An upgraded dev experience in Google AI Studio

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-ai-studio-native-code-generation-agentic-tools-upgrade/

197 109 1 year ago

developers.googleblog.com

pjmlp3• 1 year ago

Gemini 2.5 Pro is incredible at coding, so we’re excited to bring it to Google AI Studio’s native code editor. It’s tightly optimized with our Gen AI SDK so it’s easier to generate apps with a simple text, image, or video prompt. The new Build tab is now your gateway to quickly build and deploy AI-powered web apps. We’ve also launched new showcase examples to experiment with new models and more.

This is exactly what I see coming, between the marketing and reality of what the tool is actually able to deliver, eventually we will reach the next stage of compiler evolution, directly from AI tools into applications.

We are living through a development jump like when Assembly developers got to witness the adoption of FORTRAN.

Language flamewars are going to be a thing of the past, replaced by model wars.

It migth take a few cycles, it will come nonetheless.

xnx• 1 year ago

I agree. Until about 2005 it was code-on-device and run-on-device. The tools and languages were limited in absolute capabilities, but easy to understand and use. For about the past 20 years we've been in a total mess of code-on-device -> (nightmare of deployment complexity) -> run-on-cloud. We are finally entering the code-on-cloud and run-on-cloud stage.

I'm hoping this will allow domain experts to more easily create valuable tools instead of having to go through technicians with arcane knowledge of languages and deployment stacks.

cjbgkagh3• 1 year ago

Having worked on expert systems the difficulty in creating them is often the technical limitations of the end users. The sophistication of tooling needed to bridge that gap is immense and often insurmountable. I see the AI as the bridge to that gap.

That said it seems like both domain expertise and the ability to create expert systems will be commoditized at roughly the same time. While domain experts may be happy that they don’t need devs they’ll find themselves competing against other domain experts who don’t need devs either.

suddenlybananas• 1 year ago

We are finally entering the code-on-cloud and run-on-cloud stage.

Sounds like an absolute nightmare for freedom and autonomy.

hooverd2• 1 year ago

Finally, companies can wrench back control from those pesky users. Only Google should have root; any other interaction should be routed through their AI! You wouldn't want to own your own device anyways, just rent it!

neom5• 1 year ago

This is why I think Rabbit is one of the most interesting startups around. If I could wave a wand and go pick any startup to go work at, it would be Rabbit.

matt3D• 1 year ago

Which Rabbit are you meaning? When I search for Rabbit AI I get a few hits and none of them seem like the most interesting startup around.

aquova• 1 year ago

... that little AI assistant gadget thing that bombed? Them?

MrDarcy• 1 year ago

Isn’t rabbit a scam? https://paulogpd.bearblog.dev/en-rabbit-r1-its-a-scam/

magicalist• 1 year ago

This is exactly what I see coming, between the marketing and reality of what the tool is actually able to deliver, eventually we will reach the next stage of compiler evolution, directly from AI tools into applications.

Is this different from other recent models trained eg for tool calling? Sounds like they fine tuned on their SDK. Maybe someday, but it's still going to be limited in what it can zero shot without you needing to edit the code.

Language flamewars are going to be a thing of the past, replaced by model wars.

This does seem funny coming from you. I feel like you'll still find a way :P

bgwalter• 1 year ago

Gemini 2.5 will write a whole Linux kernel from scratch! We are seeing a paradigm shift! This is bigger than the invention of electricity! Awesome times to be alive!

candiddevmike• 1 year ago

I think there will still need to be some kind of translation layer besides natural language. It's just not succinct enough (especially English, ew), especially where it matters like a rules engine. The thought of building something like an adjudication or payment system with a LLM sounds terrible.

simonw• 1 year ago

You don't need to use natural language to write your rules engine. LLMs speak every language under the sun, real or made up.

You could define your rules in Prolog if you wanted - that's just as effective a way to communicate them to an LLM as English.

Or briefly describe some made-up DSL and then use that.

For coding LLMs the goal is to have the LLM represent the logic clearly in whatever programming language it's using. You can communicate with it however you want.

I've dropped in screenshots of things related to what I'm building before, that works too.

stickfigure4• 1 year ago

...as long as your application is only a few thousand lines of code.

Context windows are still tiny by "real world app" standards, and this doesn't seem to be changing significantly.

CuriouslyC• 1 year ago

I regularly put 50k LoC codebases in gemini, it has a 1M context window and actually uses it well.

mirsadm• 1 year ago

Remind me in a couple of years when this product is abandoned.

