Author: Richard Seroter

Had a quick day-trip up to Mountain View and back. Meetings were had. And content was still read.

[blog] Genie 3: A new frontier for world models. Generate dynamic, explorable worlds with nothing but a text prompt? And these worlds render in real time at 24 frames per second? Remarkable.

[article] Why Leaders Should Bring Their Best Self—Not Their Whole Self—to Work. I’m not a fan of the “bring your whole self to work” or “just be yourself.” I try to present my best self without being a weirdo.

[blog] How to Use BigQuery Sandbox with Colab for Data Science. Query loads of data at no cost? Or without sacrificing a credit card? Jeff shows you how.

[article] The Case Against Metrics for Developer Productivity. You want some way to measure team performance besides gut feel. But an heavy reliance on sterile dev metrics is risky.

[blog] Create personal illustrated storybooks in the Gemini app. I love this very much. Whether you have kids, teach kids, or just want a cool way to tell a story, this is such a cool feature.

[blog] Memory in Agents, Make LLMs remember. Agents without tools or memory are going to feel tired quickly. Philipp explains more about your memory options.

[article] 9 habits of the highly ineffective vibe coder. Some good anti-patterns here! We can learn a lot by observing what does NOT work well.

[blog] Introducing Google Cloud Setup: Your guided pathway to a secure cloud foundation. It shouldn’t take so much work to set up your cloud the right way. This effort has been years in the making, and taken enterprise-grade setup time from weeks to minutes.

[blog] Building A Story Index Of A Decade Of TV Evening News With Geocoding, Sentiment, Frame & Narrative Analysis In 1 Hour For $154. Wow. Processing fifteen years of broadcast news and making an index of all the stories? For $150? Amazing to see what’s possible.

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Back at the office today after a vacation week. I admire my colleagues who “select all: delete” their inbox on the first day back. I don’t have that level of courage.

[article] When to Innovate and When to Imitate. In many cases, you should just copy what’s already out there. This article offers advice on when you should which strategy.

[article] AI use among software developers grows but trust remains an issue – Stack Overflow survey. I still need to dig through the survey itself, but we can read this piece to learn about what developers think of AI. More here.

[blog] Friday Forward – Different Strokes. Good stuff. Know your priorities, and own it. Try and enjoy the process versus obsessing over the goals themselves!

[article] Google Brings the A2A Protocol to More of Its Cloud. This protocol (and associated tooling) is maturing for everyone. And, we’re making it simpler to use with Google Cloud too.

[blog] Don’t hide behind AI to trim your belly fat. Start redesigning your workforce. These are some of the most frank analysts that I come across. No punches pulled.

[blog] Concerns beyond the accuracy of AI output. Here’s a post from our DORA research team that uses data from extended developer interviews to learn what they worry about.

[blog] Gemini CLI: Power up your Linux workflow. These agentic CLIs do more than mess with code. You might use it to set up your local machine, analyze files, and more.

[blog] Disposable Code Is Here to Stay, but Durable Code Is What Runs the World. I read whatever Charity writes, and this one is worth you reading as well.

[blog] Remember this: Agent state and memory with ADK. Terrific post that clearly explains the ideas of short term and long term memory with AI agents.

[blog] Security for Agents and Agents for Security: The Next Cybersecurity Frontier. This is a good space for entrepreneurs. When you have VCs begging for founders, you know there’s a market.

[article] The Observability of Observability. With AIOps, who is watching the watchers? This post encourages an approach where you have checks on your AI automated systems.

[article] Firebase Studio Has Me Second-Guessing My Opinion on Developing With AI. There’s no shortage of these prototyping IDEs. Firebase Studio is a good choice and does a surprising number of different things.

[blog] Rethinking how we measure AI intelligence. It’s not just who can remember what. Let’s test these LLMs using more sophisticated approaches. Like this!

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Happy Friday. Vacation is over for me and I’m back to work on Monday. I had fun taking my kids around town, and enjoyed some extra free time. Make sure you take your vacation hours too!

[blog] Try Deep Think in the Gemini app. It’s a variation of our recent gold-winning model and does parallel thinking through a problem.

