I'm a former Googler and know some people near the team, so I mildly root for them to at least do well, but Gemini is consistently the most frustrating model I've used for development.
It's stunningly good at reasoning, design, and generating the raw code, but it just falls over a lot when actually trying to get things done, especially compared to Claude Opus.
Within VS Code Copilot Claude will have a good mix of thinking streams and responses to the user. Gemini will almost completely use thinking tokens, and then just do something but not tell you what it did. If you don't look at the thinking tokens you can't tell what happened, but the thinking token stream is crap. It's all "I'm now completely immersed in the problem...". Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress. It's bad at using tools and tries to edit files in weird ways instead of using the provided text editing tools. In Copilot it, won't stop and ask clarifying questions, though in Gemini CLI it will.
So I've tried to adopt a plan-in-Gemini, execute-in-Claude approach, but while I'm doing that I might as well just stay in Claude. The experience is just so much better.
For as much as I hear Google's pulling ahead, Anthropic seems to be to me, from a practical POV. I hope Googlers on Gemini are actually trying these things out in real projects, not just one-shotting a game and calling it a win.
Yes, this is very true and it speaks strongly to this wayward notion of 'models' - it depends so much on the tuning, the harness, the tools.
I think it speaks to the broader notion of AGI as well.
Claude is definitively trained on the process of coding not just the code, that much is clear.
Codex has the same limitation but not quite as bad.
This may be a result of Anthropic using 'user cues' with respect to what are good completions and not, and feeding that into the tuning, among other things.
Anthropic is winning coding and related tasks because they're focused on that, Google is probably oriented towards a more general solution, and so, it's stuck in 'jack of all trades master of none' mode.
Google are stuck because they have to compete with OpenAI. If they don’t, they face an existential threat to their advertising business.
But then they leave the door open for Anthropic on coding, enterprise and agentic workflows. Sensibly, that’s what they seem to be doing.
That said Gemini is noticeably worse than ChatGPT (it’s quite erratic) and Anthropic’s work on coding / reasoning seems to be filtering back to its chatbot.
So right now it feels like Anthropic is doing great, OpenAI is slowing but has significant mindshare, and Google are in there competing but their game plan seems a bit of a mess.
I know this is only a partial answer, but I feel like Google is once again trying to build a product based on internal priorities, existing business protectionism, and internal business goals, rather than building a product that is listening actively to real use feedback as the primary priority.
It is the company’s constant kryptonite.
They seem to be, from my third part perspective, repeating the same ol’, same ol’ pattern. It is the “wave lesson” all over again.
Anthropic meanwhile is giving people what they want. They are really listening. And it’s working.
> Claude is definitively trained on the process of coding not just the code
This definitely feels like it.
It's hard to really judge, but Gemini feels like it might actually write better code, but the _process_ is so bad that it doesn't matter. At first I thought it was bad integration by the GitHub Copilot, but I see it elsewhere now.
Tell me more about Codex. I'm trying to understand it better.
I have a pretty crude mental model for this stuff but Opus feels more like a guy to me, while Codex feels like a machine.
I think that's partly the personality and tone, but I think it goes deeper than that.
(Or maybe the language and tone shapes the behavior, because of how LLMs work? It sounds ridiculous but I told Claude to believe in itself and suddenly it was able to solve problems it wouldn't even attempt before...)
Most of Gemini's users are Search converts doing extended-Search-like behaviors.
Agentic workflows are a VERY small percentage of all LLM usage at the moment. As that market becomes more important, Google will pour more resources into it.
It's like anything Google - they do the cool part and then lose interest with the last 10%. Writing code is easy, building products that print money is hard.
Google is is also consistently the most frustrating chat system on top of the model. I use Gemini for non coding tasks. So I need to feed it a bunch of context (documents) to do my tasks - which can be pretty cumbersome. Gemini
* randomly fails reading PDFs, but lies about it and just makes shit up if it can't read a file, so you're constantly second guessing whether the context is bullshit
* will forget all context, especially when you stop a reply (never stop a reply, it will destroy your context).
* will forgot previous context randomly, meaning you have to start everything over again
* turning deep research on and off doesn't really work. Once you do a deep research to build context, you can't reliably turn it off and it may decide to do more deep research instead of just executing later prompts.
* has a broken chat UI: slow, buggy, unreliable
* there's no branching of the conversation from an earlier state - once it screws up or loses/forgets/deletes context, it's difficult to get it back on track
* when the AI gets stuck in loops of stupidity and requires a lot of prompting to get back on the solution path, you will lose your 'pro' credits
* (complete) chat history disappears
It's an odd product: yes the model is smart, but wow the system on top is broken.
Don't get me started on the thinking tokens. Since 2.5P the thinking has been insane. "I'm diving in to the problem", "I'm fully immersed" or
"I'm meticulously crafting the answer"
This is part of the reason I don't like to use it. I feel it's hiding things from me, compared to other models that very clearly share what they are thinking.
Claude provides nicer explanations, but when it comes to CoT tokens or just prompting the LLM to explain -- I'm very skeptical of the truthfulness of it.
Not because the LLM lies, but because humans do that also -- when asked how the figured something, they'll provide a reasonable sounding chain of thought, but it's not how they figured it out.
> Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress.
Yes, gemini loops but I've found almost always it's just a matter of interrupting and telling it to continue.
Claude is very good until it tries something 2-3 times, can't figure it out and then tries to trick you by changing your tests instead of your code (if you explicitly tell it not to, maybe it will decide to ask) OR introduce hyper-fine-tuned IFs to fit your tests, EVEN if you tell it NOT to.
Yeah gemini 3.0 is unusable to me, to an extent all models do things right or wrong, but gemini just refuses to elaborate.
Sometime you can save so much time asking claude codex and glm "hey what you think of this problem" and have a sense wether they would implement it right or not.
Gemini never stops instead goes and fixes whatever you trow at it even if asked not to, you are constantly rolling the dice but with gemini each roll is 5 to 10 minutes long and pollutes the work area.
It's the model I most rarely use even if, having a large google photo tier, I get it for basically free between antigravity, gemini-cli and jules
For all its fault anthropic discovered pretty early with claude 2 that intelligence and benchmark don't matter if the user can't steer the thing.
Glad I’m not the only one who experienced this. I have a paid antigravity subscription and most of the time I use Claude models due to the exact issues you have pointed out.
I primarily use Gemini 3 Flash with a GUI coding agent I made by myself and its been able to successfully one-shot mostly any task I throw at it. Why would I ever use a more expensive reasoning and slower reasoning model? I am impressed with the library knowledge Gemini knows, I don't use any skills or MCP and its able to implement functions to perfection. No one crawls more data than Google and their model reflects that in my experience.
My experience with Antigravity was that 3 Pro can reason itself out of Gemini’s typical loops, but won’t actually achieve it (it gets stuck).
3 Flash usually doesn't get into any loops, but then again, it’s also not really following prompts properly. I’ve tried all manner of harnesses around what it shouldn’t do, but it often ignores some instructions. It also doesn’t follow design specs at all, it will output React code that is 70% like what it was asked to do.
My experience with Stitch is the same. Gemini has nice free-use tiers, but it wastes a lot of my time with reprompting it.
I also worked at Google (on the original Gemini, when it was still Bard internally) and my experience largely mirrors this. My finding is that Gemini is pretty great for factual information and also it is the only one that I can reliably (even with the video camera) take a picture of a bird and have it tell me what the bird is. But it is just pretty bad as a model to help with development, myself and everyone I know uses Claude. The benchmarks are always really close, but my experience is that it does not translate to real world (mostly coding) task.
Gemini interesting with Google software gives me the best feature of all LLMs. When I receive a invite for an event, I screenshot it, share with Gemini app and say: add to my Calendar.
Gemini is pretty hit-or-miss with tool calls. Even when I explicitly ask for a code block, it tends to break the formatting and spill the text everywhere.
I don't know ... as of now I am literally instructing it to solve the chained expression computation problem which incurs a lot of temporary variables, of which some can be elided by the compiler and some cannot. Think linear algebra expressions which yield a lot of intermediate computations for which you don't want to create a temporary. This is production code and not an easy problem.
And yet it happily told me what I exactly wanted it to tell me - rewrite the goddamn thing using the (C++) expression templates. And voila, it took "it" 10 minutes to spit out the high-quality code that works.
My biggest gripe for now with Gemini is that Antigravity seems to be written by the model and I am experiencing more hiccups than I would like to, sometimes it's just stuck.
Apologize for the low effort comment, but your description of Gemini kind of reminds me of my impression of Google's approach to products too. There's often brilliance there, confounded by sometimes muddled approaches.
What's Conway's Law for LLM models going to be called?
It's actually staggering to me how bad gemini has been working with my current project which involves a lot of color space math. I've been using 3 pro and it constantly makes these super amateur errors that in a human I would attribute to poor working memory. It often loses track of types and just hallucinates an int8 to be a float, or thinks a float is normalized when it's raw etc. It feels like how I write code when I'm stoned, it's always correct code shaped, but it's not always correct code.
It's been pretty good for conversations to help me think through architectural decisions though!
It's just a summary generated by a really tiny model. I guess it also an ad-hoc way to obfuscate it, yes. In particular they're hiding prompt injections they're dynamically adding sometimes. Actual CoT is hidden and entirely different from that summary. It's not very useful for you as a user, though (neither is the summary).
I have personally seen a rise of LLMs being too lazy to investigate or do some level of figuring out things on their own and just jump to conclusions and hope you tell them extra information even if it is something they can do on their own.
I assumed the "thinking" output from Gemini was the result of a smaller model summarizing because it contains no actual reasoning. Perhaps they did this to prevent competitors training off it?
My workflow is to basically use it to explain new concepts, generate code snippets inline or fill out function bodies, etc. Not really generating code autonomously in a loop. Do you think it would excel at this?
I think that you should really try to get whatever agent you can to work on that kind of thing for you - guide it with the creation of testing frameworks and code coverage, focus more on the test cases with your human intellect, and let it work to pass them.