NicoJuicy• 1 year ago

It will fail where all other tools fail. Migrating databases, scaling issues, ..

vunderba• 1 year ago

They don't mention it in the demo but they should really take a page from Lovable and add a bidirectional sync to a git repository.

cheema33• 1 year ago

Get outta here! You can do that in AI Studio now? If so, I need to run, not walk, to the nearest computer. Too bad I am sitting on the toilet right now..

sagarpatil2• 1 year ago

You can’t in AI studio, it’s available on loveable.

DonHopkins2• 1 year ago

What, your toilet isn't computerized?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd06Md1xOd0

koakuma-chan4• 1 year ago

Why did they hide the model thought details? Thoughts look like this now:

Analyzing TypeScript Errors

I'm currently focused on the actions/user.ts file, where I've identified a few issues. Specifically, I need to address a "Cannot find name" error related to UpdateUserDetailsFormState, and confirm that the intended target is UpdateUserDetailsFormInput. There might be some other discrepancies in the file that I need to resolve.

Debugging the Import

I've been trying to pinpoint the Cannot find name 'UpdateUserDetailsFormState' error. The type is definitely defined and imported, but it's not being recognized in the updateUserDetails function's arguments. I'm suspecting a scoping issue with the import statement within actions/user.ts. I also need to verify that UpdateUserDetailsFormState is correctly defined with the fieldValues property as optional as per the schema.

chermi• 1 year ago

My understanding is that the ability to watch the chain of thought is no walled behind the ultra subscription?

odo12425• 1 year ago

It’s also rate-limited, which means the model will silently start skipping the chain of thought after a certain number of daily requests.

Definitely a downgrade over the old version, though really it’s just Google deciding to offer less for free.

koakuma-chan4• 1 year ago

Are you sure it's rate limited? I've been using it for quite a while today and it still appears to be thinking.

sagarpatil2• 1 year ago

It allows you to use your own api ke.

nprateem2• 1 year ago

Their new 'thoughts' smack of "reticulating splines"

bjackman• 1 year ago

Someone else said in this case that you can access it with premium subscription but I have also heard that some products are hiding the CoT because of concerns about distillation

benbreen3• 1 year ago

The ability to seamlessly integrate generated images is fascinating. Although it currently takes too long to really work in a game or educational context.

As an experiment I just asked it to "recreate the early RPG game Pedit5 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedit5), but make it better, with a 1970s terminal aesthetic and use Imagen to dynamically generate relevant game artwork" and it did in fact make a playable, rogue-type RPG, but it has been stuck on "loading art" for the past minute as I try to do battle with a giant bat.

This kind of thing is going to be interesting for teaching. It will be a whole new category of assignment - "design a playable, interactive simulation of the 17th century spice trade, and explain your design choices in detail. Cite 6 relevant secondary sources" and that sort of thing. Ethan Mollick has been doing these types of experiments with LLMs for some time now and I think it's an underrated aspect of what they can be used for. I.e., no one is going to want to actually pay for or play a production version of my Gemini-made copy of Pedit5, but it opens up a new modality for student assignments, prototyping, and learning.

Doesn't do anything for the problem of AI-assisted cheating, which is still kind of a disaster for educators, but the possibilities for genuinely new types of assignments are at least now starting to come into focus.

falcor84• 1 year ago

I love this, and as for AI-assisted cheating, I would make it such that the student can use any tool whatsoever under the sun, but then needs to do a live in-person presentation on it followed by 10 minutes of Q&A. Some are better bullshitters than others, but you'll still see a very clear difference between those who actually worked and those who had the work done for them.

benbreen3• 1 year ago

Yes, I think this kind of combination is where higher ed is going to land. I've been talking to a colleague lately about how social skills and public speaking just got more important (and are things we need to focus on actually teaching). Likewise, I think self-directed, individualized humanistic research is currently not replicable by AI nor likely to be - for instance, generating an entirely new historical archive by conducting oral history interviews. Basically anything that involves operating in the physical world and deploying human emotional skills.

