The One Call I Refuse to Hand Gemini During a Phased Release
Day one of a phased release has nowhere near the sample size to tell a healthy build from a broken one. Here is the three-state rollout gate I use, and the narrow job I give Gemini inside it.
A minimal pre-send guard for Gemini-drafted app review replies
Store replies are risky after you hit send, not before. Here is a short Python guard that blocks unkeepable promises, leaked contact details, and register slips, plus the two false positives it produced on the first run.
gemini-2.5-flash Can Return a 404 'no longer available' While the Docs Still List No Shutdown Date
The shutdown date for gemini-2.5-flash is blank in the official deprecation table, yet 404 reports have been circulating since July. Here is why reading that column as a safety margin misleads you, and how to check your own keys.
Routing Between Gemini 3.7 Flash and 3.1 Pro by Rework Cost, Not Speed
A single question replaced my model-selection ritual: can a machine catch this output when it is wrong? Here is how that splits work between 3.7 Flash and 3.1 Pro, plus the pricing math across the December 31 cutover.
After generated_images Disappeared: Three Branches Between the Response and a Saved File
Once you switch to generate_content, the line that breaks is usually the save. Here are the three branches on the response side - zero image parts, a shifting image count, and picking the extension - plus a receiver function you can drop in.
Your Shipped App Still Remembers the Retired Model
Finishing the server-side migration is only half of a model retirement. The older builds of your app still hold the old model name, and once the cutoff passes, rolling back stops being a recovery option. Here is how I moved model resolution onto the server.
Moving to the Batch Tier Cancels Out the Gemini 3.7 Flash Price Increase Exactly
Introductory pricing for Gemini 3.7 Flash ends on December 31, 2026, and the rate doubles the next day. Here is which models are affected, which are not, and how to project your January bill from the usage you already have.
generate_images Survives Until 2027. Your Image Generation Still Stops on August 17
google-genai 2.18.1 still ships generate_images, and the SDK deprecation notice points at 2027. The imagen-4.0 models, meanwhile, shut down on August 17. Here is what those two deadlines actually mean, measured on my own machine.
Rewriting generate_images as generate_content, where the arguments actually go
Ahead of the August 17 Imagen shutdown, I checked the SDK directly: of the 17 arguments in GenerateImagesConfig, only 5 move across unchanged. Here is the mapping, a compatibility layer that keeps callers working, and a way to verify the request shape without an API key.
The Memory Wasn't Lost — It Was Written to a Different Profile
A Memory Bank profile is identified by the pair of schema and scope. When call sites build that scope slightly differently, extra profiles appear with no error at all. Here are the measured numbers for how badly it fragments, and how three candidate fixes actually performed.
A Timeout Was Never Evidence of Failure — Designing Around Blocking Function Calls
When a tool call cannot return until the real-world effect finishes, two habits reverse on you: parallel dispatch and generous timeouts. Measured numbers from a sandbox harness, plus the design that replaces retries with observation.
When Streaming Responses Quietly Lose Non-ASCII Text: Measuring the Byte Boundary and the Event Boundary Separately
I measured why Japanese text disappears from streaming Gemini responses using a local mock SSE server. Two separate layers were broken, one of them silently, and an English-only test suite caught neither.