[blog] Test-driven development with AI. I like the advice here to think about goals, not just the tests. And, good tip about AI to help with visual tests.

[blog] Is JSON prompting effective? (No.) Many folks (me included) feel this placebo effect when getting a tip on how to prompt AI for better results. “Oh that worked better!” Probably not?

[blog] Google Earth AI: Our state-of-the-art geospatial AI models. The mashup of AI capabilities with valuable datasets results in some super experiences.

[blog] Executives should be the least busy people. Definitely truth to this. Or at least, execs should have the most flexible calendars. Being booked solid is a sign of bad prioritization.

[article] Box CEO Aaron Levie sees a bright agentic future in the enterprise. Aaron posts on X some of the most pragmatic and insightful takes about agents. Here’s some additional perspective.

[blog] A deep dive into code reviews with Gemini Code Assist in GitHub. This no-charge code review agent that sits in your GitHub workflow adds a lot of value. I’ve used it a few times and came away impressed.

[blog] 2025 Mid-Year LLM Market Update: Foundation Model Landscape + Economics. Who is using what, and how is open model adoption going? And why do enterprises switch models? New data here.

[article] C-suite leaders attribute revenue, software development boosts to AI. I’m not sure about the results, or if there’s a disconnect between exec perspectives and employee ones. But, sometimes perception is reality!

[blog] How we revamped our Docs for AI. If bots, not people, read your docs, what should they look like? Provocative question!

[article] Research: The Hidden Penalty of Using AI at Work. Interesting. Learn how much the “competency penalty” is for using AI at work and how to resolve it.

[article] Hard-won vibe coding insights: Mailchimp’s 40% speed gain came with governance price. I’ll keep seeking out any pieces from folks explaining their real experiences with AI rollouts.

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Vacation (at home) with kids is fun, but I’ll need another vacation after this. Today we went to the Del Mar racetrack to watch the horse races. And I’m a big baseball fan, so I was tense watching today’s trade deadline. The San Diego Padres were silly active.

[blog] Being a good PM at Google. Marvelous piece from Chris that applies to anyone wanting to be a premier product manager, anywhere.

[blog] How to evaluate vibe coding tools for your enterprise. This post attempts to categorize the current crop of AI tools, who they help, and what enterprises should look for.

[blog] An Engineer’s Guide to AI Code Model Evals. I see a lot of people use feelings to describe their opinions about AI-assisted tools. Feels fast. Feels slow. Feels like it gets worse. Addy looks at what a more objective eval of an AI coding model looks like.

[blog] Evaluating Agents with ADK, Part 1: The development loop with the ADK Web UI. Let’s keep the evals conversation going. Ivan covers the manual steps of assessing the flow of an AI agent.

[blog] Don’t Tell Engineers What to Do. It’s not a free-for-all. You don’t get to do whatever you want. But managers should be setting priorities (what to work on) and empowering the team to solve things the most responsible way.

[blog] Announcing a complete developer toolkit for scaling A2A agents on Google Cloud. Lots of updates for those who want to build and distribute agents.

[blog] How to Build an MCP Server with Gemini CLI and Go. Some fantastic lessons here from Daniela as she leaps hurdles and documents how she made the jumps.

[blog] How to Secure MCP Servers. If you must use MCP servers, then look at advice such as this to set them up securely.

[blog] AI is Eating Developer Experience. It’s being added everywhere to it, yes. If used to make things better (versus using it to use it), the team will thank you.

[blog] Gemini CLI: Custom slash commands. Here’s a simple way to access reusable prompts from our agentic CLI tool.

[blog] Pivoting From Software Engineer in Google, My First 3 Months. I like Annie’s story and have enjoyed her work so far. Here, she looks at what’s different when moving from software engineering into a developer relations engineering role.

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It was another outside day of vacation. Kids and I toured the USS Midway aircraft carrier which is pretty terrific. It may be summer vacation time in this hemisphere, but there’s seemingly no slowdown in this industry.