The unsolved issue is scale. 5-10 minute Q&As work well, but are not really doable in a 120 student class like the one I'll be teaching in the fall, let alone the 300-400 student classes some colleagues have.

benbreen3• 1 year ago

Just as a side note, I ended up turning the 1970s RPG type game it originally made into a text-based RPG where you play as Henry James in 1889, kind of fun! Curious if the link actually works:

https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...

aaronharnly• 1 year ago

Presumably Google AI Studio[1] and Google Firebase Studio[2] are made by different teams with very similar pitches, and Google is perfectly happy to have both of them exist, until it isn't:

- AI Studio: "the fastest place to start building with the Gemini API"

- Firebase Studio: "Prototype, build, deploy, and run full-stack, AI apps quickly"

[1] https://aistudio.google.com/apps

[2] https://firebase.google.com/

debugnik• 1 year ago

Wait until you hear about Google Vertex AI Studio.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

I recently tried to understand the AI products listed in the cloud console. That was not an easy task, despite them clearly having made great pains to clean it up.

hu3• 1 year ago

Bosses reading this:

"this is brilliant! I'll assign multiple teams to the same project. Let the best team win! And then the other teams get PIP'd"

koakuma-chan4• 1 year ago

That's what Telegram does. They have multiple separate teams working on their own version of the same kind of project, and whoever does best wins.

odo12425• 1 year ago

Technically it’s actually a good idea

…if you do it before publicly releasing and spending marketing budget on both products, giving them a full software lifecycle and a dedicated user-base that no longer trusts you to keep things running.

Honestly, even in that case it sucks to be a developer there knowing there’s a 50% chance that the work you did meant nothing.

newlisp• 1 year ago

Canvas: "the fastest place to start building with the Gemini APP"

Also, did you hear about Jules?

riffraff• 1 year ago

Oh crap I thought they were talking od firebase studio, which I was playing with yesterday and was curious to see if there would be improvements.

Why does Google suck so much at product management?

vineyardmike2• 1 year ago

I've used a bunch of these, and they're different with different use-cases, but your point still stands about them being confusing. It seems many AI companies see a world where we have lots of small mini-apps written by LLMs, so why not integrate that into a variety of tools, I guess?

AI Studio: Mostly a playground for building mini-apps that integrate with the Gemini APIs. A big sell seems to be that you don't need an API key, instead you just build your app for testing, and the access is injected somehow. The UI is more stripped down than an IDE and I assume you'd only use it to prototype basic things. I don't know why there are "deployment" options in the UI, frankly.

Firebase Studio: Mostly a sales funnel for firebase I assume, but this is a "tradition" prototyping/development tool that uses AI to make a product. It supports front end and backend code. This also has a chat bot, but it's more of a web-IDE than a chat-first interface.

Gemini Canvas: This is gemini-the-chatbot writing mini-web-apps in a side-panel. The use case seems to be visualization and super basic prototyping. I've used it to make super simple bespoke tools like a visualizer for structured JSON objects for debugging, or an API tester. The HTML is served statically from a google domain, and you can "remix" versions created by others with your own prompts.

Jules - Experimental tool that writes code in existing codebases by handling full "tickets" or tasks in one go. Never used it, so i don't know the interface. I think it's similar to Codex though.

Gemini Code Assist - their version of a copilot. I think its also integrated or cross-branded with

Vertex AI API, Gemini API - these are just APIs for models.

jasonjmcghee• 1 year ago

Did anyone else notice the weird subtle typos in the output?

"Te harsh jolt of the cryopod cycling down rips you"

"ou carefully swing your legs out"

I find this really interesting that it's like 99% there, and the thing runs and executes, yet the copy has typos.

noisy_boy2• 1 year ago

Maybe typos are non-ai signal until we have a typo-fidelity ai to redefine that.

gexla2• 1 year ago

Seeing these announcements make me nervous. I feel like I found some sort of cheat code by using AI Studio for free. Seeing them build it out, makes me wonder when they are going to start charging for it. Though Grok has been very generous as an alternate. I guess there's a lot of good options out there. I'm just used to hitting limits most places, and not as good models.

raihansaputra• 1 year ago

Agree. And for some reason I find responses from AI Studio is much better than Gemini for the same models. I _already have_ Gemini advanced, bit still mostly use AI studio just for the quality of the responses.

DonHopkins2• 1 year ago

Though Grok has been very generous as an alternate.

I don't need it inserting console.logs and alert popups with holocaust denials and splash screens with fake videos of white genocide in my apps.

gexla2• 1 year ago

Wasn't it Google's models that showed America's founding father's as being black women? They all have their issues. I just want to get things done, before AI just takes over everything.

never_inline• 1 year ago

It's just a copy of all other models in terms of functionality. I didn't find anything controversial nor extra-ordinary in it. Image generation sucked.

