Was anything good released at Google I/O 2026?

1. 0:00 – 1:47

   Google I/O 2026 day 1 overview

   1. CVClaire Vo0:00

      [upbeat music] Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today was the first day of Google I/O, Google's flagship event where they launched so many products, so many features, so many names of products, some of which are live, and some of which we're gonna try live on today's show. In this mini app, we'll start from most technical to most fun, talk a little bit about the releases that caught my eye today at Google I/O, and see if the promise of some new consumer grade creative features really live up to the hype of the event. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Magic Patterns. Today's engineers use Cursor and Claude Code to ship features in hours that used to take weeks. If you're a designer or PM, you've probably felt a shift, too. The pressure to move faster, validate sooner, and keep up with a team that's operating at a completely different speed. You've already tried AI prototyping tools to close that gap, but if your prototypes don't look like your actual product, it doesn't matter how fast you can build. You still end up redrawing it by hand. Magic Patterns takes your product team from idea to production, and works from your real design system. When you build a prototype, what you get back actually looks like your product. You'll validate faster, get alignment sooner, and when it's time to build, engineers can connect your prototype to Cursor or Claude Code with the Magic Patterns MCP to pick up where you left off. Your eng team has their AI advantage. Make Magic Patterns yours. Try it today at magicpatterns.com/howiai.

2. 1:47 – 4:19

   Gemini 3.5 flash

   1. CVClaire Vo1:47

      There was so much interesting product launch today, but I wanna start with the foundation stuff, the models. Today, Google announced Gemini 3.5 family of models, including Gemini 3.5 Flash, their fastest, smartest coding model. What's unique about Gemini 3.5 Fast, it is both rivals the intelligence of some of our favorite coding models, 5.5, Opus 47, even 46, but it is four times as fast as those models. And so if you look at 3.5 Flash, you're getting, according to Google's benchmarks, a super smart model, sort of a Codex 47 model if you like 47, at the speed of something much more like their 3.1 Flash model. So it's super, super fast and super smart. If you look at the benchmarks, they're really focused on the agentic capabilities of this model, and if you trace this all the way through the announcements today, you'll see that Google is really going full bore into agents. It feels a little bit like catch up. Some of the features that they released, as you'll see, are things that you're used to seeing in some of the products from Anthropic and OpenAI, but applied, I think, in two different aspects. One is with the speed of the Flash models that we know and love, and two, with much more of a creative consumer bent to it. And so while we're gonna start this episode talking a little bit about the 3.5 models in the coding products, we're gonna end this episode testing this model and a couple other models on more creative use cases. But again, Gemini 3.5 available across the product portfolio i- with Google, and really focused on coding, and in particular agentic capabilities at speed, as well as the thing that we all know Gemini is really good at, which is multimodal. I have always told people, if you are working with files, videos, any sort of transformative work where you have to go from one modality, um, maybe document to another modality, Gemini models are really, really good at handling files. I love it for handling videos, and you can see here the benchmarks compared to its peers, both the previous Gemini 3 family of models, as well as its peers from the Claude and GPT models themselves, really exceed the benchmarks in multimodal, and according to them, some of their agentic capabilities, and then it's fast. We love something fast.

3. 4:19 – 6:32

   Antigravity updates

   1. CVClaire Vo4:19

      Now, how are you gonna use this model? Well, if you're a developer, you're gonna use it in an IDE or in an agentic coding harness. And so, you know, you don't hear people talk a lot about Antigravity, but when I do hear people talk about Antigravity, they say it's quite good. Antigravity is Google's IDE, agentic IDE, and they announced several features. So when you read about these features, you're really gonna feel like Google's playing catch up to, in particular, Codex. You can see a lot of the concepts that were built into Antigravity are concepts that we've seen in particular in Codex. But let's go through them one by one. First, I wanna pop up Antigravity so you all can see it here. A couple changes. This is called Antigravity 2.0. A couple changes they made in the desktop app. One is they've brought the idea of projects into Antigravity. So these are sort of like folder constrained environments or workspaces that you're working on. I pulled in the ChatPRD, um, website app here, and then they've also added in scheduled tasks. So this UI looks very similar to what we've seen in the Codex app, projects along the side, scheduled tasks along the side, and scheduled tasks are exactly what you would think they would be. A name, a project that you're working on, a schedule, and a prompt that runs on a regular cron. So nothing mind-blowing here, but again, you're gonna see that Gemini 3.5 Flash, um, high reasoning and low reasoning, both very fast for a limited time, are available here in the Antigravity IDE. The other thing that was announced was the Antigravity CLI, so again, a Claude Code or Codex CLI style interface for coding.This is one where you can open up your terminal and work with it outside the IDE. Very similar form factor to what we've been working with, so again, you're gonna kinda feel like this is a little bit of catch up to what the other providers have been doing in terms of agentic coding. But it looks nice, and we're defaulted again to Gemini 3.5 Flash High, and so it should be a fast experience.

