Ravi S. Iyer: Software Development

I was curious to know when I started blogging about my usage of AI tools. A couple of days back I searched on my active blogs and found that it was in April 2025 which is close to a year ago that I first started blogging about my usage of ChatGPT and Gemini which were the first AI tools that I used in a deliberate way. I think even before April 2025, I would have accepted some CoPilot code completion suggestions in VSCode and also perhaps tried out some chat messages with it related to some syntax errors. But those were not deliberate and sustained sessions. Also I would have tried out ChatGPT and Gemini prior to April 2025 but not to the extent that I wanted to mention that in my blogs. My first blog entry about CoPilot usage is in May 2025. Note that I have used CoPilot only in the context of software development work. I think I can conclude that it was from April 2025 or perhaps a month or two earlier, that I started seriously and deliberately using AI tools (for example, having a l...

Last updated on 28 Feb 2026 Minor update on 12 Mar 2026 Related post: Index for posts on Feb 2026 notes about Google AI Pro plan features for software development work . It has section links (jump links) for posts that have them. This post is a continuation of  Main notes about Google AI Pro plan features for software development work - Part 4 .  =================== Contents When to use NotebookLM and when to use Google Colab Notebook Colab is ideal for Gita Data cleanup work Gemini in Colab makes it an AI-driven data agent Additional Notes =================== When to use NotebookLM and when to use Google Colab Notebook # In Part 4 of this series, I had mentioned about a (free tier) ChatGPT chat: "NotebookLM vs Google Colab" which I had and which was interesting but later realized that ChatGPT was not updated with the latest features of Google Colab. So I decided not to include those chat excerpts in Part 4.   Today, 27 Feb 2026, I had a sepa...

Last minor update on 12 Mar 2026 Related post:  Index for posts on Feb 2026 notes about Google AI Pro plan features for software development work . It has section links (jump links) for posts that have them. This post is a continuation of  Main notes about Google AI Pro plan features for software development work - Part 3 .   Next part:  Part 5 ==================================== Contents Google Colab with Google AI Pro plan Workflow for using Colab to clean up Gita JSON data; Agentic feature of Colab Google No-code tools: Opal, AppSheet No-code tool solutions vs AI assisted code solutions from software developer viewpoint Google ADK (Agent Development Kit) ==================================== Google Colab with Google AI Pro plan # Me: While my Google AI Pro plan gives me good quota for Gemini 3.1 Pro model usage, does it help with usage of Google Colab too (like bigger quota of usage and perhaps more powerful compute power when need...