alt Hacker NewsI didn't have that issue back when I originally created my API keys a couple years ago. Just out of curiosity I switched to a different Google account that had never interacted with AI Studio and never used Google Cloud console.
It was literally two clicks, and didn't even leave the page: the dialog asked to create a project and type in a name, I did that, clicked submit and then it was selected as the default project. One more click and I had the free tier API key.
Not saying you didn't have that experience at the time, but personally I have had zero issues with AI Studio and consider it the most dead simple/fastest dev dashboard to get started compared to the others like OpenAI/Anthropic (thanks to Google's free tier that lets you skip billing setup annoyances just to play around with Gemini).
Despite what HN threads (that are also frequently confused and talking about GCP instead) portray as universal/widespread issues or the process being complex and time consuming somehow.
Last time I used the AI studio free tier it was limited to one or two requests, effectively useless. I think people are complaining its too hard to set up a paid API key (no reason you should make paying customers spend more than a few clicks and a minute of their time to pay you)