I'll count my clicks, starting from going to https://aistudio.google.com

1. "Get API Key" in the upper right on the default landing page

2. "Create API Key" in the upper right on the https://aistudio.google.com/apikey page

3. Select a project (default sure why not)

4. "Create API key"

... I dunno, that seems substantially the same as 3 clicks to me.

Is there some different more confusing path people take? Is the "Get API Key" button on the landing page new?

That's interesting. I first got mine directly from GCloud Console and it wasn't too hard to get one but wasn't as streamlined as your method either. Thanks for sharing.

Now try doing that in Vertex Studio.

Vertex is a GCP service, and it's completely in line with how any other GCP service account would work; there's multiple auth flows, some taking credentials from the environment, and others from a file. From zero-trust POV, you could make an argument that long-lived "API keys" are effectively an anti-pattern. You may like this position, or you may dislike it, but it works. These are the guys that created Zanzibar[1] after all.

Also, AWS Bedrock and Azure AI Studio are similarly set up; the big cloud providers are big on security.

[1] https://research.google/pubs/zanzibar-googles-consistent-glo...