All Articles
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.
Three Lines Decide Who Gets Images in the Gemini App: 13, 18, and Your Administrator
When the image entry point is missing from the Gemini app, a bug is rarely the reason. Here is how the two separate age thresholds and the work or school account rules line up, and who you should actually contact.
Some inputs ignore media_resolution entirely. Count the tokens on your own key first
In Gemini 3, media_resolution behaves differently per input type. Here is why audio never moves, where the official docs disagree with each other, and how to recount input tokens on your own API key.
Before You Split That PDF: Three Different Limits in the Gemini App
When the Gemini app refuses your PDF, file size is rarely the real problem. Here is how I tell storage, rate limits, and reading capacity apart, and what I trim before I ever reach for a splitter.
Gem sharing stops in three places: the order I check when a shared Gem never shows up
When a shared Gem never reaches the other person, the block sits in the Gem itself, in the Admin console, or in Drive. Here is what stops where, who can unblock it, and the order I check.
The color label Gemini returned for the same wallpaper changed — and the model was not the reason
I counted color-label agreement across five ways of exporting the same wallpaper. Stripping the ICC profile was the worst of them. Here is how I pin the color space down before asking, and how I check the answers against a number I compute myself.
When the Sheets AI Function Won't Generate, Suspect the File's Location Before the Limit
If Generate and insert stays greyed out in Google Sheets, don't assume you hit the 24-hour cap. Spreadsheets opened through Dropbox, Box or Egnyte can't generate at all. Here's the order I check things in now.
How I Decide Between 3.8 Flash and 3.7 Flash — A Fixed Set of 20 Questions
After swapping a model ID to a newer generation, the same input can start producing answers that feel split. Here is the 20-question evaluation set I keep, how I run both generations on equal footing, and the two numbers I use to decide.
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.
When BLOCK_NONE Changes Nothing: Telling Adjustable Gemini Blocks from the Ones You Can't Move
Some safety blocks go away when you loosen a threshold. Others never will. Here is how to read the response and decide which kind you are looking at before you touch a single setting.
I edited the Drive doc, asked Gemini again, and it quoted the old sentence back
When Gemini answers from an outdated version of a Drive file, the file usually isn't the problem — the conversation is. Here's how sources stay attached for the whole conversation, why you can't remove one mid-thread, and what to do about partial reads.
gemini-2.5-flash-image stops on October 2, and the replacement the table names retired in June
gemini-2.5-flash-image shuts down on October 2, 2026, but the recommended replacement listed in the official table, gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview, was already retired on June 25. Here is the script I wrote to follow replacement chains to their end, and what it found across every row of the table.