GEAR Training and Google Skills Unlock the Full Potential of Your New Benefits

[Outlaw]

Just wanted to drop a quick post because I was messing around in my Google Developer dashboard today and realized I had a ton of free stuff just sitting there that I didn't even know about. If you haven't logged in lately, go check it out. Seriously.

So first off, they hooked us up with some new stuff:

• Gemini Code Assist: They gave us higher quotas. So if you're using it to code, you can basically spam it with questions now without hitting a wall. It's pretty sweet for when you're stuck on some dumb bug at 2 AM.
• Firebase Studio: They gave me 30 workspaces. I have no idea how I'll use that many, but hey, more room to break things, right?
• Free Credits: Also still got that $10 monthly credit for Vertex AI and stuff. It's expiring next year, so might as well use it to screw around with some AI models.

But here is the thing I actually wanted to tell you guys. I almost ignored the "Google Skills" thing because I hate homework. But it said I get 35 credits a month for courses, and I was bored, so I clicked it.

Game changer.

I ended up doing that whole Google Prompting Essentials Specialization (it's like 5 courses). Look, I thought I knew how to talk to AI. Type a question, get an answer. Simple, right? Wrong.

Turns out, I was using it like a dumb search engine. After doing those little courses (which, btw, use up like no credits), I learned how to actually make Gemini work FOR me.

• There's one called "Use AI as a Creative or Expert Partner." So now instead of asking Code Assist "fix this code," I ask it "give me three ways to build this and tell me which one sucks the least."
• Another one, "Speed Up Data Analysis," helped me figure out how to dump a bunch of messy data into the AI and have it spit out a clean presentation. Saved me like 3 hours of clicking around in Sheets.
• And "Design Prompts for Everyday Work Tasks" just made my prompts way cleaner. I get good code on the first try now instead of playing 20 questions with the robot.

It’s like... I got the free tools (the quotas, the credits, the workspaces), but the courses taught me how to actually drive the thing.

Plus, if you scroll down, you can also claim some NVIDIA badge and unlock a learning path for that too. I just clicked it and it gave me a little badge thingy, idk, looks cool on the profile.

Anyway, just a heads up. If you're sitting on those Google Skills credits, go burn them on the Prompting Essentials thing. It actually helps. Now I'm burning through my higher Gemini quota way faster because I'm actually building stuff instead of fighting with the AI.

Go check your dashboard! You probably have a bunch of free stuff waiting.

TL;DR: New Google benefits give more AI coding quota and cloud workspaces. Use your free monthly Skills credits to learn prompting. You'll actually use the benefits better. Profit.

 

[RiskyStuff]

They should also teach how to jailbreak AI.

These are rookie things.

Because the real deal is learning machine learning, models architecture, training models and math.

But it's not something anyone can just start and do. Really big time investment. I haven't found time to learn math yet. Only learned programming as I had real life use for it.

Anyways, these days one shot learning, reasoning capabilities, scraping built into models and other features let you do a lot without learning anything. Times of GPT 3 are long gone.

 

[Outlaw]

I agree with the whole one-shot side of things until you've to discern between skills and outcomes necessary

you'd struggle to one shot without your markdown formatting telling your tools emailing boys information from a sheet then setting a calendar, but you can get three agents to talk to eachother with that same markdown file