[blog] What’s new in NotebookLM: Video Overviews and an upgraded Studio. We’re in a golden age of learning right now. It’s never been easier to study and digest new ideas. Love the video overviews!

[article] How to excel in multicloud: The new checklist. It’s a good list of things to consider. That said, there is no “easy” way to be multicloud, and most such solutions rely on a lowest common denominator approach, which strips all the value from your cloud strategy.

[blog] The Commodity Cloud Era is Over – The AI-Native Cloud Is Here. This is one reason you have to rethink your multicloud approach. There’s a good chance you’re solving yesterday’s problems and will be disappointed when you deliver solutions that aren’t relevant anymore.

[blog] Mastering agentic workflows with ADK: the recap. Great summary of some agentic workflow options and when to use which.

[article] Team got cut. Scope didn’t. Common story nowadays? What are you going to do about it? Here’s some advice that I’ve tried to follow myself.

[blog] Gen AI Evaluation Service — Tool-Use Metrics. I’m gaining new appreciation for this eval dimension. As you hand agents more tools, you want to be able to evaluate whether they’re being used correctly.

[article] METR’s study on how AI affects developer productivity. Abi takes a look at that surprising study from a few weeks ago showing that AI tools were slowing people down, not speeding them up. More study needed!

[blog] Pattern Matching with SQL: Real-Time Anomaly Detection Using BigQuery’s MATCH_RECOGNIZE. I didn’t know about this! Something that feels like a regular expression across rows in the data warehouse? Neat.

[blog] Kingdoms and Courts: The “Windsurf Effect” and How We Get Back to Normal in Tech M&A. Good post. I liked the articulation of three areas where AI-focused startups (and others) have moats.

[article] Google Cloud Q2 Surge in Revenue and Backlog Is Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare. Microsoft had terrific quarterly results. But our fundamentals might have a few competitors feeling nervous.

[blog] BigQuery meets ADK & MCP: Accelerate agent development with BigQuery’s new first-party toolset. You can build some valuable interactions with your data platform when its exposed as tools to an agent. This post has useful details on how to do that.

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Another vacation day with the kids, this time to Sea World. Before everyone woke up, I got some productive reading time.

[blog] Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast are now generally available on Vertex AI. This model has some amazing features, including the generation of videos with audio.

[article] What is First Principles Thinking? We can rush through life with shallow understanding of too much. This article is a good reminder to acquire a deeper knowledge of what we’re dealing with.

[blog] Why I’m not letting the juniors use GenAI for coding. Good reasoning, centered on code review behavior, learning moments, and (lack of) evolving thoughts. I don’t agree with all of this, but it’s worthwhile to noodle on.

[article] The importance of memory for AI. This was relevant to the piece above, as I do think our AI tools can “learn” from mistakes over the long term. If you have and use memory effectively.

[article] Employees brace for AI-driven change: survey. Good idea. Even if you don’t think it will affect your job (it will), it’ll affect your industry.

[blog] Mastering agentic workflows with ADK for Java: Parallel agents. I’m learning a few things from this series of posts. Move from abstract to tangible understanding of these agent patterns.

[blog] Mastering agentic workflows with ADK: Loop agents. This is a type I haven’t built myself yet, and appreciated seeing in action.

[article] Product Manager vs. Product Owner: Why Teams Get These Roles Wrong. I’ve done both jobs, and remember speaking about it a decade ago. Sometimes I think we over-think this. Having distinct roles here (versus tasks within a role) creates communication breakdowns.

[blog] The global endpoint offers improved availability for Anthropic’s Claude on Vertex AI. Instead of being pinned to a region (which you may need to do for sovereignty or perf reasons), this new global endpoint provides pay-as-you-go access to Claude wherever there is capacity.

[article] Anthropic unveils new rate limits to curb Claude Code power users. I feel for them. Amazon needed to immediately rate limit their new agentic IDE, our Gemini CLI got hammered. But yeah, users are justified in being grouchy when companies back down from prior limits.

[blog] Exploring the new BigQuery Data Engineering Agent. Get the data and clear instructions needed to go hands on with this AI-assisted data science experience.

