Cosmic Rundown: Gemini 3.1 Pro, AI Productivity Reality Check, and Pebble Returns

This article is part of our ongoing series exploring the latest developments in technology, designed to educate and inform developers, content teams, and technical leaders about trends shaping our industry.

Google shipped a major model update, the Pebble smartwatch is coming back from the dead, and a CTO put some hard numbers on whether AI is actually making developers more productive. Here is what matters today.

Gemini 3.1 Pro Arrives

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.1 Pro, the latest iteration of their flagship model. The Hacker News discussion is active with developers testing capabilities and comparing performance against competitors.

The model is also available through Vertex AI for those building production applications. Early reports focus on improved reasoning and code generation, though the real test will be sustained performance across diverse workloads.

The 93% AI Adoption, 10% Productivity Gap

A CTO shared data showing that while 93% of developers use AI tools, productivity gains hover around 10%. The conversation raises important questions about measuring developer productivity and whether current metrics capture the right signals.

This aligns with broader discussions about AI and Solow's productivity paradox, which generated significant debate yesterday. The pattern mirrors past technology adoption cycles where measurable gains lagged adoption by years.

Pebble Production Update

The team behind the Pebble revival shared their February production update. For those who missed it, a group acquired the Pebble assets and is manufacturing new units.

The discussion covers supply chain logistics, software development progress, and what it takes to resurrect consumer hardware in 2026. A good case study in bringing back beloved products.

Does AI Make You Boring?

A thoughtful piece argues that AI makes you boring. The thesis: over-reliance on AI assistance smooths out the rough edges and idiosyncrasies that make human work interesting.

The Hacker News thread explores tensions between efficiency and originality. Worth reading alongside the productivity data above.

Developer Tools Worth Noting

Micasa lets you track your house from the terminal. A Show HN project that takes the "everything in the terminal" philosophy to home management. Discussion.

Weathr brings ASCII weather animations to your terminal with real-time data. Simple utility, well executed. Discussion.

Mini-Diarium is an encrypted, local, cross-platform journaling app. Privacy-focused with a clean implementation. Discussion.

GPU Ray Tracer in Julia demonstrates physically-based rendering with impressive results. Interesting for anyone exploring Julia for graphics work. Discussion.

Infrastructure and DevOps

Zero downtime migrations at petabyte scale from PlanetScale covers techniques for large database operations. The discussion includes practical experiences from teams running similar migrations.

Bridging Elixir and Python with Oban shows how to connect these ecosystems for background job processing. Useful for teams with mixed language stacks. Discussion.

Quick Links

• Paged Out Issue #8: The latest issue of the one-page zine for technical topics. Discussion

• ShannonMax: Optimize Emacs keybindings using information theory. Discussion

• C64 Seawolves Technical Tricks: Coding techniques from classic game development. Discussion

• Measuring AI Agent Autonomy: Anthropic's research on evaluating agent capabilities. Discussion

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