All Articles
Still image or short clip? Deciding feature placement from the cost gap between Nano Banana 2 Lite and Omni Flash
When I froze over whether a wallpaper app's hero asset should be a still image or a short moving loop, the deciding factor was not taste but the order of magnitude of the cost. Here is how to normalize Nano Banana 2 Lite and Omni Flash onto the same footing, down to a working decision function.
How Well Does Omni Flash Hear 'Rotate the Camera 30 Degrees Right'? Measuring Where Conversational Edits Land
Public-preview Gemini Omni Flash lets you re-edit a generated video in plain language. 'Make the lighting evening' lands; 'rotate the camera 30 degrees' often misses. Here is a running log of where instructions land, sorted mechanically by comparing before/after frames.
Keeping a Long-Running Managed Agent Alive Across Sandbox Recycling — Durable Checkpoints and Idempotent Resume
A Managed Agents sandbox can be recycled out from under you. Before 40 minutes of work resets to zero, we design a durable checkpoint that pushes progress outside the sandbox and an idempotent resume that never runs a side effect twice. With working SQLite code.
The Same gemini-flash-latest Pointed to Different Models in Different Regions
Alias resolution rolls out region by region. Send the same gemini-flash-latest to Tokyo and us-central1 and, for a few days, different models answer. Here is why that quietly invalidates your comparisons, and how a one-shot probe catches it.
A Gemini stream drops halfway — restart it, or have the model continue?
Most apps silently restart a dropped stream. Here is the arithmetic behind continuing from the partial output instead, and where to put the threshold.
I Asked Gemini to Grade My App Store Screenshots. Everything Scored 78–85.
Ask Gemini Vision to grade App Store screenshots out of 100 and good candidates and deliberately broken ones both land at 78–85. Here is how I measured the judge's discrimination power, dropped absolute scoring, and rebuilt it as debiased pairwise comparison.
Sample what you already accepted — an audit budget that catches silent quality drift
A confidence gate only ever looks at output the model hesitated on. Silent drift sinks into the batch that sailed through. Working from a fixed 30-minutes-a-day review budget, this walks through deriving detection time from the binomial, reallocating the same budget across risk strata, and catching slow decay with a cumulative monitor.
Before One Runaway Experiment Drains the Shared Budget: Using AI Studio Spend Caps as Isolation Walls
When you run several Gemini experiments under one billing account, a single runaway loop takes everything else down with it. Here is how I use AI Studio's per-project spend caps as isolation walls, plus a client-side soft ceiling and monthly reconciliation, with working code.
When a Batch Job Sat in RUNNING for Half a Day: Field Notes on Catching Stalls Early with Per-State Dwell Budgets and Record Reconciliation
When a Gemini Batch job stalls quietly under the shadow of the 24-hour SLA, per-state dwell-time budgets and submitted-vs-completed record reconciliation let you name the stall early. Field notes with real operational numbers.
When Gemini's executed result and its prose disagree on a number — a gate that trusts only code_execution_result
Gemini Code Execution returns the value it actually computed and the sentence describing it as separate parts. Trust the prose and you can inherit a hallucinated number. Here is a verification gate, in working code, that extracts the executed result as the single source of truth and rejects prose that disagrees.
When an Optional Field Comes Back Three Ways: Null, Empty String, and Missing Key in Gemini Structured Output
Optional fields in Gemini structured output drift between null, empty string, and a missing key, and downstream code breaks in three different ways. Here is how I collapse all three into one shape using nullable in responseSchema and a post-output normalization gate, with numbers from a nightly batch.
When responseSchema Can't Do $ref: Handling Recursive Schemas in Production with responseJsonSchema
Gemini's responseSchema is an OpenAPI subset with no $ref or $defs, so it can't express shared definitions or recursion. Here's how I moved to responseJsonSchema to reuse localized fields and handle a recursive category tree in production.