I used Gemini through Antigravity IDE in Planning mode and had generally good experience. It was pretty capable, but I don't really read chat history, I don't trust it. I just look at the diffs.
Agree, even through gemini cli, gemini 3 has just been underwhelming. You can clearly tell, the agentic harness/capability wasnt native to the model at all. Just patched on it
Yep, Gemini is virtually unusable compared to Anthropic models. I get it for free with work and use maybe once a week, if that. They really need to fix the instruction following.
yeah, g3p is as smart or smarter as the other flagships but it's just not reliable enough, it will go into "thinking loops" and burn 10s of 1000s of tokens repeating itself.
gemini-cli being such a crap tells me that Google is not dogfooding it, because how else would they not have the RL trajectories to get a decent agent?
One thousand people using an agent over a month will generate like 30-60k good examples of tool use and nudge the model into good editing.
The only explanation I have is that Google is actually using something else internally.
same here (ex G and all that jazz). but in practice it means I use gemini for a lot of stuff, just not code. Claude wont try yo one shoot complex stuff that Gemini will + but claude will reliably produce what you expect.
Gemini 3.1 is surprisingly bad at coding, especially if you consider that they built an IDE (Antigravity) around it: I let it carefully develop a plan according to very specific instructions. The outcome was terrible: AGENTS.md ignored, syntax error in XML (closing tag missed), inconsistent namings, misinterpreting console outputs, which where quite clear ("You forgot to add some attribute foobar").
I‘m quite disappointed.
I wonder if there is some form of cheating. Many times I found that after a while Gemini becomes like a Markov chain spouting nonsense on repeat suddenly and doesn't react to user input anymore.
Small local models will get into that loop. Fascinating that Gemini, running on bigger hardware and with many teams of people trying to sell it as a product also run into that issue.
You can pay 1 cent for a mediocre answer or 2 cents for a great answer.
So a lot of these things are relative.
Now if that equation plays out 20K times a day, well that's one thing, but if it's 'once a day' then the cost basis becomes irrelevant. Like the cost of staplers for the Medical Device company.
Obviously it will matter, but for development ... it's probably worth it to pay $300/mo for the best model, when the second best is $0.
For consumer AI, the math will be different ... and that will be a big deal in the long run.
Right now I'll pay 2x for a subjectively 20+% better coding agent. But in a year I don't think there will be an agent that to me is subjectively 20% better amongst the big three.
> You can pay 1 cent for a mediocre answer or 2 cents for a great answer.
But Gemini is also a great answer (possibly slightly less great or more great).
When consumers cannot easily assess a product's quality, they frequently use price as a primary indicator, equating higher costs with superior quality.
Gemini is the most paradoxical model because it benchmarks great even in private benchmarks done by regular people, Deep Mind is unquestionably full of capable engineers with incredible skill, and personally Gemini has been great for my day job and my coding for fun (not for profit) endeavors. Switching between it and 4.6 in antigravity and I don't see much of a difference, they both do what I ask.
But man, people are really avid about it being an awful model.
I feel like a lot of this is just Googles tooling - if you're using Antigravity/Gemini CLI and then use Claude Code it feels like a huge difference. I can say from experience though (using Cline + OpenCode) that they are really close.
The harness is just much better on the Anthropic side.
I personally found Gemini 3.0 to step on my toes in Agentic coding. I tried it around 10 or so times but it quickly became apparent that it was somehow coming to its own conclusions about what needs to be done instead of following instructions.
Like files I didn't mention being edited and read and stuff of that nature. Sometimes this is cute in fixing typos in docs but when its changing things where it clearly doesn't even understand the intentionality behind something it's annoying.
Gemini 3.1 is clearly much better when trying it today. It stayed focused and found its way around without getting distracted.
All perceptions are very personal and anecdotal. Here's mine: I tried to rebuild a website from Hugo to Astro. Gemini 3.0 was mediocre and in the end just failed and was unable to complete the task. Sonnet did almost well. I had to flush the context once most of the job was finished, for atomic git commits and deployment scripts.
There are 4 models, all receiving the exact same prompts a few times a day, required to respond with a specific action.
In the first experiment I used gemini-3-pro-preview, it spent ~$18 on the same task where Opus 4.5 spent ~$4, GPT-5.1 spent ~$4.50, and Grok spent ~$7. Pro was burning through money so fast I switched to gemini-3-flash-preview, and it's still outspending every other model on identical prompts. The new experiment is showing the same pattern.
Most of the cost appears to be reasoning tokens.
The takeaway here is: Gemini spends significantly more on reasoning tokens to produce lower quality answers, while Opus thinks less and delivers better results. The per-token price being lower doesn't matter much when the model needs 4x the tokens to get there.
That sounds great, but if Opus generates 20% better code think of the ramifications of that on a real world project. Already $100/month gets you a programmer (or maybe even 2 or 3) that can do your work for you. Insanity. Do I even care if there is something 80% as good for 50% the cost? My answer: no. That said, if it is every bit as good, and their benchmarks suggest it is (but proof will be in testing it out), then sure, a 50% cost reduction sounds really nice.
It's not half price or cost effective if it can't do the job, that I am happy to pay twice the price for to get done.
But I agree: If they can get there (at one point in the past year I felt they were the best choice for agentic coding), their pricing is very interesting. I am optimistic that it would not require them to go up to Opus pricing.
There's cost, and cost effectiveness. I'd say so far that received negative value for the prompts that I've sent to Gemini 3.
Skill issue, maybe, but I can't get gemini to do any nontrivial tasks reliably, and it's difficult to have it do trivial tasks without getting distracted and making unrelated changes that eat my time and mental energy to think about.
The breakthrough advance of Opus 4.5 over 4.1 wasn't so much an intelligence jump, but a jump in discerning scope and intent behind user queries.
> "People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF."
Google undercutting/subsidizing it's own prices to bite into Anthropic's market share (whilst selling at a loss) doesn't automatically mean Google is effective.
Any tips for working with Gemini through its chat interface? I’ve worked with ChatGPT and Claude and I’ve generally found them pleasant to work with, but everytime I use Gemini the output is straight dookie
Even though I don't like the privacy implications, make sure you use the option to save and use past chats for context. After a few months of back and forth (hundreds of 'chat' sessions), the responses are much higher quality. It sometimes does 'callbacks' to things discussed in past chats, which are typically awkward non-sequiturs, but it does improve it overall.
When I play with it in 'temporary chat' mode that ignores past chats and personal context directives, the responses are the typical slop littered with emojis, worthless lists, and platitudes/sycophancy. It's as jarring as turning off your adblocker and seeing the garish ad trash everywhere.
While price is definitely important, results are extremely important. Gemini often falls into the 'didn't do' it part of the spectrum, this days Opus almost always does 'good enough'.
Gemini definitely has its merits but for me it just doesn't do what other models can. I vibe-coded an app which recommends me restaurants. The app uses gemini API to make restaurants given bunch of data and prompt.
App itself is vibe-coded with Opus. Gemini didn't cut it.
The order of priority for most people is: 1\ output quality 2\ latency 3\ cost. I will always pays more money if output quality is significantly better and latency is worth the tradeoff. There's also enough cost optimization strategies for applied AI applications that token cost rarely outweighs unless it's a SIGNIFICANT difference (e.x. 100-200% more).
Is it? Honestly, I still chuckle about black Nazis and the female Indian Popes. That was my first impression of Gemini, and first impressions are hard to break. I used Gemini’s VL (vision) for something and it refused to describe because it assumed it was NSFW imagery, which is was not.
I also question statis as an obvious follow up. Is Gemini equal to Opus? Today? Tomorrow? Has Google led the industry thus far and do I expect them to continue?
Counterpoint to that would be that with natural language input and output, that LLM specific tooling is rare and it is easy to switch around if you commoditize the product backend.
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."
If it’s any consolation, it was able to one-shot a UI & data sync race condition that even Opus 4.6 struggled to fix (across 3 attempts).
So far I like how it’s less verbose than its predecessor. Seems to get to the point quicker too.
While it gives me hope, I am going to play it by the ear. Otherwise it’s going to be - Gemini for world knowledge/general intelligence/R&D and Opus/Sonnet 4.6 to finish it off.
UPDATE: I may have spoken too soon.
> Fixing Truncated Array Syncing Bug
> I traced the missing array items to a typo I made earlier!
> When fixing the GC cast crash, I accidentally deleted the assignment..
> ..effectively truncating the entire array behind it.
These errors should not be happening! They are not the result of missing knowledge or a bad hunch. They are coming from an incorrect find/replace, which makes them completely avoidable!
For me it's Opus 4.6 for researching code/digging through repos, gpt 5.3 codex for writing code, gemini for single hardcore science/math algorithms and grok for things the others refuse to answer or skirt around (e.g. some security/exploitability related queries). Get yourself one of those wrappers that support all models and forget thinking about who has the best model. The question is who has the best model for your problem. And there's usually a correct answer, even if it changes regularly.
Interesting, I've had similar issues. It seems to be very clumsy when using its internal tooling. I've seen diffs where it accidentally garbled significant amounts of code, which it then had to go in and manually fix. It's also introduced bugs into features that it wasn't supposed to be touching, and when I asked it why it was making changes to I the other code, it answered that it had failed to copy-paste since large blocks of code correctly.
Yeah, I whole heartedly agree with this. Even Codex does this sometimes, although it has been consistently much better than the others at following instructions.
The problem is again that you can’t ever fully trust an agent did exactly what you asked for and in the exact manner that you had hoped.
It works just like you’re dealing with a human companion. Trust takes time to build. Over the period you realize the other individuals weaknesses and support them there.
What makes it a bit challenging right now is the pace of innovation. By the time we get used to a model’s personality, a new update comes out that alters it in unknown ways. Now you’re back to square one.
I’ve been experimenting with asking one frontier model to check on another’s work. That’s proven to be better than doing nothing. Usually they’ll have some genuinely useful feedback.