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Day one of vacation with my two younger kids while my wife and oldest are away at college orientation. Mini golf and such were on the agenda today.

[article] Our Favorite Management Tips on Communicating Like a Leader. Super solid advice here for anyone (everyone?) trying to get better at communicating.

[blog] The agentic experience: Is MCP the right tool for your AI future? If you’ve got a bet on MCP, you better have a strong API strategy. This post uses that lens to offer direction.

[blog] Modern Java for Cloud-Native Apps: Is It Catching Up with Go and Node.js? Not a scientific breakdown, but the dated “Java is slow” idea should be put to bed.

[blog] Your guide to taking an open model from discovery to a production-ready endpoint on Vertex AI. Fantastic post that really solidified my understanding of the workflow from selection to serving of open models.

[blog] Scaling Inference To Billions of Users And AI Agents. I want to keep seeing posts on production-grade deployment and scale, not just “getting started” content.

[blog] How AI Is Improving My Wireframing Process. I *think* AI can improve just about any process. These are practical areas where designers are going to see an uplift.

[blog] How I Turned Gemini CLI into a Multi-Agent System with Just Prompts. Fun experimentation here, with a powerful result. Being able to spawn these agents, each with a unique persona, has many practical implications.

[article] ‘Wizard of Oz’ blown up by AI for giant Sphere screen. We took the wraps off this a couple months back, and now everyone will get to enjoy the results.

[blog] The many, many, many JavaScript runtimes of the last decade. Goodness, there are a lot of runtimes for JavaScript. Check out this post for a run through.

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Landed late last night and had a two hour talk + demo this morning at 7am. I’m really good at scheduling. Next week I’m on vacation (staycation with the kids), but will probably still do reading lists each day. Enjoy your weekend!

[blog] Google Gemini CLI Cheatsheet. Many, many of you have downloaded and tried this agentic CLI. But what can you do with it? I like Philipp’s cheatsheet.

[blog] Model Context Protocol (MCP) explained: An FAQ. Some good Q&A from our friends over at Vercel. This is mostly the positive perspective, but still quite useful.

[blog] Exploring the Evolution of Google’s Community Forum: A Comparison of Old and New features. We’ve got a revamped community environment for everyone who builds with Google technologies. Looks great.

[article] Stop Prompting, Start Designing: 5 Agentic AI Patterns That Actually Work. Some good visualizations here that might help you understand some agent patterns you’ve heard of.

[blog] Mastering agentic workflows with ADK: Sequential agents. Here’s an agent pattern in practice. Learn how to build an agent that runs in a step-by-step sequence.

[blog] Zombie Burnout: A New Way to Think About the Restless Exhaustion of Modern Life. Burnout doesn’t just come from overwork. it comes from work that doesn’t inspire you any longer. Good advice here.

[blog] Aeneas transforms how historians connect the past. Wow, this is rad. AI trained for Latin (but possible to do for other languages) to help historians understand ancient inscriptions.

[article] How Rust-Based Zed Built World’s Fastest AI Code Editor. Many (most?) of the AI editors and tools out there are based on Visual Studio Code, or a fork. Zed is something different.

[blog] New Cluster Director features: Simplified GUI, managed Slurm, advanced observability. Standing up and managing AI infrastructure can be a lot of work. I’ve seen folks struggle with it. This updated experience in Google Cloud looks like a big step forward.

[blog] A Practical Guide to Multimodal Data Analytics. Jeff goes deep into this unify analysis of multimodal content. It’s pretty cool that you can use SQL and Python here.

[article] How Elicitation in MCP Brings Human-in-the-Loop to AI Tools. Here’s a new feature of MCP that you should take a look at.

[article] Is Google Cloud winning the AI era? Winning takes many forms, but we’re doing some things right at the moment.

[blog] Amazon Q: Now with Helpful AI-Powered Self-Destruct Capabilities. Oof. Rough story, but it can happen. Community input is great, but you have to be careful on those PRs.

[blog] Practical Gemini CLI: Bring your own system instruction. Learn all about overriding the system prompt of the Gemini CLI. The extensibility here is powerful.

