Google Gemini has the worst LLM API

Summary

Google is on the frontier with recent Gemini releases. They now have:A competitive coding & reasoning model (Gemini-2.5-pro)The longest-context frontier models (1 or 2M context - OAI just achieved parity since GPT-4.1 has a 1M context too)The best frontier audio, video & document multimodal models. (Some others support audio but at a much higher cost)The best multimodal fine-tuning offering (Gemini-2.0-flash can be tuned with audio, image & documents)And yet these models hide behind the poorest developer experience in the market.1. The Gemini API is available in two places, with differing functionalityYou can use Gemini via either Vertex AI, or Google AI Studio. Google Developer Advocates will tell you: if you’re a startup or hobbyist, you should use Google AI Studio, as Vertex AI is more enterprise-focused.That makes sense: it parallels the distinction between the OpenAI API and the Azure OpenAI API. Or Anthropic API vs Amazon Bedrock Claude. It’s not unusual to offer an enterprise API with stronger security or compliance guarantees, but slower feature roll-out.But unfortunately that comparison doesn’t hold. Functionality is released to AI Studio & Vertex AI at different times, and some functionality never comes to AI Studio. This often becomes a dealbreaker and you end up needing to juggle both options as a startup.2. The documentation is badThere are two documentation sites for AI Studio vs Vertex. You will land on the wrong one.This gets worse due to the non-equivalent functionality. For example, AI Studio’s docs may lead you to believe that Google only supports fine-tuning for Gemini 1.5. But, Vertex AI supports fine-tuning for Gemini 2.0, it’s just that AI Studio does not.In general, the docs are worse than most. Much of the AI Studio docs still refer to Gemini 1.5, which is now deprecated & make it generally unclear whether Gemini 2.5 still supports the same features. The API is also the quirkiest around. For example, there are “safety settings” that reject c...