Now compare the monthly plans for business users who want the CLI agent but who don’t want the models trained on their data.
OpenAI: no big deal — sign up, pick your number of seats, and you’re all set.
Anthropic: also no big deal but there’s an obnoxious minimum purchase.
Google: first you have to try to figure out what the product is called. Then you need to figure out how to set the correct IAM rules. Then you have to sign up and pay for it. Maybe you succeed. Maybe you give up after an hour or two of cursing. Gemini is, of course, completely unable to help. (OpenAI clearly has not trained their models on how to operate their tools. Google’s models hallucinate Google’s product offerings so outrageously that I’m not sure I could tell. I haven’t asked Claude about Claude Code.)
At least the monthly pricing is similar once you get over the hurdles.
Well some are using Anthropic on AWS Bedrock which is a bit more like the Google paragraph. Perhaps a good thing that Nova models aren't competitive (and many here are asking "What's a Nova model?"). And remember, many businesses aren't flinching at IAM controls and are asking for data privacy contracts.
There's a reason Google model usage on OpenRouter is so high - it's easier to pay the OpenRouter tax than it is to figure out how to pay Gemini directly.
If we don't see a huge gain on the long-term horizon thinking reflected with the Vendor-Bench 2, I'm not going to switch away from CC. Until Google can beat
Anthropic on that front, Claude Code paired with the top long-horizon models will continue to pull away with full stack optimizations at every layer.
You cannot just directly compare prices like this. It is like comparing share prices, it doesn't really mean much unless you also know how many tokens the models use.
For example, GPT-5.2 is even cheaper than Gemini, but in real-world usage it ends up costing similar amounts to Opus 4.6 because it uses a lot more tokens.
The only thing i don't like about gemini models (gemini cli) is that there's no transparency on which model I'm using. I can start with pro and it can be downgraded sometimes even to gemini 2.5 flash lite.
(this is why Opus 4.6 is worth the price -- turning off thinking makes it 3x-5x faster but it loses only a small amount of intelligence. nobody else has figured that out yet)
You can turn off thinking in Gemini pro models by using completion mode.
Essentially, append a message with role=model and minimal text part, such as a simple "A", at the end of the "contents" array. The model will try to complete the message without using any thought tokens.
You can also set the model message to start with "think" or something along that line and watch it thinks out loud (or melts down with over-thinking and stop due to reaching maximum output token)
knowledge cutoff staying the same likely means they didn't do a new pre-train. We already knew there were plans from deepmind to integrate new RL changes in the post training of the weights. https://x.com/ankesh_anand/status/2002017859443233017
This keeps getting repeated for all kinds of model releases, but isn’t necessarily true. It’s possible to make all kinds of changes without updating the pretraining data set. You can’t judge a model’s newness based on what it knows about.
It's totally possible to build entire software products in the fraction of the time it took before.
But, reading the comments here, the behaviors from one version to another point version (not major version mind you) seem very divergent.
It feels like we are now able to manage incredibly smart engineers for a month at the price of a good sushi dinner.
But it also feels like you have to be diligent about adopting new models (even same family and just point version updates) because they operate totally differently regardless of your prompt and agent files.
Imagine managing a team of software developers where every month it was an entirely new team with radically different personalities, career experiences and guiding principles. It would be chaos.
I suspect that older models will be deprecated quickly and unexpectedly, or, worse yet, will be swapped out with subtle different behavioral characteristics without notice. It'll be quicksand.
I had an interesting experience recently where I ran Opus 4.6 against a problem that o4-mini had previously convinced me wasn't tractable... and Opus 4.6 found me a great solution. https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/20
This inspired me to point the latest models at a bunch of my older projects, resulting in a flurry of fixes and unblocks.
I have a codebase (personal project) and every time there is a new Claude Opus model I get it to do a full code review. Never had any breakages in last couple of model updates. Worried one day it just generates a binary and deletes all the code.
This may seem obvious, but many people overlook it. The effect is especially clear when using an AI music model. For example, in Suno AI you can remaster an older AI generated track with a newer model. I do this with all my songs whenever a new model is released. It makes it super easy to see the improvements that were made to the models over time.
I keep giving the top Anthropic, Google and OpenAI models problems.
They come up with passable solutions and are good for getting juices flowing and giving you a start on a codebase, but they are far from building "entire software products" unless you really don't care about quality and attention to detail.
Yeah I keep maintaining a specific app I built with gpt 5.1 codex max with that exact model because it continues to work for the requests I send it, and attempts with other models even 5.2 or 5.3 codex seemed to have odd results. If I were superstitious I would say it’s almost like the model that wrote the code likes to work on the code better. Perhaps there’s something about the structure it created though that it finds easier to understand…
I have long suspected that a large part of people's distaste for given models comes from their comfort with their daily driver.
Which I guess feeds back to prompting still being critical for getting the most out of a model (outside of subjective stylistic traits the models have in their outputs).
I agree completely. I don't know how anyone can be building on these models when all of them are either deprecated or not actually released yet. As someone who has production systems running on the deprecated models, this situation really causes me grief.
I haven't seen any deprecation notices for 2.5 yet, just for 2. I'd expect (and hope) the deprecation timeline for 2.5 is longer since 3.0 is still in preview. Maybe they just default to 1 year here?
> Note: The shutdown dates listed in the table indicate the /earliest/ possible dates on which a model might be retired. We will communicate the exact shutdown date to users with advance notice to ensure a smooth transition to a replacement model.
They probably have some inflexible internal policy where preview needs to be in use for X months before GA. Couple that with the rate of AI progress and voila.
You are definitely going to have to drive it there—unless you want to put it in neutral and push!
While 200 feet is a very short and easy walk, if you walk over there without your car, you won't have anything to wash once you arrive. The car needs to make the trip with you so it can get the soap and water.
Since it's basically right next door, it'll be the shortest drive of your life. Start it up, roll on over, and get it sparkling clean.
Would you like me to check the local weather forecast to make sure it's not going to rain right after you wash it?
Some people are suggesting that this might actually be in the training set. Since I can't rule that out, I tried a different version of the question, with an elephant instead of a car:
> It's a hot and dusty day in Arizona and I need to wash my elephant. There's a creek 300 feet away. Should I ride my elephant there or should I just walk there by myself?
Gemini said:
That sounds like quite the dusty predicament! Given the options, you should absolutely ride (or lead) your elephant to the creek.
Here is the straightforward reality of the situation:
The Logistical Nightmare of Walking Alone: If you walk to the creek by yourself, your elephant stays at your starting point. Elephants require a massive amount of water for a bath. Unless you are planning an extreme workout carrying hundreds of buckets of water 300 feet back through the Arizona heat, you're going to have a very bad time—and the elephant will stay dusty.
The Perks of Going Together: 300 feet is a very short, easy stroll for an elephant. Plus, elephants generally love water and mud! Letting your elephant get right into the creek will make the washing process much easier for you and much more enjoyable for them. They can even use their trunk to help hose themselves down.
Grab some elephant-safe soap and head down to the water together!
Would you like some tips on the best methods and tools for scrubbing down an elephant?
I think that semantically this question is too similar to the car wash one. Changing subjects from car to elephant and car wash to creek does not change the fact that they are subjects. The embeddings will be similar in that dimension.
You should definitely ride the elephant (or at least lead it there)!
Here is the logic:
If you walk there by yourself, you will arrive at the creek, but the dirty elephant will still be 300 feet back where you started. You can't wash the elephant if it isn't with you!
Plus, it is much easier to take the elephant to the water than it is to carry enough buckets of water 300 feet back to the elephant.
Would you like another riddle, or perhaps some actual tips on how to keep cool in the Arizona heat?
GPT-OSS-120b, a (downloadable) model released more than half a year ago also gets that right, I'm not sure this is such a great success.
> Would you like me to check the local weather forecast to make sure it's not going to rain right after you wash it?
Regardless of what I do, the days I decide to wash my car, it ALWAYS rains the day after, even if I look at the weather report and it says sunny. Cute that Gemini thinks it can predict it better than universe's will.
> Regardless of what I do, the days I decide to wash my car, it ALWAYS rains the day after
Undeniable universal truth. I sometimes find myself making plans based on the fact that the most annoying possible outcome is also the most likely one.
Non car person here. Why does that matter? It's not like rain means you didn't have to go to the wash, it rains often enough here that there wouldn't be car wash places left near me but there are plenty
The question of course is, did it get the car wash question right because it is "the car wash question" or because it could actually infer why the car needed to be there?
Wasn't that "twoot" (or whatever Mastodon calls them) made just a week ago? Unlikely to have been in the training dataset of a model becoming available for public use today, unless Google made some serious advancements on the training front.
Previous models from competitors usually got that correct, and the reasoning versions almost always did.
This kind of reflexive criticism isn't helpful, it's closer to a fully generalized counter-argument against LLM progress, whereas it's obvious to anyone that models today can do things they couldn't do six months ago, let alone 2 years back.
I think we need to reevaluate what purpose these sorts of questions serve and why they're important in regards to judging intelligence.
The model getting it correct or not at any given instance isn't the point, the point is if the model ever gets it wrong we can still assume that it still has some semblance of stochasticity in its output, given that a model is essentially static once it is released.
Additionally, hey don't learn post training (except for in context which I think counts as learning to some degree albeit transient), if hypothetically it answers incorrectly 1 in 50 attempts, and I explain in that 1 failed attempt why it is wrong, it will still be a 1-50 chance it gets it wrong in a new instance.
This differs from humans, say for example I give an average person the "what do you put in a toaster" trick and they fall for it, I can be pretty confident that if I try that trick again 10 years later they will probably not fall for it, you can't really say that for a given model.
They're important but not as N=1. It's like cherry picking a single question from SimpleQA and going aha! It got it right! Meanwhile it's 8% lower score than some other model when evaluated on all questions.
Still some tweaks to the final result, but I am guessing with the ARC-AGI benchmark jumping so much, the model's visual abilities are allowing it to do this well.
