A 17% Drop in Output Tokens Sounded Big. Then I Decomposed the Bill
Output pricing fell 16.67% and output tokens fell about 17%. Adding those numbers does not give you the savings. Here is an exact price/volume/cross-term decomposition, plus a loop measurement where the savings rate went down instead of up.
Production-Ready Function Calling with Gemini 2.5 Pro API — Realistic Patterns for Failures, Timeouts, and Hallucinations
Gemini 2.5 Pro's Function Calling is powerful, but it tends to land in 'works, but does odd things sometimes' territory in production. Here are the design patterns I arrived at running search, reservation, and notification agents.
Firebase Genkit × Gemini API in Production — Design Choices and Gotchas from a Month of Indie Backend Work
Field notes from a month of running Firebase Genkit and Gemini API behind an indie app review-summarization backend. Flow and Tool design, Cloud Functions vs. Cloud Run, real cost and latency numbers, and seven undocumented gotchas.
What I Decided Before Letting an Agent Touch My Files: Folder Boundaries and Guardrails for Gemini Spark
A practical guardrail design for handing local folder cleanup to an autonomous agent: a content-hash manifest, an allowlist policy, and a post-run diff audit that catches irreversible operations before they slip past you.
Gemini 3 Multi-Tool Agents: Function Calling + Built-in Tools + Context Circulation in Production
A hands-on look at Gemini 3 multi-tool agents: combining Built-in Tools with Function Calling, Context Circulation, and parallel tool IDs, with measured latency numbers and the pitfalls I hit in production.
When Two Managed Agents Fight Over the Same Repo: External Leases and Fencing for Isolated Sandboxes
Every Managed Agents run gets its own isolated sandbox, so a local lock cannot stop two runs from touching the same repo or record. Here is how I serialize them safely with an external lease and a fencing token.
Your Tool Results Are Quietly Eating the Conversation — Handle Passing to Keep Gemini Function Calling Contexts Lean
Tool results linger in Function Calling history and compound your input tokens every turn. Two implementations — a token-budgeted compactor and handle passing — cut my measured input by roughly 8x, with the pitfalls I hit along the way.
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 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.
Implementing Gemini API Function Calling — Parallel Calls, Tool Chains, and When to Use Managed Agents
Production patterns for Gemini API Function Calling: parallel calls, error handling, and tool chaining, plus when to use Managed Agents and how to pin the tool-selecting model to a GA release.
Gemini API Grounding × Structured Output Guide — Turn Web Search Results into Typed JSON Data
Combine Gemini API Grounding with Google Search and Structured Output to extract real-time web information as type-safe JSON data. Practical implementation patterns included.
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.