4. 6:32 – 7:59

   CLI test and agent features

   1. CVClaire Vo6:32

      Let's just test this really quickly. This is on my website, and I have a feature for the blog that I wanted to work on, and that is our blog generator for our podcast. So as I said at the beginning, the Gemini models are very good at video, and so one of the things that we do is we put the videos from these podcasts into an admin tool on the marketing site, and it generates blog posts for us. But I wanna be able to do that agentically. So let's see how fast Gemini 3.5 responds to that request. And I'm just gonna use, um, I'm gonna type in and I'm gonna say, "We have a blog generator UI at admin tools. I want to turn this into an API that an AI agent can use instead of a web UI for our team. Please build." So that should go ahead, just very similar to these other tools that we're used to, look at directories, ask me for permissions. I'm gonna say yes and always allow, and it's gonna run through and hopefully write some quick code. Now, I'm not noticing it is particularly faster, but let's see how long it takes to get to an outcome. You know, it doesn't feel that much faster to me, but we'll see how long it takes to generate. I wanna show you a couple other features of Anti-Gravity that was released

5. 7:59 – 9:43

   Core agent features released today—May 19th, 2026

   1. CVClaire Vo7:59

      today. So again, going on this theme of playing a little bit of catch up with Claude Code and Codex, the core agent features that were released today in Anti-Gravity are subagents. Again, the ability for the main agent to spawn off a subagent to do a specific task. One use case that people love of Anti-Gravity, especially coming from Google, is the browser subagent, which has always been available. But now different subagents can be spawned by the main agent to work on coding tasks. This is something that you've seen in Claude Code and Codex, again, but now available in Anti-Gravity. There's also hooks, so you can use hooks at different parts of the life cycle of your agent. If you don't know what hooks are, they're little events emitted every time your agentic harness kicks off a tool, or every time it completes a turn, or every time a new session is started, and you can hook into those events and do something on demand. And so now Anti-Gravity has the ability to configure those hooks. We have the idea of projects, which I told you about and showed you in the desktop app. There are native Git worktrees and local, local development environments. Again, these are all things that we have seen in Codex, so nothing super surprising here. The ones that I really like that I want to just spend a couple minutes on while we're letting Anti-Gravity and the IDE cook are these slash commands. Now, I love some slash commands, especially in Codex. My favorite one has been /goal, the ability to define a goal and basically have your agent, you know, bash his head against that problem over and over until it solves, solves a problem or meets the goal.

6. 9:43 – 11:20

   New slash commands

   1. CVClaire Vo9:43

      So Anti-Gravity has shipped a /goal, /command, which will allow an agent to do a long-running task against a goal. But there are actually a couple other really fun slash commands that I wanna call out that I think I'm gonna be testing over the next couple weeks and probably give you all my feedback on. So this first one is this grill-me/command. I love this because, you know, Claude Code has this question and answer tool where it, like, clarify for you. It's very polite. It's very Anthropic coded. You know, if you make a PRD or a spec in Claude Code, [lips smack] and then it needs clarification, it's gonna go ahead and ask you a couple questions and clarify. This seems like a much more aggressive version of that. It's called Grill Me. So what this does is this command, the agent will ask clarification questions back and really get to the heart of what your requirements are and how it's gonna work. Now, the question is, is this actually as hardcore as the slash command communicates, or is this just a cute way to differentiate against the question and answer tool? We'll see. Maybe we can spin it up in the Anti-Gravity IDE and test it. The other slash commands are /schedule, so be able to schedule those tasks as we showed in the UI, as well as use the browser. And so again, Anti-Gravity in particular is pretty good at using an autonomous agent to test in the browser. There's an ability to kick that off using the /browser tool. So a lot of updates here. Again, the TLDR, coding's faster, the model's faster.