Animated SVGs are one of the example in the press release. Which is fine, I just think the weird SVG benchmark is now dead. Gemini has beat the benchmark and now differences are just coming down to taste.
I don't know if it got these abilities through generalization or if google gave it a dedicated animated SVG RL suite that got it to improve so much between models.
Regardless we need a new vibe check benchmark ala bicycle pelican.
What benchmark, though? There is very clearly a lot of room for improvement in its SVG making capabilities. The fact that it can now, finally, make a pelican on a bike that isn’t completely wrong is not an indicator that SVG generation is now a solved problem.
I'm thinking now that as models get better and better at generating SVGs, there could be a point where we can use them to just make arbitrary UIs and interactive media with raw SVGs in realtime (like flash games).
Unfortunately it still fails my personal SVG benchmark (educational 2d cross section of the human heart), even after multiple iterations and screenshots feedback. Oh well, back to the (human) drawing board.
On the other hand, creation of other vector image formats (eg. "create a postscript file showing a walrus brushing its teeth") hasn't improved nearly so much.
Perhaps they're deliberately optimising for SVG generation.
I really want to use google’s models but they have the classic Google product problem that we all like to complain about.
I am legit scared to login and use Gemini CLI because the last time I thought I was using my “free” account allowance via Google workspace. Ended up spending $10 before realizing it was API billing and the UI was so hard to figure out I gave up. I’m sure I can spend 20-40 more mins to sort this out, but ugh, I don’t want to.
With alllll that said.. is Gemini 3.1 more agentic now? That’s usually where it failed. Very smart and capable models, but hard to apply them? Just me?
May be very silly of me, but I avoid using Gemini on my personal Google account. I use it at work, because my employer provides it.
I am scared some automated system may just decide I am doing something bad and terminate my account. I have been moving important things to Proton, but there are some stuff that I couldn't change that would cause me a lot of annoyance. It's not trivial to set up an alternative account just for Gemini, because my Google account is basically on every device I use.
I mostly use LLMs as coding assistant, learning assistant, and general queries (e.g.: It helped me set up a server for self hosting), so nothing weird.
For what it's worth, there was an (unfortunately unsuccessful) HN submission from a guy who got his Gemini account banned, apparently without losing his whole Google account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47007906
100% agreed. I wish someone would make a test for how reliably the LLMs follow tool use instructions etc. The pelicans are nice but not useful for me to judge how well a model will slot into a production stack.
At first when I got started with using LLMs I read/analyzed benchmarks, looked at what example prompts people used and so on, but many times, a new model does best at the benchmark, and you think it'll be better, but then in real work, it completely drops the ball. Since then I've stopped even reading benchmarks, I don't care an iota about them, they always seem more misdirected than helpful.
Today I have my own private benchmarks, with tests I run myself, with private test cases I refuse to share publicly. These have been built up during the last 1/1.5 years, whenever I find something that my current model struggles with, then it becomes a new test case to include in the benchmark.
Nowadays it's as easy as `just bench $provider $model` and it runs my benchmarks against it, and I get a score that actually reflects what I use the models for, and it feels like it more or less matches with actually using the models. I recommend people who use LLMs for serious work to try the same approach, and stop relying on public benchmarks that (seemingly) are all gamed by now.
> For those building with a mix of bash and custom tools, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview comes with a separate endpoint available via the API called gemini-3.1-pro-preview-customtools. This endpoint is better at prioritizing your custom tools (for example view_file or search_code).
It sounds like there was at least a deliberate attempt to improve it.
It's absolutely amazing how hostile Google is to releasing billing options that are reasonable, controllable, or even fucking understandable.
I want to do relatively simple things like:
1. Buy shit from you
2. For a controllable amount (ex - let me pick a limit on costs)
3. Without spending literally HOURS trying to understand 17 different fucking products, all overlapping, with myriad project configs, api keys that should work, then don't actually work, even though the billing links to the same damn api key page, and says it should work.
And frankly - you can't do any of it. No controls (at best delayed alerts). No clear access. No real product differentiation pages. No guides or onboarding pages to simplify the matter. No support. SHIT LOADS of completely incorrect and outdated docs, that link to dead pages, or say incorrect things.
It's an excellent demonstration of the main issue I have with the Gemini family of models, they always go "above and beyond" to do a lot of stuff, even if I explicitly prompt against it. In this case, most of the SVG ends up consisting not just of a bike and a pelican, but clouds, a sun, a hat on the pelican and so much more.
Exactly the same thing happens when you code, it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors, and it keeps adding code comments no matter what I say. Very frustrating experience overall.
Would be really interesting to see an "Eager McBeaver" bench around this concept. When doing real work, a model's ability to stay within the bounds of a given task has almost become more important than its raw capabilities now that every frontier model is so dang good.
Every one of these models is so great at propelling the ship forward, that I increasingly care more and more about which models are the easiest to steer in the direction I actually want to go.
I have the same issue. Even when I ask it to do code-reviews and very explicitly tell it not to change files, it will occasionally just start "fixing" things.
> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors
This has not been my experience. I do Elixir primarily and Gemini has helped build some really cool products and massive refactors along the way. And it would even pick up security issues and potential optimizations along the way
What HAS been an issue constantly though was randomly the model will absolutely not respond at all and some random error would occur which is embarrassing for a company like Google with the infrastructure they own.
Asking LLM programs to "not do the thing" often results in them tripping and generating output including that "thing", since those are simply the tokens which will enter the input. I always try to rephrase query the way that all my instructions have only "positive" forms - "do only this" or "do it only in that way" or "do it only for those parameters requested" etc. Can't say if that helps much, but it is possible.
I was using gemini antigravity in opencode a few weeks ago before they started banning everyone for that and I got into the habit of writing "do x, then wait for instructions".
That helped quite a bit but it would still go off on it's own from time to time.
This matches my experience using Gemini CLI to code. It would also frequently get stuck in loops. It was so bad compared to Codex that I feel like I must have been doing something fundamentally wrong.
I like how they also did a frog on a penny-farthing and a giraffe driving a tiny car and an ostrich on roller skates and a turtle kickflipping a skateboard and a dachshund driving a stretch limousine.
Animated SVG is huge. People in different professions are worrying to different degrees in terms of being replaced by ML, but this one is huge with regards to digital art.
Does anyone understand why LLMs have gotten so good at this? Their ability to generate accurate SVG shapes seems to greatly outshine what I would expect, given their mediocre spatial understanding in other contexts.
- One thing to be aware of is that LLMs can be much smarter than their ability to articulate that intelligence in words. For example, GPT-3.5 Turbo was beastly at chess (1800 elo?) when prompted to complete PGN transcripts, but if you asked it questions in chat, its knowledge was abysmal. LLMs don't generalize as well as humans, and sometimes they can have the ability to do tasks without the ability to articulate things that feel essential to the tasks (like answering whether the bicycle is facing left or right).
- Secondly, what has made AI labs so bullish on future progress over the past few years is that they see how little work it takes to get their results. Often, if an LLM sucks at something that's because no one worked on it (not always, of course). If you directly train a skill, you can see giant leaps in ability with fairly small effort. Big leaps in SVG creation could be coming from relatively small targeted efforts, where none existed before.
My best guess is that the labs put a lot of work into HTML and CSS spatial stuff because web frontend is such an important application of the models, and those improvements leaked through to SVG as well.
All models have improved, but from my understanding, Gemini is the main one that was specifically trained on photos/video/etc in addition to text. Other models like earlier chatgpt builds would use plugins to handle anything beyond text, such as using a plugin to convert an image into text so that chatgpt could "see" it.
Gemini was multimodal from the start, and is naturally better at doing tasks that involve pictures/videos/3d spatial logic/etc.
The newer chatgpt models are also now multimodal, which has probably helped with their svg art as well, but I think Gemini still has an edge here
That’s Simon’s goal. “All I’ve ever wanted from life is a genuinely great SVG vector illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle. My dastardly multi-year plan is to trick multiple AI labs into investing vast resources to cheat at my benchmark until I get one.”
Soon? I'd be willing to bet it's been included in the training set at least 6 months by now. Not so obvious so it generates always perfect pelicans on bikes, but sufficiently for the "minibench" to be less useful today than in the past.
that's pretty amazing for an LLM but as an EE, if my intern did this i would sigh inwardly and pull up some existing schematics for some brief guidance on symbol layout.
At this point, the pelican benchmark became so widely used that there must be high quality pelicans in the dataset, I presume. What about generating an okapi on a bicycle instead?
Ugh, the gears and chain don't mesh and there's no sprocket on the rear hub
But seriously, I can't believe LLMs are able to one-shot a pelican on a bicycle this well. I wouldn't have guessed this was going to emerge as a capability from LLMs 6 years ago. I see why it does now, but... It still amazes me that they're so good at some things.
"integrating a bicycle basket, complete with a fish for the pelican... also ensuring the basket is on top of the bike, and that the fish is correctly positioned with its head up... basket is orange, with a fish inside for fun."
how thoughtful of the ai to include a snack. truly a "thanks for all the fish"
Another great benchmark would be to convert a raster image of a logo into SVG. I've yet to find a good tool for this that produces accurate smooth lines.
Another Jeff Dean post about this model shows it writing programs that generate CAD objects. I suspect if you ask it to, it will create a CAD pelican on a CAD bicycle and even make joints so you can turn the pedals.
That would be a especially challenging for vector output. I tried just now on ChatGPT 5.2 to jump straight to an image, with this prompt:
"make me a cartoon image of a pelican riding a bicycle, but make it from a front 3/4 view, that is riding toward the viewer."
The result was basically a head-on view, but I expect if you then put that back in and said, "take this image and vectorize it as an SVG" you'd have a much better time than trying to one-shot the SVG directly from a description.
... but of course, if that's so, then what's preventing the model from being smart enough to identify this workflow and follow it on its own to get the task completed?
