to be extra judgmental to anonymous figures on a blog you'll never meet. Thank you for reminding me to give people the benefit of doubt and not jump to worst case assumptions.

I've edited my post to be more charitable

ipaddr 12/11/2025|||
There is some truth in that statement.

Low energy afternoons you might be able to come up with a prompt but not the actual solution.

There are people offloading all thoughts into prompts instead of doing the research themselves and some have reached a point where they lost the ability to do something because of over AI use.

msp26 12/11/2025||
Hi if the Gemini API team is reading this can you please be more transparent about 'The specified schema produces a constraint that has too many states for serving. ...' when using Structured Outputs.

I assume it has something to do with the underlying constraint grammar/token masks becoming too long/taking too long to compute. But as end users we have no way of figuring out what the actual limits are.

OpenAI has more generous limits on the schemas and clearer docs. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#s....

You guys closed this issue for no reason: https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/issues/660

Other than that, good work! I love how fast the Gemini models are. The current API is significantly less of a shitshow compared to last year with property ordering etc.

shresbm123 12/13/2025|
Thanks for the feedback. Sorry that we closed the bug without giving you a clear indication of why. Let us look into this
logankilpatrick 12/11/2025||
Hey! Very valid feedback on setting up a billing account. This is something I have been pushing for over the last 2 years at Google. The good news: setting up billing directly in AI Studio tested internally and will be shipped in January : )

Will follow up on some of the other threads in here!

whalesalad 12/11/2025||
> setting up billing directly in AI Studio tested internally and will be shipped in January

Does this mean I can finally use premium features without onboarding my entire google workspace? I made the mistake of getting a good chunk of my family on my google app domain back in ~2007. For the last few years, I spend $80 per month just to host their email because the cost is easier to deal with than the human beings themselves. But I want to use the latest premium Google AI tooling and as far as I can tell the only way to do that is to upgrade my google workspace to the next tier and blow even more $$$ away each month. Suffice to say I have not done this, but it is a blocker from using things like Nano Banana with a non-gmail account.

mrieck 12/11/2025|||
Will that change also allow paying upfront ($250 or whatever) to bump up a tier?

I want to release a service using computer-use but am worried about 429 quota errors if I have actual users.

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025||
email me and I can get you bumped, but we are also working on prepay to get higher quota up front! Lkilpatrick@google.com
mseri 12/11/2025||
Finally! Great to hear. I had the exact same experience, but gave up at the moment of ID verification… too much hassle indeed
neom 12/10/2025|
I complained about this on HN recently and Logan responded and asked me to email him with feedback on how I'd like the experience to work (I didn't, sorry Logan, been busy :)) - Logan, to his credit, is very active everywhere reading and soliciting feedback. I think they're going to be giving it a pretty big bump on ux/ui of AI studio next month. It's easy to see he's a super smart guy trying to build something complex within a massive machine - given how focused on the product he appears to be, I have high hopes.

https://x.com/OfficialLoganK

verdverm 12/10/2025||
I don't know, he announced on Bluesky that they are dropping a big vibe coding update to aistudio next year

1. cart out in front of the horse a bit on this one, lame hype building at best

2. Not at all what I want the team focusing on, they don't seem to have a clear mission

Generally Google PMs and leaders have not been impressive or in touch for many years, since about the time all the good ones cashed out and started their own companies

logankilpatrick 12/13/2025||
> cart out in front of the horse a bit on this one, lame hype building at best

hmmm

> 2. Not at all what I want the team focusing on, they don't seem to have a clear mission

allow anyone to build with Google's latest AI models, be the fastest path from prompt to production with Gemini

mvkel 12/11/2025|||
This has often been the case (Google dev rel soliciting feedback) and they very rarely take meaningful action. Like firing a bug report with Apple.

They'll get to it when it becomes strategically important to.

Why making it easier to pay them isn't always strategically important, I'm not sure.

magicalhippo 12/11/2025|||
Dev rel is part of PR department isn't it? At least that's how it has always seemed to me when it comes to these mega corps.
logankilpatrick 12/13/2025||
nope, at least dev rel in deepmind is part of my product team
logankilpatrick 12/13/2025|||
my team is responsible for building the worlds best product, every piece of feedback directly influences what we do : )
bosky101 12/11/2025||
@logan waiting for named apikeys
jasonstephen 12/11/2025||
@bosky101 We have renaming API Keys in AI Studio today. Please reach out to me on X (@jastephx) if you have other feature requests around API Keys.
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