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.
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
A week of running Gemini's @Canva connector in production. Includes the prompt builder that stops Brand Kit references from going missing, a work-log script that replaces 'it feels faster' with medians, and a colour-difference audit that moves the weekly brand check off human eyes.
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.
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.
Cutting Gemini Embedding's output_dimensionality from 768 to 256 reduced my vector DB storage to one-third
An indie developer's record of trimming gemini-embedding-001 from 768 to 256 dimensions for an 80,000-row wallpaper recommendation index, with measured numbers on storage, cost, recall trade-offs, an int8 quantization implementation, a CI benchmark gate, and the five-step rollout plan I now use in production.
What I Tried, In Order, When Gemini API Returned User location is not supported in Production
Hitting the Gemini API from Cloudflare Workers or Vercel and getting hit with a sudden 'User location is not supported' error? Here is the exact order I worked through, drawn from a live production incident on my own indie apps.
Putting Gemini on Your Desktop and Phone as a PWA — How It Compares to a Browser Tab in Daily Use
How to install gemini.google.com as a Progressive Web App on macOS, Windows, iPhone, and Android — and what I actually measured after a week of comparing PWA usage to keeping it as a Chrome tab.