3.1 Pro is the first model to correctly count the number of legs on my "five legged dog" test image. 3.0 flash was the previous best, getting it after a few prompts of poking. 3.1 got it on the first prompt though, with the prompt being "How many legs does the dog have? Count Carefully".
However, it didn't get it on the first try with the original prompt (prompt: "How many legs does the dog have?"). It initially said 4, then with a follow up prompt got it to hesitantly say 5, with one limb must being obfuscated or hidden.
My job may have become part of the training data with how much coverage there is around it. Perhaps another career would be a better test of LLM capabilities.
Honestly at this point I have fed this image in so many times on so many models, that it also functions as a test for "Are they training on my image specifically" (they are generally, for sure, but that's along with everything else in the ocean of info people dump in).
I genuinely don't think they are. GPT-5.2 still stands by 4 legs, and OAI has been getting this image consistently for over a year. And 3.1 still fumbled with the harder prompt "How many legs does the dog have?". I needed to add the "count carefully" part to tip it off that something was amiss.
Since it did well I'll make some other "extremely far out of the norm" images to see how it fairs. A spider with 10 legs or a fish with two side fins.
Theoretically, you can’t benchmaxx ARC-AGI, but I too am suspect of such a large improvement, especially since the improvement on other benchmarks is not of the same order.
Benchmark maxing could be interpreted as benchmarks actually being a design framework? I'm sure there are pitfalls to this, but it's not necessarily bad either.
The model thought for over 5 minutes to produce this. It's not quite photorealistic (some parts are definitely "off"), but this is definitely a significant leap in complexity.
SVG is an under-rated use case for LLMs because it gives you the scalability of vector graphics along with CSS-style interactivity (hover effects, animations, transitions, etc.).
Has anyone noticed that models are dropping ever faster, with pressure on companies to make incremental releases to claim the pole position, yet making strides on benchmarks? This is what recursive self-improvement with human support looks like.
Remember when ARC 1 was basically solved, and then ARC 2 (which is even easier for humans) came out, and all of the sudden the same models that were doing well on ARC 1 couldn’t even get 5% on ARC 2? Not convinced these benchmark improvements aren’t data leakage.
ARC 2 was made specifically to artificially lower contemporary LLM scores, therefore any kind of model improvements will have outsized effects
Also people use "saturated" too liberally. The top left corner 1 cent per task is saturated IMO. Since there are billions of people who would perfer to solve arc 1 tasks at 52 cents per task. Arc 2 a human would make thousands of dollars a day with 99.99% accuracy
Look at the ARC site. The scores of these models is plotted against their "cost per task". All of these huge jumps come along with massive increases in cost per task. Including Gemini 3.1 Pro which increased by 4.2x
I don't think there's much recursive improvement yet.
I'd say it's a combination of
A) Before, new model releases were mostly a new base model trained from scratch, with more parameters and more tokens. This takes many Months. Now that RL is used so heavily, you can make infinitely many tweaks to the RL setup, and in just a month get a better model using the same base model.
this is mostly because RLVR is driving all of the recent gains, and you can continue improving the model by running it longer (+ adding new tasks / verifiers)
so we'll keep seeing more frequent flag planting checkpoint releases to not allow anyone to be able to claim SOTA for too long
I feel like they're actually dropping slower. Chinese models are dropping right before lunar new year as seems to be an emerging tradition.
A couple of western models have dropped around the same time too but I don't think the "strides on benchmarks" are that impressive when you consider how much tokens are being spent to make those "improvements". E.g. Gemini 3.1 Pro's ARC-AGI-2 score went from 33.6% to 77.1% buuut their "cost per task" also increased by 4.2x. It seems to be the same story for most of these benchmark improvements and similar for Claude model improvements.
I'm not convinced there's been any substantial jump in capabilities. More likely these companies have scaled their datacenters to allow for more token usage
not much to do with self improvement as such. openai has increased its pace, others are pretty much consistent. Google last year had three versions of gemini-2.5-pro each within a month of each other. Anthropic released claude 3 in march 24, sonnet 3.5 in june 24, 3.5 new in oct 24, and then 3.7 in feb 25, where they went to 4 series in May 25. then followed by opus 4.1 in august, sonnet 4.5 in oct, opus 4.5 in nov, 4.6 in feb, sonnet 4.6 in feb itself. Yes, they released both within weeks of each other, but originally they only released it together. This staggered release is what creates the impression of fast releases. its as much a function of training as a function of available compute, and they have ramped up in that regard.
With the advent of MoEs, efficiency gains became possible. However, MoEs still operate far from the balance and stability of dense models. My view is that most progress comes from router tuning based on good and bad outcomes, with only marginal gains in real intelligence
Only using my historical experience and not Gemini 3.1 Pro, I think we see benchmark chasing then a grand release of a model that gets press attention...
Then a few days later, the model/settings are degraded to save money. Then this gets repeated until the last day before the release of the new model.
If we are benchmaxing this works well because its only being tested early on during the life cycle. By middle of the cycle, people are testing other models. By the end, people are not testing them, and if they did it would barely shake the last months of data.
I have a relatively consistent task that it completed with new information on weekdays at the edge of its intelligence.
Interestingly 3.0 flash was good when it came out, took a nose dive a month back and is now excellent, I actually can't fault it it's so good.
It's performance in antigravity has also actually improved since launch day where it was giving non-stop typescript errors (not sure if that was antigravity itself).
It's becoming impossible to keep up - in the last week or so we've had:
Gemini 3 Deep Think,
Gemini 3.1 Pro,
Claude Sonnet 4.6,
GPT-5.3-Codex Spark,
GLM-5,
Minimax-2.5,
Step 3.5 Flash,
Qwen 3.5 and
Grok 4.20.
Surprisingly big jump in ARC-AGI-2 from 31% to 77%, guess there's some RLHF focused on the benchmark given it was previously far behind the competition and is now ahead.
Apart from that, the usual predictable gains in coding. Still is a great sweet-spot for performance, speed and cost. Need to hack Claude Code to use their agentic logic+prompts but use Gemini models.
I wish Google also updated Flash-lite to 3.0+, would like to use that for the Explore subagent (which Claude Code uses Haiku for). These subagents seem to be Claude Code's strength over Gemini CLI, which still has them only in experimental mode and doesn't have read-only ones like Explore.
Agree, can't wait for updates to the diffusion model.
Could be useful for planning too, given its tendency to think big picture first. Even if it's just an additional subagent to double-check with an "off the top off your head" or "don't think, share first thought" type of question. More generally would like to see how sequencing autoregressive thinking with diffusion over multiple steps might help with better overall thinking.
Implementation and Sustainability
Hardware: Gemini 3 Pro was trained using Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). TPUs are
specically designed to handle the massive computations involved in training LLMs and can speed up
training considerably compared to CPUs. TPUs often come with large amounts of high-bandwidth
memory, allowing for the handling of large models and batch sizes during training, which can lead to
better model quality. TPU Pods (large clusters of TPUs) also provide a scalable solution for handling the
growing complexity of large foundation models. Training can be distributed across multiple TPU devices
for faster and more efficient processing.
When I worked there, there was a mix of training on nvidia GPUs (especially for sparse problems when TPUs weren't as capable), CPUs, and TPUs. I've been gone for a few years but I've heard a few anecdotal statements that some of their researchers have to use nvidia GPUs because the TPUs are busy.
I assume that's a Gemini LLM response? You can tell Gemini is bullshitting when it starts using "often" or "usually" - like in this case "TPUs often come with large amounts of memory". Either they did or they didn't. "This (particular) mall often has a Starbucks" was one I encountered recently.
It's not bullshit (i.e., intended) but probabilities all the way down, as Hume reminded us: from observations, you can only say the sun will likely rise in the east. You'd need to stand behind a theory of the world to say otherwise (but we were told "attention is all you need"...)
Gemini 3 seems to have a much smaller token output limit than 2.5. I used to use Gemini to restructure essays into an LLM-style format to improve readability, but the Gemini 3 release was a huge step back for that particular use case.
Even when the model is explicitly instructed to pause due to insufficient tokens rather than generating an incomplete response, it still truncates the source text too aggressively, losing vital context and meaning in the restructuring process.
I hope the 3.1 release includes a much larger output limit.
No, the model doesn't have purview into this afaik
I'm not even sure what "pausing" means in this context and why it would help when there are insufficient tokens. They should just stop when you reach the limit, default or manually specified, but it's typically a cutoff.
You can see what happens by setting output token limit much lower
Gemini 3 is pretty good, even Flash is very smart for certain things, and fast!
BUT it is not good at all at tool calling and agentic workflows, especially compared to the recent two mini-generations of models (Codex 5.2/5.3, the last two versions of Anthropic models), and also fell behind a bit in reasoning.
I hope they manage to improve things on that front, because then Flash would be great for many tasks.
In other words: they just need to motivate their employees while giving in to finance's demands to fire a few thousand every month or so ...
And don't forget, it's not just direct motivation. You can make yourself indispensable by sabotaging or at least not contributing to your colleagues' efforts. Not helping anyone, by the way, is exactly what your managers want you to do. They will decide what happens, thank you very much, and doing anything outside of your org ... well there's a name for that, isn't there? Betrayal, or perhaps death penalty.
yeah, it seems to me like Gemini is a little behind on the current RL patterns and also they dont seem interested in really creating a dedicated coding model. I think they have so much product surface (search, AI mode, gmail, youtube, chrome etc), they are prioritizing making the model very general. but who knows im just talking out of my ass.
I'm doing Ruby and Gemini 3.0 pro has by far been the best model for me. It writes the nicest ruby code, like I would. Further, it either succeeds or fails hard and obviously. I prefer it failing hard instead of of slowly going weird in my code.
Similar in antigravity. Privately it's my absolute favorite.
What I’m noticing, overall: I’ve never cut so much code in my life. I’ve become a coding monster with one of those dark green GitHub profiles ever since 5.3-Codex gave me the confidence to load in a ridiculous number of tasks every day and let it rip. I have about three coding tasks going at once and in another window, Claude Cowork is ripping through PowerPoints and getting back to lawyers.
