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Comment by aaronharnly | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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"

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.

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.

> 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.

Does it have to mean nothing? If there is a review at the end of the exercise, good parts from each of the teams can be explored for integration to build the best final product. Of course all these things are probably as much political as technical so it is always complicated.

I was certainly thinking of the more political case where one team simply gets laid off with no review. That case would be perfectly alright, to be honest.

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

Also, did you hear about Jules?

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.

Wait until you hear about Google Vertex AI Studio.

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.

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?

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