Developers ask Google not to discontinue Gemini 2.5 Flash

Developers on Hacker News and Reddit are asking Google not to discontinue the Gemini 2.5 Flash model. Many builders rely on it for real production work, and worry that a sudden shutdown would be costly or hard to replace in terms of price and output quality.

Around the same time, the community is also asking about the practical difference between Flash and Flash-lite for image generation (cost and quality differences), reporting repeated "permission denied" errors in Google AI Studio, and discussing that new successor models — more Flash versions, Omni, Alpha, and others — are expected soon, covering nearly everything except 3.5 Pro. Together these point to Google reshuffling its Gemini lineup quickly, leaving people who built on the current model uncertain about what happens next.