All Articles
Hung Jobs Fail Quietly — Wrapping a Scheduled Gemini Call With a Timeout, an Empty-Output Check, and a Lock
An outer shell script that protects a cron-driven `gemini -p` call from three quiet failures: hanging on a response, exiting 0 with empty output, and overlapping with the previous run. Includes exit codes and timings measured with stand-in commands, and how far `timeout` reaches into child processes.
Stop Re-Reading Every Crash Report: Grep a Known-Bug Table First and Keep Only an Index in GEMINI.md
A routine for investigating app crash reports without making the model read every past bug in full: a one-line-per-bug lookup table, what belongs in GEMINI.md, and a grep helper you can paste in.
Three Veo 3.1 previews stop on Oct 22. I started with an inventory of every call site
Three Veo 3.1 preview models shut down on Oct 22, with gemini-omni-1.1-flash as the listed replacement. Before swapping model names, here is a search script that finds every call site in a repo, and a config pattern that stops loudly after the deadline instead of drifting to another model.
Gemini CLI Kept Saying 'API key not valid' After I Gave It a New Key — It Was Reading an Old One From a Third Place
I switched Gemini CLI from Google login to a paid API key, and the 400 'API key not valid' error would not go away. The key can come from four places — the shell, a project .env, a home .env, and settings.json — and a short script that lights them up in order narrows the cause to one.
The Day I Unplugged an MCP Server for the First Time — How I Decide Which Tools Stay On
Keep adding MCP servers and quality degrades well before you hit the API ceiling of 512 function declarations. Here is how I use includeTools and excludeTools in Gemini CLI to decide which tools stay enabled, and how I put the rest away.
The approval rules I had written never matched once — auditing my Gemini CLI policies
A deny rule I trusted for half a year had never matched. The pattern was tested against a JSON string, the folder I kept my rules in is not read, and ask_user turns into deny the moment nobody is watching. Here is the audit, and the script I wrote to keep doing it.
Matching name variants in a print catalog: normalize first, then ask Gemini for candidates
When the same artist appears under three spellings, asking Gemini whether two names are the same person quietly merges different generations. Here is the two-layer alternative — deterministic normalization first, model-generated candidates second — with working code and a cost estimate.
Icon-Only Buttons Can Stay Silent for Screen Readers, Even When Every Translation Is in Place
A fully translated app can still read as silence. Here is how I collect icon elements and labels from iOS and Android, settle everything mechanical locally, and send only the wording to Gemini — with the actual output from each stage.
When Gemini Let Me Upload Several Code Files at Once, I Stopped Selecting by Folder
Once you can hand Gemini a slice of a repository, the hard part moves from pasting to choosing. I measured the dependency graph of my own Next.js repo, found that folder-based selection caught zero callers, and wrote down the selection routine I use now.
An agreement-rate gate approves the model swap, then your category shares move
Swapping the model behind an image classification batch can pass a golden-set agreement gate while category shares quietly shift. I measured the sample sizes each check really needs and rebuilt the gate as a paired comparison.
Why Shipped Clients Deserve a Refusal, Not a Silent Model Substitution
A model can retire, but the apps already on people's phones cannot. This is how I built a sunset ledger keyed on output contracts, and how I now back-date my own deadline from the version residue curve.
A twice-daily batch that only ran once — reconstructing run counts from artifacts
One half of a scheduled job silently never fired, and throughput sat at half of plan for over a week without a single error in the logs. Here is how I reconstructed actual run counts from artifacts and backlog, with working code.