Site seems to be down - I can’t get the article to load - but by far the most maddening part of Vertex AI is the way it deals with multimodal inputs. You can’t just attach an image to your request. You have to use their file manager to upload the file, then make sure it gets deleted once you’re done.
That would all still be OK-ish except that their JS library only accepts a local path, which it then attempts to read using the Node `fs` API. Serverless? Better figure out how to shim `fs`!
It would be trivial to accept standard JS buffers. But it’s not clear that anyone at Google cares enough about this crappy API to fix it.