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Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
91–100 of 361 posts
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.
> You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime. Does segmentation also count as dynamic pricing? -- The IT guy at Podunk Lutheran College has no money: Gratis. The IT guy at a medium-sized real estate agency has some money: $500. The IT guy at a Fortune 100 company has tons of money: $50,000. https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you…
The entire lab supply industry is disgusting in this respect. The funding (and recent grants) that a given professor or research lab has is generally publicly available information that vendors will buy in easily digestible formats from brokers and companies that scrape the websites of major granting agencies.
All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much money you’ve received recently and even has an outline what research you plan to do over the next few years since even the detailed applications often get published alongside funding allocations.
The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically spend.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#93You literally cannot buy Antigravity with a non-personal Google account. I read someone on here who is using Gemini via OpenRouter because it was the only way they could pay for it.
I'm using it fine through both aistudio and vertex ai, direct API calls It's not at all hard generally, the core of this issue is centered around gemini-cli which is a hot pile of trash. The inability to get keys or account credentials (like why even use an API key, Google is top notch in auto-auth/WIF) Insanity to me how gemini-cli is so bad at the basics with so many great Google packages in open source that handle…
> I'm using it
Do you mean Antigravity or Gemini?
If you mean Antigravity then.. how? Their docs say you can't do this.
If you mean Gemini then I personally haven't had issues but haven't tried to productionize a Gemini app. The OPs account seems to reflect other comments here.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#94The 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 t…
It depends on the environment.
If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go, it can work well.
If an application is complicated or it’s a tool that the whole business runs on, often times the company will discover their customers have more success with training and a point of contact/account manager to help with onboarding.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
The number one rule of business that should just be passively reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field: 1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.
Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#96The same billing experience applies to the Google programmable search api. Easy to get a key, but a Byzantine maze to pay for more than the free version.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#97I 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 (Ma…
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.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#98Wasn't this type of Google thing clearly called out in the Karpathy Software 3.0 talk? It's interesting to me this UX problem is not readily solved. What is the sticking point in a big org? I don't have a point of reference.
It will be politics, it's always politics. Large orgs works a lot like the feudal system.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The number one rule of business that should just be passively reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field: 1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.
Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.
Plenty of people on here looking to disrupt a market with tech...c'mon guys, get on it
Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work (and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money), which is issuing government enforced fines.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did notice in their post instead of searching for answers, they asked Gemini how to do things, and when that didn't work, they asked Claude. I often see coworkers offload their work of critical thinking to an AI to give them answers instead doing the grunt work nessecary to find their answers on their own.
This rhetoric worries me. If you insist on degrading others at least fix it to something like: > [They seemingly] can't think on their own without an AI [moderating] They _literally_ can think on their own, and they _literally_ did think up a handful of prompts. A more constructive way to make what I assume to be your point would be highlighting why this shift is meaningful and leaving the appeal to ego for yourself.
There is some truth in that statement.
Low energy afternoons you might be able to come up with a prompt but not the actual solution.
There are people offloading all thoughts into prompts instead of doing the research themselves and some have reached a point where they lost the ability to do something because of over AI use.