Tell HN: Google sells Gemini Code Assist, but their back end bans paying users

1 point

2 months ago

I am an individual developer who purchased the Google One AI Premium tier specifically for Gemini Code Assist in VS Code. Instead of working, Google's backend OAuth server has a severe regression where it misclassifies my standard @gmail.com account as an Enterprise user.

Because it thinks I'm Enterprise, the extension forces a shadow GCP project (like `shining-osprey-687pw`) onto my machine, actively bypassing Windows OS-level read-only file locks to inject it into my settings.json. This results in a permanent HTTP 403 Permission Denied loop.

I spent 18 hours diagnosing this server-side routing failure and provided 5 video proofs to Google One Support. Their official response? They confirmed it's a backend failure, but stated that because they are the consumer support wing, they have zero access to the developer engineering teams. They literally closed the ticket and told me to figure it out, even though I pay them for the subscription.

My bug report has been sitting on the cloud-code-vscode GitHub for a month with zero Google response. Has anyone else experienced this complete breakdown of Google's billing vs. support infrastructure?

Complete bug report- https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-code-vscode/issues/1217

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/499255000

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