7. 11:20 – 12:25

   Antigravity test results and takeaways

   1. CVClaire Vo11:20

      It's caught up to Codex, and it has a couple interesting slash commands. Let's go back to Anti-Gravity in the IDE and see if it really built something as fast as it claims. Okay. It edited several features, and it went ahead and created a programmatic API endpoint. It has API key authentication that it can use. It can be trigger, it can trigger the generation of visual workflows, which is what we want, and, um, the agent can now provide a featured image URL. So it has created all these documents pretty fast. I am curious what this /artifact command will show us. So, um, if I click open, it will show me the documentation on how it works. Very nice, fast.Kind of what I would expect from a coding agent. Nothing too special here. Again, I think we're really just playing catch up, but with the speed of the Gemini 3.5 Flash model, I'll be curious to see if more of us reach for Antigravity, especially for well scoped tasks, to get them done, get them out the door

8. 12:25 – 13:52

   AI Studio updates

   1. CVClaire Vo12:25

      without waiting. For the less technical, I do wanna call out a couple changes that were made to Google AI Studio, Google's sort of low code, no code coding product. So a couple things that they released in Google AI Studio, again powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, is the ability to build apps connected to your Google Workspace apps. So again, Google is the source of truth for so much personal information and for companies that usual, use Google Workspace for company information. And I've seen a lot of this in Claude Code and Claude Cowork. People are using the MCP connectors to build artifacts and apps on that data source, and Google is going straight for owning that experience themselves. So now you can build apps that read sheets, draft Gmails, organize Drive, see your calendar, all with built-in Workspace integration out of the box. Now, we're gonna try this and see if it actually works, but if it does, it's really going to carve off a lot of those internal enterprise use cases for productivity or those throwaway personal assistant use cases. You can now create Android apps inside Google AI Studio. So again, this is a lower code, no code experience, and so if you wanna start creating mobile apps for the Android ecosystem, that's something that you can do here in Google AI Studio.

9. 13:52 – 15:20

   Access issues

   1. CVClaire Vo13:52

      All right. So one of the things that I found a little bit frustrating with the Google announcements today is that they've announced a bunch of stuff, and then at the very, very bottom they're like, "It's available to some subset of people," or, "It's available, but later this summer." And so we're gonna see if it has access to my Google Calendar and Mail. If not, we'll move on with our life, and we will try it as soon as I have access. I am a paying customer, so hopefully I have early access, but we'll see. So I'll say, make me an app to manage the next month of weekend events with my kids, in particular our sporting events. They are all on my personal calendar in Google. So let's see what this does. It's gonna think, and hopefully it has integrated access with my Workspace and can go ahead and build that product. And guess what? It didn't do anything magical, and I'm looking in the settings, I'm looking in the connectors. I could not find it. So it's possible that not all of us have access to this right away, but I do think when we get Google Workspace access, you can imagine the kinds of features that you could build with this. So this is one we're gonna have to circle back to and do another day. But again, the vision here is for Google AI Studio to have access to your work- Workspace apps and be able to build products with that Workspace already integrated. I just can't figure out how to access it, and I am pretty smart.

10. 15:20 – 17:24

    Gemini redesign

    1. CVClaire Vo15:20

       Okay, we're gonna go. More and more fun stuff. Let's switch over to Gemini. Now, I'm gonna reflect on something about all these announcements, which is I cannot keep the product and brand names straight. Just to clarify, so far we've talked about Google Gemini 3.5 Flash, the model. We have talked about Antigravity, the IDE in Antigravity, the CLI. We've talked about Google AI Studio, the low code, no code product. Now we're talking about Gemini, Google AI, the consumer-ish AI product competitor to, like, Claude and ChatGPT. We've got too many brands going across this API portfolio. I'm not even done. I have, like, seven more tabs to get you all through. So again, if I could ask the Google team to do anything, it's a comprehensive brand analysis and singular brand that I can work with. This episode is brought to you by Thoughtspot. Product leaders know the struggle. Your users want data insights, but they don't wanna leave your app to find them. Thoughtspot Embedded solves this by putting analytics directly into your product. Your users can search in plain English and explore data instantly, right where they work. No separate tools and zero context switching. What sets Thoughtspot apart is that it's not just another bolt-on dashboard. It's a search-driven, AI-powered experience that feels native to your app. Developers can embed it with just a few lines of code and then fully customize the look and feel. The result? More engaged users, faster decisions, and a product that delivers more value every time someone logs in. If analytics is becoming core to your product strategy, visit go.thoughtspot.com/howiai for more information, and try the free trial at go.thoughtspot.com/howiai/trial.

