So a couple weeks ago I decided to pay some money for the Gemini API cause I'd found myself getting a lot of use out of the free tier chat and figured they deserved some of my cash.
First headache was a lot of delays and 'service unavailable due to excessive load messages'. Second headache was a lot of frustration with the Continue plugin in my IDE. Gemini chat suggests I try the Antigravity app. I do so. IT's OK. Launch it on an agentic task, it gets part way through and stops, asking me to subscribe. Try getting it to use some of the Gemini credits I paid for a few days earlier. Turns out Antigravity is developed by a completely separate team within Google and they don't recognize or accommodate Gemini credits because they are trying to maintain budgetary independence so as to maintain operational autonomy Gemini. At least, that's the explanation Gemini (free tier) offered for why Antigravity (Free/subscription only) won't accept Gemini (prepaid/subscription) payments. What a time to be alive.
You won't be surprised to learn I switched to a competitor.
On one end we have Coase's theory of the firm, but then we have the realities of the modern tech megacap company, which is 20+ companies in a trench coat, and where it's clear the alignment between the best interest of a middle manager, the company as a whole, and of the consumer have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But pointing at one working thing in an investor call seems quite valuable, so we aren't seeing investors actually demanding to spin off companies with minimal actual synergy.
So we end up with companies acting in ways that don't help themselves or the consumer, but which have no reasonable mechanisms to correct any of this. So we end up with the two best entrants in the AI space being independent companies, all while we know that, in case of significant cuts, it's the companies that are attached to other huge, unrelated sources of revenue that will have easier time surviving. Gemini can mess up all they want as long as management still has Ads and youtube sitting there subsidizing them.
It has been close to unusable for anything serious. I did really like the ability of Gemini-pro models to ground their research using Google Search. This meant that they were often much more thorough and up to date in their recommendations and finding solutions that came to life after the models themselves were trained. But even using Gemini as a reviewer was a weak point in my harness because of the poor reliability of their service (529 or 503).
I’ve since paid for a search API(linkup, exa, and valyu) and hooked them up to Deepseekv4-pro. It has been doing a stellar job.
The key was to prompt them to systematically use search to validate their answers(not simply “use the tool”, but something like find possibilities using web search, then once you formulate a solution, validate it with this check list -
1. Is there a better way to do this in 2026?
2. Are the libraries and its docs you’re using up to date?
So a couple weeks ago I decided to pay some money for the Gemini API cause I'd found myself getting a lot of use out of the free tier chat and figured they deserved some of my cash.
First headache was a lot of delays and 'service unavailable due to excessive load messages'. Second headache was a lot of frustration with the Continue plugin in my IDE. Gemini chat suggests I try the Antigravity app. I do so. IT's OK. Launch it on an agentic task, it gets part way through and stops, asking me to subscribe. Try getting it to use some of the Gemini credits I paid for a few days earlier. Turns out Antigravity is developed by a completely separate team within Google and they don't recognize or accommodate Gemini credits because they are trying to maintain budgetary independence so as to maintain operational autonomy Gemini. At least, that's the explanation Gemini (free tier) offered for why Antigravity (Free/subscription only) won't accept Gemini (prepaid/subscription) payments. What a time to be alive.
You won't be surprised to learn I switched to a competitor.
On one end we have Coase's theory of the firm, but then we have the realities of the modern tech megacap company, which is 20+ companies in a trench coat, and where it's clear the alignment between the best interest of a middle manager, the company as a whole, and of the consumer have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But pointing at one working thing in an investor call seems quite valuable, so we aren't seeing investors actually demanding to spin off companies with minimal actual synergy.
So we end up with companies acting in ways that don't help themselves or the consumer, but which have no reasonable mechanisms to correct any of this. So we end up with the two best entrants in the AI space being independent companies, all while we know that, in case of significant cuts, it's the companies that are attached to other huge, unrelated sources of revenue that will have easier time surviving. Gemini can mess up all they want as long as management still has Ads and youtube sitting there subsidizing them.
+1 to service unavailable annoyances.
It has been close to unusable for anything serious. I did really like the ability of Gemini-pro models to ground their research using Google Search. This meant that they were often much more thorough and up to date in their recommendations and finding solutions that came to life after the models themselves were trained. But even using Gemini as a reviewer was a weak point in my harness because of the poor reliability of their service (529 or 503).
I’ve since paid for a search API(linkup, exa, and valyu) and hooked them up to Deepseekv4-pro. It has been doing a stellar job.
The key was to prompt them to systematically use search to validate their answers(not simply “use the tool”, but something like find possibilities using web search, then once you formulate a solution, validate it with this check list -
1. Is there a better way to do this in 2026?
2. Are the libraries and its docs you’re using up to date?
This seems to help very much based on experience.