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Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

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Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#31

Post by cortesoft »

dannyobrien wrote: post #11

The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting…

I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things.

I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk to someone before I can buy.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#32

Post by arielcostas »

tigranbs wrote: post #8

Yeah, then try adding more quotas to scale your usage; you will feel the pain! But, to be fair, it is way easier than the AWS Bedrock or Microsoft Azure!

I'd say Bedrock is the easiest since you just log into your AWS account, get an AWS credential in the same way you would for any other service (if you're on EC2 it's even easier) and call the endpoints from the SDK. Azure though...

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#35

Post by polalavik »

niwtsol wrote: post #34

The article lightly mentions it, but how AWS and Google Cloud Console are so absolute nonsensical in UX and ease of use is beyond comprehension.

holy hell google cloud is so confusing i just ended up using (a much more expensive) digital ocean droplet instead for a little project. I guess they only really care about enterprise customers who can burn tons of money figuring it out, but it made me never want to use it again.

Same with google ads - super fuckin shit UI/UX, super confusing to understand what is going on.

companies like digital ocean, supabase, etc can make money (from people like me) because they just circumvent the bullshit or wrap the dogshit experience (aws) into a much better experience. bless supabase.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#36

Post by throwup238 »

aerhardt wrote: post #10

I had to warm up a Gemini API project worth a few thousand hours during weeks so that I could get to the tier that allowed me to carry out the workload. How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?!

> How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?!

Another rate limit in the wall.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#37

Post by sofixa »

niwtsol wrote: post #34

The article lightly mentions it, but how AWS and Google Cloud Console are so absolute nonsensical in UX and ease of use is beyond comprehension.

Baring them using specific marketing terms (so you have EC2 for what are basically virtual machines), for which both the docs and the portal itself provide helpful information, what do you mean? I find GCP's console and whole set up to be slightly better, but both it and AWS are fine.

Now Azure, or anything made by VMware, you just know they hate you.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#38

Post by plaidfuji »

> 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

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#39

Post by semi-extrinsic »

tigranbs wrote: post #8

Yeah, then try adding more quotas to scale your usage; you will feel the pain! But, to be fair, it is way easier than the AWS Bedrock or Microsoft Azure!

I recently had the distinct displeasure of being the first to set up a service in Azure on a new tenant at Microsoft.

Of course I first had to faff about adding the company credit card, which took five tries and two days. Then I found I had to create the appropriate resource group, before I could set up a service. Fair enough, it might make sense later to have costs divided up like that. After I got the resource group, I then thought to start simple and spin up a single VM.

This gave me an error message saying that my request exceeded the quota. Which quota? The built-in copilot in Azure chewed on the raw error in its JSONness, and helpfully told me I could find the Azure quota page by searching for it in the Azure portal.

Once I entered the quota page, I was greeted with a message saying that I was now in the new quota experience in public preview mode. After many clicks I found the appropriate line for the desired VM SKU in the desired region, where it said I had used 0 of the quota of 30. So why didn't it work? I tried to request an increased quota, just in case. That process spent five minutes on "please wait", then failed with a generic error message.

At that point I started googling around, and eventually in some forum thread I found the missing piece: my resource group did not yet have a subscription. After more faffing about, I got a subscription associated with my resource group. What is a subscription, you ask, and what is the relation between a tenant, a subscription and a resource group? I haven't the foggiest, but I've clicked enough buttons to make the errors go away. Por ahora.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#40

Post by verdverm »

neom wrote: post #24

I complained about this on HN recently and Logan responded and asked me to email him with feedback on how I'd like the experience to work (I didn't, sorry Logan, been busy :)) - Logan, to his credit, is very active everywhere reading and soliciting feedback. I think they're going to be giving it a pretty big bump on ux/ui of AI studio next month. It's easy to see he's a super smart guy trying to build something compl…

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

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