Comment by mythz
2 days ago
Gemini CLI is too slow to be useful, kind of surprised it was even offered and marketed given how painful it is to use. I thought it'd have to be damaging to the Gemini brand to get people to try it out, suffer painful UX then immediately stop using it. (Using it from Australia may also contribute to its slow perf)
Antigravity was also painful to use at launch where more queries failed then succeeded, however they've basically solved that now to the point where it's become my most used editor/IDE where I've yet to hit a quota limit, despite only being on the $20/mo plan - even when using Gemini 3 Pro as the default model. I also can't recall seeing any failed service responses after a month of full-time usage. It's not the fastest model, but very happy with its high quality output.
I expected to upgrade to a Claude Code Max plan after leaving Augment Code, but given how good Antigravity is now for its low cost, I've switched to it as my primary full-time coding assistant.
Still paying for GitHub Copilot / Claude Pro for general VS Code and CC terminal usage, but definitely getting the most value of out my Gemini AI Pro sub.
Note this is only for development, docs and other work product. For API usage in products, I primarily lean on the cheaper OSS chinese models, primarily MiniMax 2.1 for tool calling or GLM 4.7/KimiK2/DeepSeek when extra intelligence is needed (at slower perf). Gemini Flash for analyzing Image, Audio & PDFs.
Also find Nano Banana/Pro (Gemini Flash Image) to consistently generate the highest quality images vs GPT 1.5/SDXL,HiDream,Flux,ZImage,Qwen, which apparently my Pro sub includes up to 1000/day for Nano Banana or 100/day for Pro?? [1], so it's hard to justify using anything else.
If Gemini 3 Pro was a bit faster and Flash a bit cheaper (API Usage), I could easily see myself switching to Gemini for everything. If future releases get smarter, faster whilst remaining aggressively priced, in the future - I expect I will.
Your first point
> kind of surprised it was even offered and marketed given how painful it is to use. I thought it'd have to be damaging to the Gemini brand to get people to try it out, suffer painful UX then immediately stop using it.
is immediately explain by your second point
> Antigravity was also painful to use at launch where more queries failed then succeeded, however they've basically solved that now to the point where it's become my most used editor/IDE
Switching tools is easy right now. Some people pick a tool and stick with it, but it's common to jump from one to the other.
Many of us have the lowest tier subscriptions from a couple companies at the same time so we can jump between tools all the time.
Yeah except Gemini CLI is still bad after such a long time, every now and then I'll fire it up when I need a complex CLI command only to find that it hadn't improved and that I would've been better off asking an LLM instead. I don't quite understand its positioning, it's clearly a product of a lot of dev effort which I thought was for a re-imagined CLI experience, but I can't imagine anyone uses it as a daily driver for that.
I retried Antigravity a few weeks after launch after Augment Code's new pricing kicked in, and was pleasantly surprised at how reliable it became and how far I got with just the free quota, was happy to upgrade to Pro to keep using it and haven't hit a quota since. I consider it a low tier sub in cost, but enables a high/max tier sub workflow.
I've only managed to hit the Opus 4.5 limit once after a really productive 4-hour session. I went for a cup of tea and by time I came back the limit had refreshed.
I really think people are sleeping on how generous the current limits are. They are going to eat Cursor alive if they keep it this cheap.
The IDE itself remains a buggy mess, however.
Not exactly sure why you are paying for Claude Pro, doesn't GH Copilot Pro give you Claude Opus 4.5 (which I'm assuming you are using since it is SOTA for now). OpenCode lets you use GH Copilot, so you can use OpenCode's ACP adapter and plug it into the IDE
Antigravity also gives access to Opus 4.5, and OpenCode lets use Antigravity APIs too.