Google IO crash-out: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Antigravity CLI, Railway takedown

2026-05-20 Wed ⏱ 23 min @t3dotgg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p334v40npw
Original title: I'm scared to make this video

Theo unloads a three-part takedown of Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash launch day: a benchmark-padded model that bleeds tokens and fails real agentic work, a closed-source Antigravity CLI replacing the promising open-source Gemini CLI, and Google Cloud bricking Railway's $2M/month account with no warning. He's filming despite previous Google retaliation against critical videos.

Gemini 3.5 Flash — looks great on charts, terrible in use

Marketing chart hides the dollar sign: $1.50/M in, $9/M out — ~3× the prior Flash, ~20× Gemini 2.0 Flash.
Heavy reasoning model: burns ~72M tokens on benchmarks vs GPT-5.5 Medium at 22M. Speed × token-waste cancels out.
End-to-end cost: 4th most expensive model on artificial-analysis benches, ~2× the cost of running 3.1 Pro to completion.
Real-world fail: only model that couldn't rewrite Theo's Fish Slop game. Broken visuals, dead mechanics, transparent PNGs missing.
Underperforms 3.1 Pro on SkateBench despite topping most agentic charts.

Antigravity CLI — closed source, broken, and kills Gemini CLI

New CLI written in Go, replaces Gemini CLI. Closed source.
Gemini CLI (100k stars, 6k merged PRs, used by Chinese labs as a base) loses Pro/Ultra API access June 18.
Bugs Theo hit live: scroll routes keystrokes into input box, Ctrl-C doesn't exit, must /exit, re-login every launch, email leaks into UI with no hide option, input box jitters.
The Antigravity demo video shows a folder literally named "Codex" — Theo reads this as the Windsurf-founder hire team biting Codex while sidelining the internal team that built community trust.

Railway downed by Google Cloud

Google Cloud blocked Railway's account (web layer + CDN), taking the platform offline; Railway pays ~$2M/month.
Precedent: UniSuper ($90B AUM) had its entire GCP private cloud deleted via "inadvertent misconfiguration"; saved only by an off-Google backup.
Theo: Azure is bad but predictable, AWS works, GCP is uniquely unreliable at scale.

The internal-politics angle

Theo names Dimitri, Jack, Gal as the people who kept him from publishing this for ~a year — open DMs, took feedback, drove Gemini CLI's direction.
All three roles absorbed by the anti-gravity team; their work retired.
Theo's read: Google has the infra, talent, TPUs, research — but cannot keep people working together long enough to ship anything coherent.

Why he's scared to publish