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In the air flying home after a solid week in Manhattan. Doing some research into MCP during the flight, and glad to be able to search my own reading list for past links to review!

[blog] Managing Links with Gemini: Validating Links for Semantic Correctness. This is super cool work from our documentation team. Make sure your links go where you think they do.

[blog] NotebookLM: One-Click Accident Report Comprehension. This tool is so useful for understanding complex topics. The ability to generate videos and mind maps ensures a few ways you can digest the content.

[paper] A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models. This paper looks at the emerging discipline of context engineering, some patterns, and where gaps exist.

[blog] AI agents vs. predefined workflows: practical decision guide. Everything doesn’t need to be an agent. This post from Capital One points out when to use an agent, and when an AI workflow will do.

[blog] Mastering agentic workflows with ADK for Java: Sub-Agents. Excellent post that will help you better understand the ideas behind agents, subagents, agents-as-tools, and coordination of it all.

[blog] 25+ top gen AI how-to guides for enterprise. We’re awash in tutorials and how-to material. Here’s an attempt to pull together a handful of representative guides.

[blog] My AI Code Reviewer Needed a Project, So I Vibe-Coded One for It. I had a lot of code review content yesterday, and here’s another. This offers some prompts you might use to review a codebase.

[blog] A2A Server with an MCP backend in Cloud Run. Expose an API using MCP, and have agents that can talk to other agents using the A2A protocol.

[blog] To MCP or not to MCP? But maybe chill out on all the MCP stuff as there are cost and control implications.

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Today was fun and tiring with a mix of leadership offsite meetings and stepping in for a sick colleague to present at a large group meeting. It was nice to end that meeting and see Alphabet’s great quarterly earnings.

[article] Alphabet’s Q2 revenue beats estimates as cloud computing surges. Heckuva quarter. The business is solid, and our cloud organization is accelerating. Here are the CEO remarks, including excitement about serving OpenAI as a customer.

[article] How CEOs Hone and Harness Their Intuition. I’ve seen some people and teams hide behind data because they didn’t trust their intuition. Here’s how to build it up.

[blog] Should You Market Your API with an MCP Server? If your API is your product, why do you need an MCP server? Adam does a good job explaining when it makes sense.

[blog] Goals Take Practice. If you’re naturally good at setting goals, congrats. John looks at the many types of goals, and why practice is needed to get good at them.

[blog] Building an AI-Powered Podcast Generator with Gemini and Cloud Run. Neat example that others can follow to get customized and generated podcasts.

[blog] How I Prioritize OSS Bugs. How an OSS maintainer prioritizes bugs could be different than how you do for a commercial or internal product, but maybe not.

[blog] Context Engineering for AI Agents: Lessons from Building Manus.It’s an emerging discipline, but advice like this will help you advance your thinking on context engineering.

[blog] Debugging the One-in-a-Million Failure: Migrating Pinterest’s Search Infrastructure to Kubernetes. These “we had a problem and here’s how we investigated it” posts are always a fun read to me. The Pinterest team chased down an issue that was affected a small subset of users, but posed a risk.

[blog] Why I’m Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them). This is a pragmatic look at what can go wrong with agents (correctness at scale, cost, etc) and worth a read.

[blog] Stop Leaked Credentials in Their Tracks with Veles, Our New Open-Source Secret Scanner. Very valuable capability. Keep yourself safe, even as we ship more software.

[blog] Code review in the AI age. Are we shipping faster with AI, or shifting our time from coding to reviewing? Whichever it is, the practice of code review is as important as ever.

[blog] The evolution of code review practices in the world of AI. This post looks at how AI augments, instead of replaces, human code reviews.

[article] How Does AI Disrupt Accountability in Code Reviews? Another post on code reviews that highlights the human factor and the team accountability that code reviews encourage.

[blog] The Dataproc advantage: Advanced Spark features that will transform your analytics and AI. DIY Spark versus a managed service is a choice. We’re trying to make it harder for you 🙂

[article] Spring AI 1.0 Delivers Easy AI Systems and Services. I liked this intro from Josh into the world of Spring AI for Java app builders.

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