AI Guides › Workbench
By Nigel Guy · 7 min read
The usual move is to save someone's "five free Google tools" list, open all five tabs on a Saturday, and start wiring them together without asking which ones still exist. That feels productive right up until a tool shuts down with your work inside it. Two of the five tools in the list doing the rounds have already gone, or are about to: Mixboard went offline on 28 September 2026, and Opal stops running on 17 November 2026. Opal's published country list also leaves out the UK.
The rule: treat every Google Labs tool as a loan, not a purchase. Export what you make the same day, and build the chain so any one link can be swapped out.
| Tool | What it does | Cost at time of writing | Best for | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pomelli (labs.google/pomelli) | Reads your website and builds a "Business DNA" profile (tone, fonts, colours, imagery), then makes on-brand campaign assets, brand books and simple websites | No price published; it runs as a Labs experiment | Small businesses without a brand guide | English only, 18+, and it inherits whatever is wrong with your current site |
| Mixboard | AI moodboard | Closed on 28 September 2026 | Nothing now | All boards and shared links were deleted |
| Stitch (stitch.withgoogle.com) | Turns a plain-language description into web or mobile UI, with HTML/CSS and Figma export | Free, with a daily credit limit that resets at midnight UTC | First-draft layouts | A screen design is not a working product |
| Antigravity (antigravity.google) | Desktop agent that writes and edits code inside a project folder | Free tier with a weekly quota; more on Google AI Pro (£18.99/month at time of writing) | Turning a Stitch layout into a real site | It changes files on your machine, so review every change |
| Opal (opal.google) | No-code AI mini-app builder | Stops running on 17 November 2026; the UK is not on its country list | Nothing new | Workflows do not migrate automatically |
| Skills in Gemini | Saved, reusable instructions you run with "/" in Gemini chat | Rolling out now; Google says skills are available on all Google AI subscription tiers. Check your own account | Opal's job: a repeat task you do by hand | They are instructions, not a hosted app with its own form |
The original list also mentioned five "bonus" tools without naming any that could be checked, so they are not covered here.
Sign in at labs.google/pomelli and enter your website address. Pomelli builds the Business DNA. Since May 2026 you can also upload product documents and photos, or describe the brand in a chat with the Pomelli agent. Edit the profile before you generate anything. The extracted tone and palette are only a starting point.
Paste this into the Pomelli agent, or into any chat model next to an export of your DNA. Fill in the brackets:
You are a brand editor reviewing an AI-extracted brand profile for [BUSINESS_NAME], which sells [WHAT_YOU_SELL] to [CUSTOMER].
Goal: one short, accurate brand sheet I can paste into other tools.
Steps:
1. List any tone, colour or font in the profile that conflicts with [THREE_WORDS_THAT_DESCRIBE_US].
2. Propose a corrected voice description of no more than 60 words, plus three "we say / we never say" pairs.
3. Give the palette as hex codes, each labelled with its use (background, text, accent).
4. Draft [NUMBER] social posts in that voice, each under [CHARACTER_LIMIT] characters.
Rules: do not invent awards, prices, statistics or customer quotes. If any input is missing, ask me before you write.
Before answering, check every post against the "never say" list.
Copy the final sheet into a document you own, today.
Mixboard's export route ended with the shutdown, so don't plan anything around it. If you need a visual direction, Pomelli's brand book feature gives you images, fonts and colours based on your DNA. Keep the art direction to one page: the palette, two type choices, three reference images, and one line on mood.
Open stitch.withgoogle.com, choose App or Web, and describe the screen. Stitch is available in English to people aged 18 and over in countries where Gemini is available, which includes the UK. You can export the result as HTML/CSS or send it to Figma. Stitch also offers an MCP connection so Antigravity can read your designs directly.
Design one [WEB/MOBILE] screen: the [PAGE_TYPE] for [BUSINESS_NAME].
Audience: [CUSTOMER]. The page must get them to [ONE_ACTION].
Brand: background [HEX], text [HEX], accent [HEX]; headings in [FONT], body in [FONT]; voice is [VOICE_LINE].
Sections in order: [SECTION_1], [SECTION_2], [SECTION_3]. One primary button only.
Use placeholder text marked [TBC] wherever you don't have real copy. Do not make up testimonials or logos.
Generate two or three variants, choose one, and export it.
Download it from antigravity.google/download (macOS 12 or later on Apple Silicon, Windows 10 64-bit, or Linux). Create a project, add a fresh folder, and start an agent. Choosing New worktree mode keeps its edits separate from your main folder. The /grill-me command makes the agent ask questions before it builds.
Act as a careful front-end developer. Build the attached Stitch screen as a static site in this folder.
Inputs: the exported layout at [PATH_TO_EXPORT] and the brand sheet at [PATH_TO_BRAND_SHEET].
Steps: 1) restate the plan and list the files you'll create; 2) wait for my go-ahead; 3) build; 4) run it locally and tell me how to view it.
Constraints: plain HTML/CSS unless I say otherwise; accessible colour contrast; no tracking scripts; no copy beyond the brand sheet and layout. Leave [TBC] markers in place.
Ask me before you install anything or touch files outside this folder.
Finish with a checklist of what you changed and anything you couldn't do.
The free tier has a weekly quota. Complex tasks use more of it than simple ones.
If you built anything in Opal, open it before 17 November and copy out the prompts. The files stay in My Drive > Opal, but they stop running after that date. To rebuild a repeat job, such as turning one blog post into three social posts, save it as a skill in Gemini and call it with "/":
Skill name: repurpose-post
When I paste an article, act as the social editor for [BUSINESS_NAME].
Produce: [NUMBER] posts for [PLATFORMS], each under [CHARACTER_LIMIT] characters, in the voice from the attached brand sheet.
Keep facts exactly as written in the article; flag anything that needs a source.
If the article or platform list is missing, ask for it.
Check each post against the brand sheet's "never say" list before showing it.