11. 17:24 – 19:16

    Gemini image gen test

    1. CVClaire Vo17:24

       Now, one of the things that you'll notice when you go into the new Gemini is there is a redesign. They made a big deal about this redesign. They called it something ridiculous that I can't remember now, but we will put it in the show notes. It's, like, supposed to make you feel good. Look at this glow. Everything's redesigned. You have a bunch of prompts and examples. So they really are trying to uplevel and upscale the consumer experience of using Gemini. But even more than that, they have added some pretty cool features to Gemini. So if you're not familiar with it, NanoBanana is one of the best image gen models. You can now create images with NanoBanana using a bunch of templates, so they're really trying to make it easy to inspire you with what to do with these models.I use NanoBanana quite a bit actually for our podcast thumbnails, so let's try it really quickly. I'm actually gonna grab a screenshot of myself, something a little cute. Okay. I drag this in, and I say, "Upscale and beautify," because I wanna be pretty, "the image of this podcast host. Change the background to a professional podcasting studio." Okay, so I'm gonna press Enter. Sorry to the people in the comments that keep saying, "Stop topping... typing on your laptop. Type on your keyboard. It's making the video shake." I know. I'm just used to doing it. Okay, it took a little bit, but here it is. This is not my face. This is horrifying in every way possible, but some of the things that I notice about the image gen that has changed is, again, all these image gen models wanna get a lot better at generating text. You see that. It looks a little bit photorealistic, even though it doesn't look face realistic, and it generated pretty fast. But more fun than the image gen models

12. 19:16 – 22:56

    Omni (video generation)

    1. CVClaire Vo19:16

       are the video generation models. And so Google announced a new video gen model called Omni. Omni has a bunch of capabilities that we're gonna show in a minute in the Flow app, but it's able to create longer, more consistent, more photorealistic videos using AI, and it's able to use reference materials to create those videos as well. Okay, I have this image that my kid drew me of this little guy. I'm actually gonna take a screenshot of it while I hold it up to this camera, so just bear with me while I do that. I'm gonna drag this over into Gemini Video Creation, and we're gonna use this new model to animate this superhero, animate this superhero breaking a kid out of class to go have fun. Now, Google has made all of these experiences more agentic. So you saw it generate a plan, and then it's gonna create a video. It's gonna take a couple minutes. So while we're letting that generate, let's just talk a little bit more about how Google is describing Gemini Omni. They're comparing it to NanoBanana for video is now Omni for video, and it's gonna combine a reasoning model with a video creation model. And what they say is you can create video from anything, so which is why I picked the example of taking this very cute drawing that I keep from my kid over here on my desk and seeing if we could create something from this. Again, going back to what I talked about the Google models, the multimodal capabilities of these models is very high. So when you wanna do conversion of video to text, image to video, all those sorts of things, you can ground, what they say is you can ground Gemini in real world knowledge and create video components based on that. There's a couple of really cool features. So one of the things that they let you do is conversationally edit videos. So let's say you have a video of a structure. You can change that video of that structure to change the structure into bubbles. And so you can take real life video components and change them, edit them, sort of Photoshop style, with Omni by just prompting it. I think that's very cool. You can take a video and have Omni describe it, so again, this, like, multimodal part of it. And so you can have it describe it, and then you can edit the description to generate a new version of that. I think that's pretty cool. You can refine the same video. So again, one of the challenges with these video generation models is that when you create them, they take very long, and then you can't really edit them, and then you get inconsistent characters. And so the ability to change the environment, angle, et cetera, but keep characters consistent is gonna be really powerful when doing sort of production level video gen. Let's see. My video's ready. Let's get out of here and go have some real fun. [laughs] Hold on tight. Here we go. Ah. So my kid [laughs] is really gonna like this. Again, this was 10 seconds long, and so it really is much longer than, I think, the six or seven seconds that Sora was. So again, we're, like, extending this bit by bit. And then the ability for me to, like, conversationally edit this video or change the school to, like, a, a, a, an academy and have it be snowy outside. All those sorts of things are here with the Omni model, but you can see that it's gonna be a really powerful video editing model.