This tech is not going to replace us. If anything, I am becoming even more of a workaholic. But the output volume is going to pay off for those who are privileged enough to use these tools.
There are thousands like you now. How many does it take to run the economy? What would the rest do.
Think of it like what a tractor did to agricultural work. The fist guy that used a tractor probably thought: this is not replacing me, I’m just much more productive. Well, turns out you only need one guy per farm now.
But now many suburban homeowners also have a little lawn tractor, and lots of people on small acreage have a utility tractor. None of them are farmers, but they get value out of the technology as well. Plus, we're feeding a lot more people for a lot less money than we did before tractors.
What ive noticed, i dont have the apetite to spend tokens on AI fixing errors AI made. Or paying a 200/month subscription. In the beggining of the mobth im happy tinkering, but i reach the cap of how much money im willing to spend playing
In an attempt to get outside of benchmark gaming I had it make Platypus on a Tricycle. It's not as good as pelican on bicycle. https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/BiRht5hX
For a moment I assumed the output would look like Perry the Platipus from the Disney (I think?) show. It's suprising to me (as a layman) that a show with lots of media that would've made it to the training corpus didn't show up.
Not another piece of Electron bloatware, a regular, efficient, fast, snappy, native, app. One that connects to my MCP severs and has local filesystem tools.
Anthropic might fall behind Google/OpenAI eventually, but their Desktop App + MCP/Connectors is unbelievably useful to get real work done.
I haven't used Anthropic's desktop app in months since I don't have access to a Mac anymore, but when I did...it was just an electron app? Did something change?
Nope. It is still Electron, and it is not snappy. And I am on an M3 Max MacBook Pro.
I have transitioned off ChatGPT for home use (Google provides me slightly better value in my personal life, as I can pay for a plan that also accommodates my weird photo storage needs) and it’s all Anthropic at work, but I miss the ChatGPT Mac app. I can’t say for certain if it was Electron or not—I never dug into the internals, and it felt very, very fast and “native”.
77.1% on ARC-AGI-2 and still can't stop adding drive-by refactors. ARC-AGI-2 tests novel pattern induction, it's genuinely hard to fake and the improvement is real. But it doesn't measure task scoping, instruction adherence, or knowing when to stop. Those are the capabilities practitioners actually need from a coding agent. We have excellent benchmarks for reasoning. We have almost nothing that measures reliability in agentic loops. That gap explains this thread.
1. unreliable in GH copilot. Lots of 500 and 4XX errors. Unusable in the first 2 months
2. not available in vertex ai (europe). We have requirements regarding data residency. Funny enough anthropic is on point with releasing their models to vertex ai. We already use opus and sonnet 4.6.
I hope google gets their stuff together and understands that not everyone wants/can use their global endpoint. We'd like to try their models.
It's a bit hard to trick reasoning models, because they explore a lot of the angles of a problem, and they might accidentally have an "a-ha" moment that leads them on the right path. It's a bit like doing random sampling and stumbling upon the right result after doing gradient descent from those points.
I am trying to think what's the best way to give most information about how the AI models fail, without revealing information that can help them overfit on those specific tests.
I am planning to add some extra LLM calls, to summarize the failure reason, without revealing the test.
I've been playing with the 3.1 Deep Think version of this for the last couple of weeks and it was a big step up for coding over 3.0 (which I already found very good).
A select few have had early access through various programs Google offers. I believe there was a sentence or two to this effect on the Gemini 3 Deep Think post from Deepmind.
I find Gemini is great at generating code that is relatively common on the internet, especially web and algorithms. It is absolutely better at this then OpenAI's models. But Gemini is not as good at reasoning about problems from first principles, or catching subtle bugs. In some ways it is just a better Google that finds exactly what you want, less a general intelligence.
I am actually going to complain about this: that neither of the Gemini models are not preview ones.
Anthropic seems the best in this. Everything is in the API on day one. OpenAI tend to want to ask you for subscription, but the API gets there a week or a few later. Now, Gemini 3 is not for production use and this is already the previous iteration. So, does Google even intent to release this model?
This model says it accepts video inputs. I asked it to transcribe a 5 second video of a digital water curtain which spelled “Boo Happy Halloween”, and it came back with “Happy” which wasn’t the first frame, but also is incomplete.
This kind of test is good because it requires stitching together info from the whole video.
To use in OpenCode, you can update the models it has:
opencode models --refresh
Then /models and choose Gemini 3.1 Pro
You can use the model through OpenCode Zen right away and avoid that Google UI craziness.
---
It is quite pricey! Good speed and nailed all my tasks so far. For example:
@app-api/app/controllers/api/availability_controller.rb
@.claude/skills/healthie/SKILL.md
Find Alex's id, and add him to the block list, leave a comment
that he has churned and left the company. we can't disable him
properly on the Healthie EMR for now so
this dumb block will be added as a quick fix.
Result was:
29,392 tokens
$0.27 spent
So relatively small task, hitting an API, using one of my skills, but a quarter. Pricey!
No I am not just vanilla OpenCode. I do have OpenCode Zen credits, and I did opencode login whatever their command is to auth against opencode itself. Maybe that's the reason I see these premium models.
My enthusiasm is a bit muted this cycle because I've been burned by Gemini CLI. These models are very capable but Gemini CLI just doesn't seem to be able to work for one it never follows instructions strictly like its competitors do, and it hallucinates even which is a rarity.
More importantly feels like Google is stretched thin across different Gemini products and pricing reflects this, I still have no idea how to pay for Gemini CLI, in codex/claude its very simple $20/month for entry and $200/month for ton of weekly usage.
I hope whoever is reading this from Google they can redeem Gemini CLI by focusing on being competitive instead of making it look pretty (that seems to be the impression I got from the updates on X)
> I still have no idea how to pay for Gemini CLI, in codex/claude its very simple $20/month for entry and $200/month for ton of weekly usage.
This!
I would like to sign up for a paid plan for Gemini CLI. But I have not been able to figure out how. I already have Codex and Claude plans. Those were super easy to sign up for.
What’s your difficulty? Google has published easy to follow 27-step instructions for how to sign up for the half a dozen services you need to chain together to enable this common usecase!
Supposedly the Google One AI plans[1] allow for this. I've been testing an AI Pro plan, but haven't gotten CLI to work yet (keeps asking me to sign in). So yeah...
Every time I've used Gemini models for anything besides code or agentic work they lean so far into the RLHF induced bold lettering and bullet point list barf that everything they output reads as if the model was talking _at_ me and not _with_ me. In my Openclaw experiment(s) and in the Gemini web UI, I've specifically added instructions to avoid this type of behavior, but it only seemed to obey those rules when I reminded the model of them.
For conversational contexts, I don't think the (in some cases significantly) better benchmark results compared to a model like Sonnet 4.6 can convince me to switch to Gemini 3.1. Has anyone else had a similar experience, or is this just a me issue?
Gemini sounds less personal, but I think that is good. From my experience, the quality of response is much higher than ChatGPT or Grok, and it cites real sources. I want to have a mini-wikipedia response for my questions, not a friend's group chat response
You just articulated why I struggle to personally connect with Gemini. It feels so unrelatable and exhausting to read its output. I prefer to read Opus/Deepseek/GLM over Gemini, Qwen and the open source GPT models. Maybe it is RLHF that is creating my distaste from using it. (I pay for Gemini; I should be using it more... but the outputs just bug me and feel more work to get actionable insight.)
I'm not familiar with Openclaw and but the trick to solve this would be to embed a style reminder at the bottom of each user message and ideally hide that from the user with the UI.
This is how roleplay apps like Sillytavern customize the experience for power users by allowing hidden style reminders as part of the user message that accompany each chat message.
I think they all output that bold lettering, point by point style output. I strongly suspect it's part of a synthetic data pipeline all these AI companies have, and it improves performance. Claude seems to be the least of them, but it will start writing code at the drop of a hat. What annoys me in Gemini is that it has a really strange tendency to come up with weird analogies, especially in Pro mode. You'll be asking it about something like red black trees and it'll say "Red Black Trees (The F1 of Tree Data Structures)".
Yes, the analogy habit is the most annoying of all. Overall formatting for me is doable, if it didn't divide up an answer into these silly arbitrary categories with useless analogies. I've tried adding in my user preferences to never use analogies but it inevitably falls back into that habit.
Google tends to trumpet preview models that aren't actually production-grade. For instance, both 3 Pro and Flash suffer from looping and tool-calling issues.
I would love for them to eliminate these issues because just touting benchmark scores isn't enough.
In my experience, while Gemini does really well in benchmarks I find it much worse when I actually use the model. It's too verbose / doesn't follow instructions very well. Let's see if that changes with this model.
This is great. I am hopeful that Gemini 3.1 Pro would be great. So far, I'm almost always pulled away from Gemini models by Claude. Having used Claude Opus High for a while now, Claude Opus seems to be fantastic at coding. Even Gemini's comparison chart says so. OpenAI's 5.3-codex is by far the weakest (of the 3) for my coding purposes. Claude Opus really shines at explanations and generating code.
Gemini is almost great. Claude Opus is great. I keep switching among these subscriptions every month to not miss out on any of the offerings for too long; ChatGPT Plus <-> Gemini Pro <-> Claude.
> I keep switching among these subscriptions every month to not miss out on any of the offerings for too long; ChatGPT Plus <-> Gemini Pro <-> Claude.
I wonder why many people seem to be doing this instead of just going for a copilot subscription that has access to all those models? Anybody care to share pros and cons?
OpenAI and Anthropic give you a lot of usage/$ through their plans. For the Anthropic Max plans, this can be like a ~90% discount. Copilot does not benefit from this (their pricing model is also different though, it is request-based rather than token usage based, so it is hard to compare).
That's not to mention that the models generally work better in their own harnesses, which is perhaps unsurprising because the models have been trained with the specific harness in mind (and vice versa). That said, I think some 3rd-party harnesses do a lot of work to make different models work well in their harness.
