Is Gemini 3.5 Flash Actually Cheaper? Measuring Retry Amplification to Find the Flash vs Pro Break-Even
Now that 3.5 Flash is generally available, it is tempting to route everything to it. But once you measure effective cost per success instead of per-call price, the decision changes. Here is a small harness to measure retry amplification and find the break-even.
Finding Every Reference to the Image Preview Models Before They Stop on June 25
gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview and gemini-3-pro-image-preview stop on June 25. Here is a dependency audit for surfacing references buried in rarely-run branches and batches before the cutoff.
Letting File Search's Multimodal Mode Find Wallpapers I Couldn't: A Field Report
I tested whether File Search's new multimodal retrieval (gemini-embedding-2) could replace category tags for finding one wallpaper among thousands. A 300-image trial, the walls I hit, and where semantic search actually fits — with working code.
Building an App Store Rejection Workflow with the Gemini API — From Structured Notices to Resolution Center Replies
How I use the Gemini API to parse App Store rejection notices into structured JSON, cross-check guidelines, draft Resolution Center replies, and run pre-submission checks as an indie developer.
Is Anyone Actually Using Your Gemini Feature? Measuring Acceptance, Regeneration, and Edit Distance
Token charts will not tell you whether users embrace a Gemini-powered feature. A practical design for measuring acceptance rate, regeneration rate, and edit distance with Swift and BigQuery, with two weeks of real numbers.
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.
Gemini Live API Audio Sounds Sped Up — Fixing the Sample Rate Mismatch
When Gemini Live API responses sound high-pitched and sped up, or come back full of noise, the cause is almost always that the 24kHz output is being played at a different sample rate. Here are the concrete fixes for both the browser and iOS.
Reconciling Orphaned Gemini Files API Uploads Across a Fleet of Apps
Files API uploads quietly expire after 48 hours. Here's how I keep orphaned files and quota under control across six apps, using reconciliation against my own database and a scheduled cleanup job — written up as production notes from running wallpaper apps.
Three Weeks After Moving Firebase from CocoaPods to SPM with Gemini 3 Pro
Notes from migrating Firebase dependency management from CocoaPods to Swift Package Manager across my indie iOS apps. Where Gemini 3 Pro helped, where it did not, and how the setup felt after three weeks in production.
Two Months With Gemini 2.5 Pro's 1M Context: What It's Actually Good (and Bad) At
An honest two-month review of using Gemini 2.5 Pro's 1M-token long context window on real work — organizing 12 years of indie-developer notes, cross-checking large MDX archives, and learning where short prompts still beat long ones.
3 Months Using Gemini API as My App Backend — An Indie Developer's Honest Review
I adopted Gemini API as the backbone for a new app and ran it in production for three months. Here is what the costs, latency, and quality actually looked like — and how I split work across Gemini, Claude, and GPT-4o.
One Month with Gemini 2.5 Flash: An Indie Developer's Honest Cost and Performance Report
Real cost, speed, and quality data from running Gemini 2.5 Flash across three indie apps for a full month. Includes free-tier usage patterns, Flash vs Pro decision criteria, and cost-minimizing Python code.