What launched at Google I/O 2026 (30-minute day 1 recap)

Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, 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 IO, 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 IO, 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 quad code to ship features in hours that used to take weeks. 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 the 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 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 cloud code with the MagicPatterns MCP to pick up where you left off. Your eng team has their AI advantage. Make MagicPatterns yours. Try it today at magicpatterns.com/howiai. 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 three five Fast, it is both rivals the intelligence of some of our favorite coding models, 5.5, Opus four seven, even four six, 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 four seven model if you like four seven, 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 …