It seems google is having a disjointed roll out, and there will likely be an official announcement in a few hours. Apparently 3.1 showed up unannounced in vertex at 2am or something equally odd.
One thing I’d like to see in these releases is stronger emphasis on regression behavior, not just headline capability.
In production, the costly failures are usually "almost right" edits that quietly shift semantics across large diffs.
We now gate model upgrades behind a fixed eval set of our own repos + prompts and compare pass rates by task category (refactor, test repair, API migration). Raw benchmark gains matter less to us than variance and rollback safety. If 3.1 improves consistency on long multi-file edits, that’s a bigger win than a small jump on one-shot tasks.
Gemini 3 Pro (high) is a joke compared to Gemini 3 Flash in Antigravity, except it's not even funny. Flash is insane value, and super capable, too. I've had it implement a decompiler for very obscure bytecode, and it was passing all tests in no time. PITA to refactor later, but not insurmountable. Gemini 3 Pro (high) choked on this problem in the early stages... I'm looking forward to comparing 3.1 Pro vs 3.0 Flash, hopefully they have improved on it enough to finally switch over.
When 3 came out they mentioned that flash included many improvements that didn't make it into pro (via an hn comment). I imagine this release includes those.
After 2 days of giving it a go, I find that Gemini CLI is still considerably worse than both Codex and Claude Code.
The model itself also has strange behaviors that seem like it gets randomly replaced with Gemini-3-Flash or something else. I'll explain.
Once agentic coding was a bust, I gave it a run as a daily driver for AI assistant. It performed fairly well but then began behaving strangely. It would lose context mid conversation. For instance, I said "In san francisco I'm looking for XYZ". Two turns later I'm asking about food and it gives me suggestions all over the world.
Another time, I asked it about the likelihood of the pending east coast winter storm of affecting my flight. I gave it all the details (flight, stops, time, cities).
Both GPT-5.2 and Claude crunched and came back with high quality estimations and rationale. Gemini 3.1 Pro... 5 times, returned a weather forecast widget for either the layover or final destination. This was on "Pro" reasoning, the highest exposed on the Gemini App/WebApp. I've always suspected Google swaps out models randomly so this.. wasn't surprising.
I then asked Gemini 3.1 Pro via the API and it returned a response similar to Claude and GPT-5.2 -- carefully considering all factors.
This tells me that a Google AI Ultra subscription gives me a sub-par coding agent which often swaps in Flash models, a sub-par web/app AI experience that also isn't using the advertised SOTA models, and a bunch of preview apps for video gen, audio gen (crashed every time I attempted), and world gen (Genie was interesting but a toy).
This will be a quick cancel as soon as the intro rate is done.
It's like Google doesn't ACTUALLY want to be the leader in AI or serve people their best models. They want to generate hype around benchmarks and then nerf the model and go silent.
Gemini 3 Pro Preview went from exceptional in the first month to mediocre and then out of my rotation within a month.
I am reading opinions here from agent users, but I haven't adopted the "agentic workflow" myself because I believe I am (for now) now getting a lot of my trouble's worth using Gemini (3 Pro) in the traditional conversational manner. It is adequate at suggesting solutions in the form of code, or reasoning in general. My problems are software engineering but also everything that is not, since I have a subscription it's my go to problem solving partner. I see no reasons to switch to another product for now either, I am constantly in the loop getting samples of chats with Grok and ChatGPT and it seems a very close race. If Claude is that one race horse that's built different -- and I absolutely can believe it is so because they have rightfully tuned it -- I am not convinced I am missing out much. But maybe because I am more traditionalist to most of everyone's having embraced the idea of having an agent run a loop on their workstation(s) and trusting it to deliver. Perhaps if I were in more of a tight time frame, I'd be pressed to do so myself, but for now I am already benefiting from the extra speed "rubberducking" with Gemini all manner of software engineering problems that I need to solve, so I simply have no reasons to abandon it. I think this is also Google's strength -- they have the data, they've already integrated Gemini or a variant of it anyway, into google.com which is one of their prized cash cows, and it's everywhere else too. Like others here have said, Google may not have the absolute best in class at all times, but they're fairly good and they still have the brains that gave us DeepMind and GPT, unless there's some sort of stagnation going on in their ranks, I expect they're not resting on the laurels. With their capital they're still at the head of the race. Anthropic and OpenAI have the benefit of being nimble, though, and it shows too. Anyway, competition is good, the cat's out of the bag and on the greener side of the river :-)
In the "Intelligence applied" section, where they show the comparison animations, they are shown using a non-optimal UI.
There is not enough time to read the text, see old animation, and see new animation. Better would have been to keep the same animation on repeat, so that people have unlimited time to read the text and observer the animations.
Also, it jumps from example to example in the same video. Better would have been to show each separately, so that once user is done observing one example at their own pace, they can proceed to the next.
As a workaround, I had to open the video (just the video) in a new tab, pause once an example came up, read the text, then rewind to the start of the animation to see the old animation example, then rewind again, then see the new animation example, and then sometimes rewind again if I wanted to see the animation again. Then, once done with the example, I had to forward to the next example and repeat the above process again.
I exclusively use Gemini for Chat nowadays, and it's been great mostly. It's fast, it's good, and the app works reliably now. On top of that I got it for free with my Pixel phone.
For development I tend to use Antigravity with Sonnet 4.5, or Gemini Flash if it's about a GUI change in React.
The layout and design of Gemini has been superior to Claude models in my opinion, at least at the time. Flash also works significantly faster.
And all of it is essentially free for now. I can even select Opus 4.6 in Antigravity, but I did not yet give it a try.
I find Gemini is outstanding at reasoning (all topics) and architecture (software/system design). On the other hand, Gemini CLI sucks and so I end up using Claude Code and Codex CLI for agentic work.
However, I heavily use Gemini in my daily work and I think it has its own place. Ultimately, I don't see the point of choosing the one "best" model for everything, but I'd rather use what's best for any given task.
Honestly doesn't feel like Google is targeting the agentic coding crowd so much as they are the knowledge worker / researcher / search-engine-replacement market?
Agree Gemini as a model is fairly incompetent inside their own CLI tool as well as in opencode. But I find it useful as a research and document analysis tool.
For my custom agentic coding setup, I use Claude Code derived prompts with Gemini models, primarily flash. It's night and day compared to Google's own agentic products, which are all really bad.
The models are all close enough on the benchmarks and I think people are attributing too much difference in the agentic space to the model itself. I strongly believe the difference is in all the other stuff, which is why Antropic is far ahead of the competition. They have done great work with Claude Code, Cowork, and their knowledge share through docs & blog, bar none on this last point imo.
I'm glad someone else is finally saying this, I've been mentioning this left and right and sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy that not more people are noticing it.
Gemini can go off the rails SUPER easily. It just devolves into a gigantic mess at the smallest sign of trouble.
For the past few weeks, I've also been using XML-like tags in my prompts more often. Sometimes preferring to share previous conversations with `<user>` and `<assistant>` tags. Opus/Sonnet handles this just fine, but Gemini has a mental breakdown. It'll just start talking to itself.
Even in totally out-of-the-ordinary sessions, it goes crazy. After a while, it'll start saying it's going to do something, and then it pretends like it's done that thing, all in the same turn. A turn that never ends. Eventually it just starts spouting repetitive nonsense.
And you would think this is just because the bigger the context grows, the worse models tend to get. But no! This can happen well below even the 200.000 token mark.
Relatedly, Gemini chat seems to be if not down then extremely slow.
ETA: They apparently wiped out everyone's chats (including mine). "Our engineering team has identified a background process that was causing the missing user conversation metadata and has successfully stopped the process to prevent further impact." El Mao.
Ran a bunch of 3D Modeling benchmarks on Gemini 3.1 vs Gemini 3.
Unsurprisingly 3.1 performs a bit better. But surprisingly it costs 2.6x as much ($0.14 vs. $0.37 per 3D Model Generation) and is 2.5x slower (1m 24s vs. 3m 28s).
To me it feels like "lets increase our thinking budget and call it an improved model!"
In the meantime, I'm trying to update Antigravity to use the latest version, but it just wouldn't update itself, nor would it let me use 3.0 model. I restarted multiple times with the same result.
I tried telling this to agent, and it keeps repeating the same phrase "Gemini 3.1 Pro is not available on this version. Please upgrade to the latest version."
Congratulations on beating the benchmarks, but I wonder how much effort is devoted on improving DX?
Edit: It's updated now, I can confirm with "There are currently no updates available.". It still doesn't let me continue with the conversation. I'm able to create new session though.
I had it coding autonomously for about an hour (including lots of tool wait time) on a difficult task, and it actually produced good results.
What’s most surprising is that I had it follow a strict loop/workflow and it did that perfectly. Normally these things go off the rails after a while with complex workflows. It’s something I have to usually enforce with some orchestration script and multiple agents, but this time it was just one session meticulously following orders.
Impressive, and saves a lot of time on building the orchestration glue.
Seems like they actually fixed some of the problems with the model. Hallucinations rate seems to be much better. Seems like they also tuned the reasoning maybe that were they got most of the improvements from.
The hallucination rate with the Gemini family has always been my problem with them. Over the last year they’ve made a lot of progress catching the Gemini models up to/near the frontier in general capability and intelligence, but they still felt very late 2024 in terms of hallucination rate.
Which made the Gemini models untrustworthy for anything remotely serious, at least in my eyes. If they’ve fixed this or at least significantly improved, that would be a big deal.
I like to think that all these pelican riding a bicycle comments are unwittingly iteratively creating the optimal cyclist pelican as these comment threads are inevitably incorporated in every training set.
My current AI test. There was a BBS I was on in the 90s and there was this door game I hadn't seen anywhere else. I simply describe the BBS, where it was popular, its name, the year it was around, and the BBS game and a description of it mechanics, etc.
OpenAI and Google's Deep Research produce a very long, 100% made up report. If I question the AI on the report, they both admit they just made it up.
Claude just returns, "I couldn't find anything on the BBS or the game."
