Google (Gemini) Is Impressive Now | ✉️ #86

Illustration of a person smiling and holding a fluffy animal, with a paper airplane graphic nearby. Text on the left reads "MKDEV DISPATCH #86" and "GOOGLE (GEMINI) IS IMPRESSIVE NOW" in bold, with a background of light grey and orange featuring paper airplane patterns.

Last updated: 31/01/26 | Published: 31/01/26

Hey! 👋

I wrote this 3 months ago:

Image shows a social media post by a user discussing recommended AI tools like Perplexity, Dia, Comet, ChatGPT, and Claude. It mentions skepticism towards Google despite its massive influence and data ownership, noting disappointment with Google's performance in recent years.

As one to expect, everything changed since that post.

Google’s Nano Banana Pro image generation model is the best image generation model I ever saw.

Google’s Veo 3.1 video generation model is right there at the top, capable of creating videos that are indistinguishable from reality.

Gemini 3 Pro and Flash are excellent at coding, vision, reasoning and much more. It seems to be unbeatable when it comes to seeing in particular, but it’s also a fantastic coding assistant and a general use case model.

New AI Search results are much nicer and do give reasonably good quick answers - still behind Perplexity, but AI Mode is catching up.

And now it’s official - new generation of Siri in iPhones is going to be powered by Gemini, bringing this to millions if not billions of users around the world.

I still use Claude Code for coding, but I am playing around with Antigravity a lot lately. My default search is still Perplexity, but my periodic fallbacks to google.com keep giving better and better results, even if I go there exactly not to get AI-search-kind-of-answers.

Thanks to it’s own chips and now with some seriously impressive collection of models, Google seems to be in the best position to dominate the next… 3 months of our AI-enhanced lives? Maybe even 4-5 months?

And I am sorry that this dispatch is about AI again - this time it was inevitable, as I had to publicly admit that the game changed again.

What We've Shared

DevOps Accents, episode 69: Is the Internet Really Decentralized? The internet is “decentralized”… until one cloud provider has a bad day. This time on DevOps Accents, Leo, Pablo, and Kirill break down where decentralization actually exists, where we’ve centralized by convenience, and why outages feel inevitable in today’s cloud-driven world.
We Tried AI Coding Agents in Real Projects. Here’s What Actually Happened. In this snippet from the previous episode of DA, we talk openly about what happens when you let AI code for you — from broken projects to massive productivity gains — and how tools are reshaping the role of developers.

What We've Discovered

Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea: Can we have datacenters in space? A former NASA engineer/scientist with a PhD in space electronics provides convincing arguments we shouldn't.
terraform cdk is deprecated: Many people seem to be upset about it, but it’s hard to argue with the fact, that this product never got any traction. Writing infra with real programming language is a wonderful theory, that just doesn’t seem to get a wide adoption in practice in all this years.
Internet Artifacts: This is what internet needs to look more like. Also an excellent educational resource - but please make sure to check out the rest of the website.
Introducing Pathfinding.cloud: New open source tool from Datadog that maps out all possible privilege escalation paths for AWS IAM.
Ruby 4.0.0 Released: The best programming language got a new major release.

The 87th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, February 13th. See you next time!