13. 22:56 – 24:31

    Flow (cinematic editing)

    1. CVClaire Vo22:56

       Now, if you wanna go deeper into video editing, you can use Google Flow, which is a much more prescriptive step-by-step video editing tool. Um, they embedded Omni into this new tool, Flow, and one of the things that you'll see here is they're really doubled, doubling down on cinematic quality, production quality editing. And so they're looking at cinematic realism. Is this hyperrealistic? You can blend multimodal references, so if you have a person, which I'm gonna get to, a situation, an environment, you can use that to seed the video, and then you can kind of edit videos using conversational information. One of the things that you'll see in Flow that they've encoded is the ability for you to define characters. So let's say I wanna take this guy and call him Captain Escape-A-School. I can use this, design a character in Google Flow, and then @mention that character in any future video moving forward, and create videos with that. And then you can actually create yourself as an avatar. So in addition to being able to create kind of like, uh, unique new characters, you can actually take a video of yourself and create an avatar. Maybe we'll try that.Um, there's a lot of custom tools built in, brainstorming how to scale, how to organize. So you see this really coming for production grade AI video gen. But let's jump into Flow really quickly and see if we can make an avatar of myself and

14. 24:31 – 26:45

    Avatar creation test

    1. CVClaire Vo24:31

       how it works. How you do this, you go into flow.google, it will redirect you to Google Labs. You click your name, you create an avatar. We're gonna get started. Okay, I scan this QR code. I pull it up on my phone. It's selfie.app.google. I agree to it taking my face. I'm gonna allow camera access. I'm gonna move this mic out of the way. Give me a sec, BRB. It's telling me to read numbers out loud. 25, 47, 56, 87, 18, 52. Okay, it's telling me to turn my head right. And then I've turned it... Okay. And then it's telling me to turn my face to the left. Okay. That was it. Please don't steal my identity. All right, so it's uploading, and it is creating an AI avatar of at me, and then I should be able to use that for any video moving forward. No. No, sir, I couldn't. So again, here's where we're really on the struggle bus with Google, which is they've announced a lot of stuff, and it hasn't really worked. So I did it. I gave them my identity. I trained their model. I subjected my human face to their DeepMind engineers, and it didn't even create the avatar. So the promise is really good for some of these things, but the reality is if you're not able to use them or they're broken on the day, then people are gonna lose patience for some of this. And so, you know, a couple of my challenges that I've had with the Google announcements is, one, I haven't been able to really find where they are because the products are named hard, and two, even when they announce a feature, even if it's live, even if I can get to it, it hasn't quite worked yet. So that's a real bummer.

