Gemini 3.5 Flash, Composer 2.5 is a Beast, Google IO, We Live in Exciting Times | Ep 16
Google I.O. brought major updates, but the developer community is furious. Is Gemini 3.5 Flash a massive step backward for production apps? In Episode 16 of Rate Limited, Ray, Eric, and Adam break down the massive backlash surrounding Google’s new pricing model and token consumption, why the Gemini CLI is getting aggressively sunset, and whether Cursor’s new Composer 2.5 is the absolute pinnacle of AI coding workhorses.
We also react to Andrej Karpathy’s massive jump to Anthropic, detail a wild success story of modding Zelda into VR using Codex's Goal Mode, and discuss how to transition your mindset into the era of probabilistic, agentic engineering.
If you are an engineer or builder navigating the frontier of AI, hit that subscribe button for deep, unfiltered technical breakdowns twice a month.
Links:
Ray: https://www.youtube.com/@RayFernando1337
Eric: https://www.youtube.com/@pvncher
Adam: https://www.youtube.com/@GosuCoder
00:00 - Google I.O., OpenAI, & Composer 2.5
00:45 - The Truth About Gemini 3.5 Flash & Token Guzzling
02:08 - Is Gemini Rebranding What "Flash" Means?
03:45 - Prompt Performance & Instruction Following in Anti-Gravity
05:47 - Google's Profit Margins and Capacity Constraints
06:15 - RIP Gemini CLI: Google Consolidating Compute
07:38 - The Hidden Cost of Small Model Reasoning
09:38 - Google's Distillation Strategy & Compute Allocation
11:41 - Knowledge Cutoffs & Eval Degradation in Gemini 3.5
13:40 - Anti-Gravity 2.0 Drama: Shifting Away From Consumers
16:40 - Composer 2.5 First Impressions: A Pure Coding Workhorse
19:15 - Building Parallel QA Agents with Browser Use
21:32 - How Cursor Pulls Off Trillion-Parameter Speeds
23:18 - Is Speed the Moat? Continuous Improvement RL Loops
25:25 - The Messiness of Real-World Context vs. Static Evals
27:13 - Tool Search vs. Preloading Context Bloat
28:14 - Minimal Context Setups vs. Skill Maximalism
32:00 - The Lack of Portability Between AI Harnesses
34:25 - GPT-5.5 Low/Medium vs. Anthropic 4.7 Latency
38:10 - Tool Tinkering vs. Grabbing Off-The-Shelf Tech
39:11 - The Team's Current Model Stack (Vibe Check)
42:11 - Codex App: Mind-Blowing Background Computer Use
44:39 - Goal Mode vs. High-Level Orchestration Loops
48:23 - Success Story: Modding Zelda into VR Using Goal Mode
50:33 - Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic: Why Now?
52:30 - The Value of Co-location & The Bay Area Sparkle
55:00 - Impact Over Upside: Technologists Shaping Green Spaces
56:09 - The Mindset Shift: Transitioning to Agentic Engineering
58:30 - Auditing Your Threads & Finding Inefficiencies
01:00:27 - AI Automation as "Mana" for Your Life
