Dev rel is part of PR department isn't it? At least that's how it has always seemed to me when it comes to these mega corps.
nope, at least dev rel in deepmind is part of my product team
Readit Newslogankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
logankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
This has often been the case (Google dev rel soliciting feedback) and they very rarely take meaningful action. Like firing a bug report with Apple.
They'll get to it when it becomes strategically important to.
Why making it easier to pay them isn't always strategically important, I'm not sure.
my team is responsible for building the worlds best product, every piece of feedback directly influences what we do : )
logankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
I don't know, he announced on Bluesky that they are dropping a big vibe coding update to aistudio next year
1. cart out in front of the horse a bit on this one, lame hype building at best
2. Not at all what I want the team focusing on, they don't seem to have a clear mission
Generally Google PMs and leaders have not been impressive or in touch for many years, since about the time all the good ones cashed out and started their own companies
> cart out in front of the horse a bit on this one, lame hype building at best
hmmm
> 2. Not at all what I want the team focusing on, they don't seem to have a clear mission
allow anyone to build with Google's latest AI models, be the fastest path from prompt to production with Gemini
logankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
Will that change also allow paying upfront ($250 or whatever) to bump up a tier?
I want to release a service using computer-use but am worried about 429 quota errors if I have actual users.
email me and I can get you bumped, but we are also working on prepay to get higher quota up front! Lkilpatrick@google.com
logankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
Every aspect is at least partially broken several times a day, and even when there isn't a temporary outage of something somewhere, there are nonsensical "blocks" for things that ought to just work.
I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse, just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am paying for and can use elsewhere.
Simultaneously, I'm trying to convince my company to pay for a corporate account of some sort so that I can use API keys with custom tools and run up a bill of potentially thousands of dollars that we can charge back to the customer.
My manager tried to follow the instructions and... followed the wrong ones. They all look the same. They all talk about "Gemini" and "Enterprise". He ended up signing up for Google's equivalent of Copilot for business use, not something that provides API keys to developers. Bzzt... start over from the beginning!
I did eventually find the instructions by (ironically) asking Gemini Pro, which provided the convenient 27 step process for signing up to three different services in a chain before you can do anything. Oh, and if any of them trigger any kind of heuristic, again, you get a hand in face telling you firmly and not-so-politely to take a hike.
PS: Azure's whatever-it-is-called-today is just as bad if not worse. We have a corporate account and can't access GPT 5 because... I dunno. We just can't. Not worthy enough for access to Sam Altman's baby, apparently.
> I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse, just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am paying for and can use elsewhere.
Passing along this feedback to the CLI team, no clue why this would be the case.
logankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
As the other comments pointed out, that's not covering billing...
But also the (theoretical) production platform for Gemini is Vertex AI, not AI Studio.
And until pretty recently using that took figuring out service accounts, and none of Google's docs would demonstrate production usage.
Instead they'd use the gcloud CLI to authenticate, and you'd have to figure out how each SDK consumed a credentials file.
-
Now there's "express mode" for Vertex which uses an API Key, so things are better, but the complaints were well earned.
At one point there were even features (like using a model you finetuned) that didn't work without gcloud depending on if you used Vertex or AI Studio: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/how-can-i-use-fine-tuned-mod...
AI Studio is meant to be the fast path from prompt to production, bringing billing fully into AI Studio in January will make this even faster! We have hundreds of thousands of paying customers in production using AI Studio right now.
logankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
I have it running and calling but it's not showing the usage and I set it up the day gemini 3 came out
You can check your usage, inclusive of Gemini 3 here: https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days just make sure you have the right project selected
logankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
I don't understand the multiple posts / comments I've seen about this.
I google `gemini API key` and the first result* is this docs page: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key
That docs page has a link in the first primary section on the page. Sure, it could be a huge CTA, but this is a docs page, so it's kinda nice that it's not gone through a marketing make over.
* besides sponsored result for AI Studio
(Maybe I misunderstood and all the complaints are about billing. I don't remember having issues when I added my card to GCP in the past, but maybe I did)
Added a big button on: https://googledevai.devsite.corp.google.com/gemini-api/docs/... to make this more clear
logankilpatrick commented on Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration ankursethi.com/blog/gemin... · Posted by u/speckx
> The “Set up billing” link kicked me out of Google AI Studio and into Google Cloud Console, and my heart sank. Every time I’ve logged into Google Cloud Console or AWS, I’ve wasted hours upon hours reading outdated documentation, gazing in despair at graphs that make no sense, going around in circles from dashboard to dashboard, and feeling a strong desire to attain freedom from this mortal coil.
100% agree
we will have this fixed soon : ) thank you for the patience, have wanted this in AI Studio directly since the day I joined Google!
That said, while setting up the Gemini API through AI Studio is remarkably straightforward for small side projects, transitioning to production with proper billing requires navigating the labyrinth that is Google Cloud Console. The contrast between AI Studio's simplicity and the complexity of production billing setup is jarring, it's easy to miss critical settings when you're trying to figure out where everything is.