A Better Working Relationship with Gemini

Happy New Year, one and all! Gemini and I have been working furiously over the holidays on a project in Laravel and Filament. I'm not a fast learner, but I am getting more familiar with these frameworks.

Switching from ChatGPT

I gave up my ChatGPT Plus subscription late last year out of frustration. "Gupty" was like a genius teenager - overly confident and every response read like a tweet; emojis everywhere, and after some long back and forths it would ignore me, taking a full minute to respond. Worst of all, it kept demanding I call it "Nick".

One try of the free version of Gemini was enough to make me switch. It solved a programming problem I was having in one attempt and with utter professionalism. I quickly signed up for Google AI Pro.

Not without flaws

Gemini is fast. I can have long conversations and its response time doesn't slow down. It's incredible how it can remember so much... or can it?

The longer I worked with Gemini, I noticed that I was getting frustrated when it didn't read my mind. I assumed it would give me working code based on everything we had discussed throughout the day, but while adding new features, it would start to take out things it had previously implemented. This was quite maddening as I was far too dependent on the AI's code.

Eventually, I started to pick up on these moments of forgetfulness, and I realised there must be a memory limit that when reached, comments from the beginning of the thread are purged. So if I provided all my initial code at the start of a conversation, Gemini would eventually forget it.

That would be fine if it would ask me for the code again, but instead it makes assumptions, guesses and hallucinations, creating a state of confusion that would make me give up for the night.

Making amends with Gemini

For our work to progress smoothly, I would need to keep the AI up-to-date with the full context of my project.

So I made a Content Export feature that, with one button press, takes all of my project's files, sticks them together in a single text file, and saves it to Google Drive ready for viewing.

And wow, what a difference it makes! Gemini is always on the ball, up-to-date with the latest code, and is suddenly able to solve all my problems and advance the project at lightning speed!

Why not use AI in VSCode?

You might be wondering why I don't just use the Gemini extension in VSCode. I did try, but I haven't quite figured it out yet. It keeps wanting me to log into Google each time, and even then I have to manually add parts of my code to its context window. Also, I prefer the chatbot. It feels like I have a co-worker. :)