Some Indian twitterers found a way to get it to utter Hindi profane words, that's probably the most controversial thing I know about it.

delfinom2• 1 year ago

Why is it even a question of "when they are going to start".

Running LLMs costs a stupid amount of money, beyond just the stupid amount of money to train them. They have to recoup that money somewhere.

ed• 1 year ago

I spent a few minutes playing with Studio and the model and agent are very impressive.

But be sure to connect Studio to Google Drive, or else you will lose all your progress.

dangoodmanUT• 1 year ago

Finally, Google is utilizing their cloud

smusamashah• 1 year ago

We also have https://websim.com/ for a while now which takes a prompt and makes your web app. Nothing as fancy, but it has existed for a long time (in AI terms) now.

UncleOxidant• 1 year ago

Google's been playing catch-up with OpenAI for a couple of years, but now they seem to be hitting their stride.

andrewstuart• 1 year ago

More than anything fancy I just want better ways to get files out of Gemini.

All the copying and pasting is killing me.

geminiiii9• 1 year ago

I use https://www.cursor.com/ and it can use Gemini and write straight to files in your project. Its free for a month.

bionhoward• 1 year ago

Still feel like you’d have to be an ignoramus to use this beyond toy bullshit projects since they train AI on your work, humans read your work, and “You may not use the Services to develop [ML|business|mental] models that compete with the Services (e.g., Gemini API or Google AI Studio).”

What kind of smooth brain hears, “they train AI on your ideas and code, humans read your ideas and code, and you agree not to compete back against this thing a multi trillion dollar company just said can do everything, which competes with you,” and says yes? Oh, the smooth brain who doesn’t even realize, because it’s all buried in “additional” legal CYA documents.

ChatGPT still dominates the reach test since I can at least opt out of model training without losing chat logs, even though I have to agree not to compete with the thing that competes with me. Google is like a corporate version of a gross nerd you tolerate because they’re smart, even though they stalk you weirdly.

What a disgrace, we all ought to be sick about creating a legalese-infused black mirror dystopia, racing to replace our own minds with the latest slop-o-matic 9000 and benefit the overlords for the brief instant they count their money while the whole ecosphere is replaced by data centers

It’s like somehow the most magical tech in history (LLMs) comes along and gets completely shafted by elite grifter-tier scumbaggery. Chat bot speech is more protected than human speech these days, Google doesn’t give a crap about privacy, it’s all about the slimy hidden-opt-out of getting everything fed into the slop machine, and break everything if you do.

“Gee, should the app break if the user doesn’t want us to read their shit?” “Yeah, that sounds good, ain’t nobody got time to categorize data into two whole buckets, ship it!”

“How about we make a free better app that doesn’t even have the option of us not reading their shit?” “Oh, yeah, that’ll really help the KPIs!”

nprateem2• 1 year ago

Finally an AI story here so I can post about leaving Anthropic.

Sorry guys, yes, Claude is the best model, but your lack of support for structured responses left me no choice.

I had been using Claude in my Saas, but the API was so unreliable I'd frequently get overloaded responses.

So then I put in fallbacks to other providers. Gemini flash was pretty good for my needs (and significantly cheaper), but failed to follow the XML schema in the prompt that Claude could follow. Instead I could just give a pydantic schema to constrain it.

The trouble is the Anthropic APIs just don't support that. I tried using litellm to paper over the cracks but no joy. However, OpenAI does support pydantic.

So i was left with literally needing twice as many prompts to support Gemini and Anthropic, or dropping Anthropic and using Gemini with OpenAI as a fallback.

It's a no-brainer.

So you guys need to pull your fingers out and get with the programme. Claude being good but also more expensive and not being compatible with other APIs like this is costing you customers.

Shame, but so long for now...

iandanforth• 1 year ago

AI studio, Gemini, Labs ... There are far too many entry points for Google's AI work.

supportengineer• 1 year ago

Promotion driven culture

lastdong• 1 year ago

Using Google Studio AI as a developer will give you a better understanding of the challenges from a product point of view, and why clear, succinct and unambiguous communication is so important. Everyone should try it. But yes, it’s really good for web apps (not so sure for low level programming), not meant as an IDE, purely for AI prompting, which is interesting.

An upgraded dev experience in Google AI Studio

Related Stories