15. 26:45 – 31:13

    Pomelli and Stitch

    1. CVClaire Vo26:45

       You know, the last ones I'll show you, I was hoping to do videos, but we'll close it off with something a little bit more accessible, which is there are two tools that I think are really interesting for designers and marketings. There is Pomeli, which is their brand product, and then there is Stitch, which is their design product. Again, we've, uh, we got the Antigravities, we got the AI Studios, we got Google AI/Gemini, we've got Flow, we've got Omni, we've got Stitch, we've got Pomel. So, like Pomeli, Pomeli. We've got a lot of products. We'll put them in the show note. I wanna show you two of these products, what they release. So Pomeli is their brand and marketing content generator. They announced a lot of stuff. I'm gonna scroll through this. On Twitter, there is an agent that allows you to create a core brand identity from a website. This is very similar to Claude Design, where you can put in a website, and it will create sort of a brand identity, and then you can create websites and brand books in addition to what Pomeli is good at, which is creating campaign assets and photoshoots. Really easy, you just put in, for me, I would put in chatprd.ai. I could continue, and this agent will go ahead again and create a brand book for me. Yes, that is my website. It's gonna analyze it. Now, in case you missed it, Google has been really focused on how to articulate design systems for AI. They released a standard called Design.md that allows you to encode your product design in a Markdown file for agents to use. I'm pretty sure that's what's behind this Pomeli brand, um, book, as well as what you're gonna see in Stitch. And then what this is gonna do is it's gonna gather my colors, my content, all that kind of stuff, and build it out. I wanna show a very similar flow in Stitch, which is their design tool. Stitch released a couple features that I think are really nice, streaming into a design canvas like Figma. I'll show you how that looks in just a minute. Being able to start with existing designs, doing inline AI edits, so being able to select a component and edit it with text, and then import and o- export options, both between your production code and no-code tools like Lovable. I did a Stitch earlier today just to show what this streaming looks like. So I said, "Design me an app that covers the recent changes to Stitch in the style of the Google I/O site." I wanna paste the Google I/O site in, so let's get the website. I'm gonna paste that in. I'm gonna click Go, and you will see here, if you haven't seen Stitch, it's again kind of like a in, in-browser Figma. It's using this agentic experience, building the design system, researching, pulling in the content, and then what you'll see is this design start to stream in the right side. So again, a bunch of these surfaces are about creation. They're about creating apps. They're about creating websites. They're about creating videos. They're about creating images, and all of this is getting streamed into different apps, and it'll be interesting to see how they all come together or if they come together or if some of these things just stay in labs format. So again, you can see here Stitch is designing in my screens. It's gonna create a mobile app because I accidentally selected mobile instead of web. This is a nice experience. Again, this is where I think I feel the speed of the Flash models is actually in design and this sort of experience versus the coding experience, which is like browsing files. It should be fast. And so again, here are the features that Stitch released, um, designed by Stitch in streaming.We've got code sync, real-time streaming canvas, um, start with your own design in place edits, and this is a really interesting tool that I think, you know, more designers might wanna play with. Now, one of the things that we should call out is every AI tool ships their own version of slop. Google slop looks like Google. Claude slop look like Claude. I'm not really sure what GPT's slop look like. It doesn't necessarily look good. But this is Google Stitch, and then we'll go back to Pomel and wrap this up. It has created a brand for me. These are definitely my brand colors. This is my tagline, and now I can create... This is the new feature, create a website. So it'll be really meta to take my brand identity and create a new website in Pomeli.

16. 31:13 – 33:50

    Recap and final thoughts

    1. CVClaire Vo31:13

       And so while this is generating, we'll wrap it up by showing whether or not this did a good job. I just wanna recap for you the developer and designer focus features that were released today at Google I/O. New model family Gemini 3.5, in particular G 3.5 Fast, which is fast. Antigravity, their agentic coding tool, released a bunch of new features in their IDE, including scheduled tasks, new slash commands, um, the concept of projects, as well as an IDE similar to Claude Code. Google AI Studio integrated Google Workspace apps and data into the no-code apps that you can generate. Google Gemini, the sort of like consumer chat interface, released an upgrade to image generation, a new design, um, end-to-end, as well as a video model, Omni, that can be used in the Google AI Gemini experience, as well as in a creative tool called Flow. Flow released a bunch of character consistency, scene consistency, and video-to-video editing tools that are gonna be really interesting for production grade editing. They also released an avatar feature which does not to date work, and then two more interesting marketing and design tools. Stitch, the sort of Figma style in-browser design tool, released streaming, inline edits, and brand consistency, and then Pomeli released the ability to do websites, brand books, et cetera. And it's still generating today. Okay, and not to wrap on a total dud, but maybe it's the summary of the evening. I had time to do a diaper change. Come down and check out my Pomeli-generated website, and it's fine. So I think a lot of interesting releases today from Google, a bunch of stuff to go play with. I think the video piece is the part that I'm most excited about. Probably second is just the speed of coding that comes from these Flash models, but there are some sharp edges, some things that definitely need to be improved, and some things that actually need to be released. I cannot wait to see what you build. I can't wait to hear your feedback and what you're most excited about from Google I/O this year. Thanks for joining How I AI. [upbeat music] Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiai pod.com. See you next time.

Episode duration: 33:52