All Articles
Getting Artifacts Out of a Managed Agents Sandbox Safely — Scoped Credentials and Egress Design
Gemini API Managed Agents run in a Google-hosted isolated sandbox. Here is the short-lived, least-privilege credential and egress-boundary design I use to return generated artifacts to my own repository safely.
When Your Gemini Agent Has Three Tool Routes and Quietly Picks the Wrong One
Put Function Calling, Code Execution, and Grounding into one agent and the model will sometimes choose the wrong route, while the output still looks perfectly plausible. Here is how I instrument route selection and correct it with phase separation and verification gates, with working code.
Your Gemini Completion Event Will Arrive Twice — An Idempotent Sink That Makes Webhook + Reconciliation Effectively Once-Only
Once you receive Gemini long-running operations over a Webhook and back it up with a reconciliation poller, the same completion arrives twice and publishing or billing runs twice. Build an idempotent sink with a normalized key and a claim-run-commit pattern that keeps side effects effectively once-only.
Don't Ingest Gemini Deep Research Reports Blindly — A Citation-Verification Acceptance Gate for MCP-Grounded Research
Now that Deep Research connects to MCP servers and File Search, you can ground research on your own data. This builds an acceptance gate that verifies, before any automated ingest, whether each citation resolves to a trusted source — with an allowlist, a grounding-coverage ratio, and categorized reject reasons, all in working code.
When Gemini Computer Use Acts on a Stale Screen and Fails Quietly — Field Notes on Guarding the Loop
A Computer Use agent will click based on a screenshot taken moments ago, miss the real target, and throw no error. These are field notes on measuring those silent misclicks and stopping them with an observe-act-verify loop.
When Gemini's Maps Grounding Quietly Fails in Production — Field Notes on Attribution, Billing Boundaries, and Fallbacks
An operations-focused look at the pitfalls that surface after you ship Grounding with Google Maps on Gemini: detecting silent grounding misses, meeting the attribution requirement, knowing which responses are billed, and building fallbacks for latency and staleness.
Restarting a Long Agent Run From Where It Broke — A Step-Ledger Design for Gemini 3.5 Flash Long-Horizon Tasks
Gemini 3.5 Flash is good at long-horizon tasks, but when a 40-step run dies on step 29, you usually start over. An append-only step ledger gives you resume, idempotency, and audit in one place. Here is the design with working Python and measured results.
Harden the Layer Before Gemini Sees User Media — A Validation Pipeline You Can Actually Run
Piping user-uploaded images and video straight into Gemini walks you into MIME spoofing, EXIF leaks, decompression bombs, and video that isn't ready yet. Here's the validation layer—magic-byte sniffing, Files API state polling, and cleanup—built up in working code.
Trusting Gemini Structured Output in Production — Schema Design, Double Validation, and Bounded Retries
Gemini's structured output guarantees parseable JSON, not correct values. Notes on schema design with @google/genai, why propertyOrdering matters, a Zod double-validation layer, handling MAX_TOKENS truncation, and a bounded-retry extraction pipeline.
Switching Image Models Quietly Degrades Quality — A Gate That Catches It Without Manual Review
When you move image generation from preview to GA models, the API keeps returning 200 and quality slips silently. This is the three-layer gate I built to detect that drift without staring at every image: deterministic property checks, multimodal embedding similarity, and a Gemini judge, wired together in Python with thresholds and a cutover procedure.
Gemini's GA Image Models Won't Output Exact Device Resolutions — A Wallpaper Pipeline That Fixes Aspect Ratio and Safe Areas
After switching to the GA image models, your wallpapers no longer fit the screen. Here's how to crop one master image into every device resolution and cut your generation count to a fraction, with full Pillow code.
A Minimal Autonomous Agent with Gemini — Tool-Loop Design Lessons
Building an autonomous agent from a minimal setup with the google-genai SDK's automatic function calling — plus the step limits, tool allowlists, and retry decisions learned from automating real blog operations.