Your opinion on recent AI Studio changes

Google AI Studio
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I’m curious what folks think about the recent changes to AI Studio. (I’ll post my opinions in a reply.)

In particular, here are some of the bigger changes that I’ve seen.

  • The “Test input” templating fields aren’t available anymore.
  • All prompts are chat-based.
  • “Get Code” no longer gives a cURL option.
  • Much laggier. (See this post.)
  • Manually entering history has been long gone at this point.

What have you noticed (good or bad) and how do you feel about them?

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curl being removed made the lives of lib authors 10x worse

we need them to bring it back, or at the VERY least, to have an option that provides raw request JSON

  • All prompts are chat-based.

Worst move by far. The multiturn format doesn’t suit everyones use cases and its ridiculous to see this happen. Structured & Chat can’t accomplish everything in the right way, and now we’re forced to use the structured prompt for freeform ones (and pretend the huge table doesnt exist)

Changes i’ve noticed:

  • Dark and light mode toggle in https://aistudio.google.com/app/settings is neat
  • I like that we can finally edit responses again, but it feels kind of redundant now that they’ve added proper system instructions…
  • The new UX for adding a file sucks. Not clear at all. I wish they’d just use a normal file picker and do the drive stuff behind the scenes. Imagine OpenAI forcing you to upload files to MS Sharepoint first in order to get ChatGPT to understand your prompt. It’s ridiculous.
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  • The “Test input” templating fields aren’t available anymore.

If AI studio is for prompt engineering for developers as we were lead to believe. Then this needs to be returned. I used this all the time to test different prompts for my applications.

  • All prompts are chat-based.

Again if Ai Studio is intended for developers for prompt engineering why we even need chat. Its impossible for me to test my prompts using chat as i have to refresh the page and copy the system prompt back in again every time to ensure that the results aren’t being polluted by the previous chat history.

  • “Get Code” no longer gives a cURL option.

As we are still missing libraries for Java, PHP, and C# to name just a few having the curl code was very helpful for the unloved developers with their chosen languages.

  • Much laggier.

No comment here as I have stopped using Ai studio due to the above issues. Which is silly since its now finally available in EU and i don’t need to use a VPN anymore and now im just not using it anymore.

Do we have a reason for any of this?

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For why I asked? Mostly because it occurred to me that while I have opinions, I was wondering what others thought. For two big reasons:

  1. I wanted to see if there were other changes that I’ve missed.
  2. I think collecting together the changes, and how we feel about them, will provide useful feedback for the team.
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acutally I meant

Do we have a reason for all these changes. which IMO are just making things worse.

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Yes, very good point, myself and Jochen Kirchstäter are lucky that we managed to get our libraries done before it vanished, but anyone new coming to the API with the intent to create their own library will have a much harder time.

The UI problem with the overwhelming number of <span> elements bogging down the browser is making life miserable for so many people that many just don’t want to use AI Studio. That this issue is not getting addressed with, like, daily updates from Google on where they are with a fix is perplexing.

Like Linda, I have to re-enter the system instruction every time because the chat interface requires you start new chat for each API use to avoid effects from the previous turn. If Chat is all we are left with in Studio, a reasonable product enhancement would include the option (checkbox) ‘Keep System Instruction’ to be applied when starting a new chat (there’s enough space on the right side of the screen to add the checkbox).

I’m saying all that’s left is Chat because the other available option (Structured prompt) is also broken. Studio generates a mini flood of API requests for a structured prompt and runs into the congestion (429) error. It fails to handle it properly, the client code does retries but at machine speed with no exponential back off. You are left with a rapidly flashing pink error bar and no mechanism to stop it other than closing out the browser tab.

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They have mainly added a new typing animation, even if it receives entire response, it still continues typing animation. its annoying

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I realized that before you can copy a image direct from clipboard and now you have to save it and after upload it. Decrese my production.

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The new Interface is ugly, i prefer the old one.

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Google, please improve light mode