All Articles
When Revenue and Cost Don't Line Up in a Gemini-Powered Niche SaaS — Field Notes on Metering Usage and Reconciling with Stripe
In a niche SaaS built on the Gemini API, monthly revenue is visible but per-user usage cost is not, so your margin stays a mystery until month-end. These notes cover a metering layer that converts tokens to money in real time, monthly reconciliation against Stripe, early detection of unprofitable users, and idempotent webhooks.
Keeping Nightly Batches Alive After the Gemini CLI Stops Responding: A google-genai SDK Fallback
On June 18 the Gemini CLI stops answering requests. Here is a small fallback harness that probes whether the CLI can still respond and quietly reroutes unattended batch jobs to the google-genai SDK, built from my own automation.
Moving My Automation Off the Gemini CLI Before the June 18 Shutdown
On June 18, the Gemini CLI stops responding for hosted plans. Here is how I moved unattended scripts that called gemini from the shell over to the google-genai SDK, with structured output, retries, and cost measurement built in.
Keep Your Flash-to-Pro Routing Threshold Honest with Shadow Re-evaluation
A Flash-generates, Pro-on-low-confidence router starts drifting the moment you hand-pick its threshold. This is a working build of a loop that samples your kept-Flash outputs, scores them against Pro, and recalibrates the threshold from a quality budget.
Running Gemini Chat History on Redis — Field Notes on Not Losing Conversation State in Production
Keep a Gemini ChatSession in process memory and it evaporates on every redeploy or scale event. Here is how I back it with Redis in production, covering token budgets, concurrent sends, SDK coupling, and graceful degradation, with the code I actually run.
Watching the 'Voice' of Generated Text: Catching a Silent Default-Model Swap Through Style Drift
When the default model changes over your head, the output can stay factually correct while its voice quietly shifts. This walks through fingerprinting the style of generated text and detecting drift statistically, with a dependency-free implementation you can drop into your pipeline.
Catching Deprecated Gemini Models in CI ― A Guard for Back-to-Back Shutdown Deadlines
When shutdowns and deprecations pile up, build a CI check that mechanically finds stale Gemini model strings across your repo. Includes a deprecation registry, a scanner, and a days-remaining warn/fail tier you can copy and run.
Before You Let a Managed Agent Ship: Designing Your Own Acceptance Gate
Let the public-preview Managed Agents generate files and broken artifacts will flow straight into production. Here is how to build a verification gate that artifacts must pass before you accept them, with runnable Python and a rejection-feedback loop.
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.
Wiring Gemini Managed Agents Into Your Automation: Keeping Conversation State and Environment State Apart
Managed Agents spin up a Linux sandbox, run an agent loop, and return a result in a single API call. The first thing that trips you up when moving off a hand-rolled loop is that conversation state and file state are two separate things. Here's that design, worked through live.
Don't Break When the Default Model Moves: A Startup Capability-Probing Layer for Gemini
Pinning a model name breaks on deprecation; trusting the default breaks when the weights swap silently. This is the design I settled on: probe what the served model can actually do at startup, then build every request from that answer. Includes runnable Python.
Your Gemini Live API session forgets the conversation every time it reconnects — field notes on token refresh and session resumption
Why a Gemini Live API WebSocket drops the conversation and the user's in-flight speech on every reconnect, and how to close the gap with single-use ephemeral tokens, session resumption handles, and the goAway warning.