Ideally what I want is this: I google "gemini api" and that leads me to a page where I can login using my Google account and see the API settings. I create one and start using it right away. No extra wizardry, no multiple packages that must be installed, just the gemini package (no gauth!) and I should be good to go.

I’m a small time GCP customer for five or six years, and relatively tech competent, and I had a very difficult time getting Gemini code set up yesterday with Vertex API keys; finally I had to use gcloud to login from the CLI in combination with clicking a link and doing web sign on from Gemini. This frustrated me, not least because I have API direct calls to Vertex Gemini working from Aider, although I could not tell you exactly what incantation I finally used to make it work. In particular it didn’t look to me like the Gemini code app uses something like dotenv? I don’t recall now; upshot - could get it to tell me I was logged in wrong / had an oauth2 error / needed a project id at various times, but no inference.

What I wanted: to be able to go to a simple page tied to a google login and generate named API keys that can be used from anywhere to query Gemini models with a SINGLE key and environment variable kept in a .env file. I would prefer to pre-fill the account that debits by API usage. For an example, you could sign up for Anthropic API, OpenAI API, OpenRouter to see their customer flows. They are extremely simple in comparison to getting a new account (or even an old one) in shape to do metered billing for Gemini inference.

I then want this API key to work, regardless of what gcloud “knows” about me — am I logged in to a GCP account? Don’t care. What’s my current “Project?” Don’t care. What’s the difference between Vertex and Gemini? Don’t care.

As I write this, I bet a startup could be launched just offering this as a wrapper. This is surprisingly painful!

Thanks again for all the work; looking forward to seeing more out of Gemini.