Deep Think, Deep Research, Live, or Omni? How I Reassigned a Week of Work Across Gemini's Growing Set of Modes
Gemini now spans thinking, researching, talking, and creating. Three practical questions that decide which mode gets which task, based on a week of reassigning my indie-dev workflow.
Google I/O 2026 Preview — What I'm Watching for in Gemini This Year
Google I/O 2026 is approaching. Based on current Gemini development trends and past announcement patterns, here's what I'm personally expecting — no guarantees.
Pre-Screening Wallpaper App Submissions with Gemini Vision: A Two-Week Field Memo
Before submitting a new batch of wallpapers, I spent two weeks running Gemini's image understanding as a first-pass filter for store review risk. What it caught, what it missed, and where a human still has to decide.
Cursor's New Model on Coding Agent Index, and Why I Still Pick Gemini as My Center of Gravity
A third-party evaluator, Coding Agent Index, recently rated a new Cursor-developed model as 'frontier-class performance at one-tenth the cost.' I walk through how a solo developer who keeps Gemini at the center of their stack should read that ranking, and where to add the new model without churning the rest of the workflow.
Fixing NotebookLM Audio Overview When It Generates in the Wrong Language or Stalls Mid-Way
Five concrete causes and fixes for when NotebookLM's Audio Overview ignores your source language, freezes on the progress bar, or cuts off mid-playback — written from hands-on use during app review analysis.
Replying to 11 Languages of Google Play Reviews With Gemini Without Sounding Like a Bot
After two major Android updates, I had to clear a backlog of unanswered Google Play reviews in Japanese, English, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Thai, Italian, Russian, Persian, Ukrainian, and Polish. This is the operations design I settled on for using Gemini as a translation and vocabulary partner without losing the human temperature.
Why I Stopped Organizing Gmail and Let Gemini Recover My Memory Instead
Running six domains as an indie developer means my Gmail accounts are buried under tens of thousands of unfiled messages. Here is how I switched from asking Gemini to find emails to asking it to answer questions, with the traps I hit along the way.
The Day @Canva Moved In With Gemini — A One-Week Field Note on Designing Through Conversation via the MCP Connector
Canva is now formally integrated with Google Gemini, and you can invoke `@Canva` from inside the Gemini app to generate, edit, and resize for social platforms in a single chat. Writing as the indie creator behind dolice.design, I share a week of operating notes on Brand Kit prompting and the new Magic Layers feature.
Google AI Pro Now Includes YouTube Premium Lite: A Pricing Read From a Solo Developer
Google has bundled YouTube Premium Lite (¥780/month) into Google AI Pro (from ¥2,900/month). Here is how the new structure reads against my actual usage as a solo developer with 50M+ downloads, including who actually benefits.
Building Automatic Wallpaper Category Classification with Gemini Vision
An indie developer shares how they implemented automatic wallpaper image classification with the Gemini Vision API — including accuracy results, real pitfalls, structured-output tips, and a cost comparison with GPT-4o Vision.
Testing Gemini Vision for Wallpaper Auto-Classification — Real Accuracy Numbers and Pitfalls
An indie developer behind a 50M+ download wallpaper app shares a hands-on Gemini Vision classification experiment — including a first attempt at 67% accuracy and the improvements that brought it to 87%.
Google AI Studio Build Mode Not Working — Blank Preview, Deploy Failures, and Other Common Issues
Troubleshoot Google AI Studio Build Mode issues: blank preview panels, prompts that don't apply, Firebase deployment failures, and code getting overwritten. Each problem with a concrete fix.