EricVB.com Personal Blog

My opening entry on this relaunched blog was discussing how I recently did some self-learning with AI using Google's Gemini CLI.  That work really sparked an enthusiasm for me to keep working with AI, and my focus was around summarizing news headlines which I continued to work on automating.  My first versions were just simply outputting the headlines in command line and wrapping them in the " cowsay " command.  (Think:  echo $daily-news | cowsay  ).  But, before I knew it, I found myself thinking this should be better served as a web platform where people could get a quick update of daily news.  I made pretty quick and early progress, and my inspiration to keep working towards building something tangible continued... I was able to use AI to help me get started by solving some challenging code logic, creating some website graphics, and even setting up an automation pipeline to generate updates on a daily basis.  It was honestly very enlightening ...

I’ve been trying to make a more focused effort recently to dedicate at least a portion of my Fridays to getting “hands on” with new tech. This effort usually ends up taking a back-burner unfortunately because my work has been pretty busy recently. I maybe get around to trying out new tech 1 Friday a month. Today though, I was able to spend a few hours and it has been a particularly fun thread to dive into! So much so, in fact, that it has me inspired to reboot my personal blog here on Substack. :-) Today I decided it was finally time to give the Gemini CLI a real test drive… Sure, I’ve installed the Gemini CLI a few times and given it some basic tire-kicking in my CloudShell on the GCP console. This time though, I wanted to try out some real use cases and get to some more technical outcomes. I did some searching around and finally started out by running through this codelab which really did a nice job showing how you could take AI to the next level. There’s just ...