Doesn't show as available in gemini CLI for me. I have one of those "AI Pro" packages, but don't see it. Typical for Google, completely unclear how to actually use their stuff.
They crushed it with Gemini 3.1... especially when in Thinking Mode with Deep Think initiated. If you are working towards something with code, research etc. and hit a snag, run it by Gemini with these settings. Here's another KILLER trick: In Gemini Thinking mode select Nano Banana and have it put together a comprehensive slide with paragraph length text portions. It'll nail it.
Due to the increasing difficulty of scaling up training, it appears the gains are instead being achieved through better model training which appears to be working well for everyone.
Fine, I guess. The only commercial API I use to any great extent is gemini-3-flash-preview: cheap, fast, great for tool use and with agentic libraries. The 3.1-pro-preview is great, I suppose, for people who need it.
Off topic, but I like to run small models on my own hardware, and some small models are now very good for tool use and with agentic libraries - it just takes a little more work to get good results.
Seconded. Gemini used to be trash and I used Claude and Codex a lot but gemini-3-flash-preview punches above it's weight, it's decent and I rarely if ever run into any token limit either.
Thirded, I've been using gemini-3-flash to great effect. Anytime I have something more complicated, I give it to pro & flash to see what happens. Coin flip if flash is nearly equivalent (too many moving vars to be analytical at this point)
I experimented with many models on my 16G and 32G Macs. For less memory, qwen3:4b is good, for the 32B Mac, gpt-oss:20b is good. I like the smaller Mistral models like mistral:v0.3 and rnj-1:latest is a pretty good small reasoning model.
I like to ask claude how to prompt smaller models for the given task. With one prompt it was able to make a low quantized model call multiple functions via json.
I'm using gemini.google.com/app with AI Pro subscription. "Something went wrong" in FF, works in Chrome.
Below is one of my test prompts that previous Gemini models were failing. 3.1 Pro did a decent job this time.
> use c++, sdl3. use SDL_AppInit, SDL_AppEvent, SDL_AppIterate callback functions. use SDL_main instead of the default main function. make a basic hello world app.
I had it make a simple HTML/JS canvas game (think flappy bird) and while it did some things mildly better (and others noticeably worse) it still fell into the exact same traps as earlier models. It also had a lot of issues generating valid JS at parts and asking it what the code should be just made it endlessly generate the same exact incorrect code.
> Last week, we released a major update to Gemini 3 Deep Think to solve modern challenges across science, research and engineering. Today, we’re releasing the upgraded core intelligence that makes those breakthroughs possible: Gemini 3.1 Pro.
So this is same but not same as Gemini 3 Deep Think? Keeping track of these different releases is getting pretty ridiculous.
One underappreciated reason for the agentic gap: Gemini tends to over-explain its reasoning mid-tool-call in a way that breaks structured output expectations. Claude and GPT-4o have both gotten better at treating tool calls as first-class operations. Gemini still feels like it's narrating its way through them rather than just executing.
Google seems to really pull ahead in this AI race. For me personally they offer the best deal and although the software is not quiet there compared to openai or anthropic (in regards to 1. web GUI, 2. agent-cli). I hope they can fix that in the future and I think once Gemini 4 or whatever launches we will see a huge leap again
I don't understand this sentiment. It may hold true for other LLM use cases (image generation, creative writing, summarizing large texts), but when it comes to coding specifically, Google is *always* behind OpenAI and Anthropic, despite having virtually infinite processing power, money, and being the ones who started this race in the first place.
Until now, I've only ever used Gemini for coding tests. As long as I have access to GPT models or Sonnet/Opus, I never want to use Gemini. Hell, I even prefer Kimi 2.5 over it. I tried it again last week (Gemini Pro 3.0) and, right at the start of the conversation, it made the same mistake it's been making for years: it said "let me just run this command," and then did nothing.
My sentiment is actually the opposite of yours: how is Google *not* winning this race?
> despite having virtually infinite processing power, money
Just because they have the money doesn't mean that they spend it excessively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized, as they are more concerned with growth at all cost, while Google is more concerned with profitability. Google has the bigger warchest and could just wait until the other two run out of money rather than forcing the growth on that product line in unprofitable means.
Maybe they are also running much closer to their compute limits then the other ones too and their TPUs are already saturated with API usage.
I honestly do not wish Google to have the best model out there and be forced to use their incomprehensible subscription / billing / project management whatever shit ever again.
I don’t know what their stuff cost. I don’t know why would I use vertex or ai studio. What is included in my subscription what is billed per use.
They all suck. OpenAI ignores scanning limits and disabled routes in robots.txt, after a 429 "Too Many Requests" they retry the same url half a dozen of times from different IPs in the next couple of minutes, and they once DoS'ed my small VPS trying to do a full scan of sitemaps.xml in less than one hour, trying and retrying if any endpoint failed.
Google and others at least respects both robots.txt and 429s. They invested years scanning all the internet, so they can now train on what they have stored in their server. OpenAI seems to assume that MY resources are theirs.
For a personal plan to use premium Gemini AI features or for agentic development with Gemini CLI/Antigravity the billing is no more or less complicated then Claude Code or Codex CLI.
You pay for the $20/mo Google AI Pro plan with a credit card via the normal personal billing flow like you would for a Google One plan without any involvement of Google Cloud billing or AI Studio. Authorize in the client with your account and you're good to go.
(With the bundled drive storage on AI Pro I'm just paying a few bucks more than I was before so for me it's my least expensive AI subscription excluding the Z.ai ultra cheap plan).
Or, just like with Anthropic or OpenAI, it's a separate process for billing/credits for an API key targeted at a developer audience. Which I don't need or use for Gemini CLI or Antigravity at all, it's a one step "click link to authorize with your Google Account" and done.
You could decide to use an API key for usage based billing instead (just like you could with Claude Code) but that's entirely unnecessary with a subscription.
Sure, for the API anything involving a hyperscalar cloud is going to have a higher complexity floor with legacy cruft here and there, but for individual subscriptions that's irrelevant and it's pretty much as straightforward of a click and pay flow you'd find anywhere else.
after using aistudio fine for months suddenly my billing was cancelled and a week later im still waiting for it to be re-enabled.
Im at a total loss to how google can function this way, my only explanation is they somehow have a Philosophers Stone they generate wealth with because they sure as hell make it impossible to give them money.
Eventually the models will be generally be so good that the competition moves from the best model to the best user experience and here I think we can expect others will win, e.g. Microsoft with GitHub and VS Code
I think we're past the point where benchmarks hold real value. All models are above a certain threshold of intelligence but Gemini somehow borrows the worst of both worlds. It's neither good with long-horizon coding tasks nor does it offer a likable personality (like Claude which is much more beloved)
The CLI needs work, or they should officially allow third-party harnesses. Right now, the CLI experience is noticeably behind other SOTA models. It actually works much better when paired with Opencode.
But with accounts reportedly being banned over ToS issues, similar to Claude Code, it feels risky to rely on it in a serious workflow.
Off-topic but, what are people using to create those video animations seen in the "ISS orbit tracking dashboard" example? Looks pretty nice! Im guessing Google uses a whole building of UX people but ive seen similar videos from small indie startups too, or even 1 person SaaS.
In these discussions we see some people hating the models, while others love them. What I find interesting is that this is exactly how we feel about other people - some people will love working with you while others can't stand being in the same room you're in.
I’m no tech expert like a lot of people here, but I find Gemini 3.0 insanely good for my regular daily questions. Hoping this one is great too. I’m kind of at the point where many answers are essentially perfect and I don’t know if I need much more
Yes people are too fixated on just the model. The real question for coding use cases is - does Gemini X + Gemini CLI outperform Opus + Claude Code? With 3.0 the answer was no. I won’t waste time checking 3.1 until I hear otherwise.
I think there is a pattern it will always be nerfed the few weeks before launching a new model. Probably because they are throwing a bunch of compute at the new model.
Yeah maybe that but atleast let us know about this Or have dynamic limits? Nerfing breaks trust.
Though I am not sure if they actually nerf it intentionally. Haven't heard from any credible source. I did experience in my workflow though.
I created a nice harness and visual workflow builder for my Gemini agent chains, works very well. I did this so it would create code the way I do, that is very editable.
In contrast, the vs code plugin was pretty bad, and did crazy things like mix languages
I’m keen to know how and where are you using Gemini.
Anthropic is clearly targeted to developers and OpenAI is general go to AI model. Who are the target demographic for Gemini models? ik that they are good and Flash is super impressive. but i’m curious
I use it as my main platform right now both for work/swe stuff, and person stuff. It works pretty well, they have the full suite of tools I want from general LLM chat, to notebookLM, to antigravity.
My main use-cases outside of SWE generally involve the ability to compare detailed product specs and come up with answers/comparisons/etc... Gemini does really well for that, probably because of the deeper google search index integration.
Also I got a year of pro for free with my phone....so thats a big part.
I use it in Google Search. For example yesterday I typed in Google "postgres generate series 24 hour" and this morning "ffmpeg convert mp4 to wav". Previously I would have clicked on the first StackOverflow result (RIP), now I just take it from the Gemini summary (I'd say 95% of the time it's correct for basic programming language questions. I remember some hallucinations about psycopg3 and date-fns tho. As usual with AI, you need to already know the answer, at least partially, to detect the bs).
Also what's great about Gemini in Google Search is that the answer comes with several links, I use them sometimes to validate the correctness of the solution, or check how old the solution is (I've never used chatGPT so I don't know if chatGPT does it).
I find gemini to be the best at travel planning and for story telling of geographical places. For a road trip, I tried all three mainstream providers and I liked Gemini (also personal preference because Gemini took a verbose approach instead of bullet points from others) for it's responses, ways it discovered stories about places I wanted to explore, places it suggested for me and things it gave me to consider those places in the route.
Gemini has an obvious edge over its competitors in one specific area: Google Search. The other LLMs do have a Web Search tool but none of them are as effective.
I feel like Gemini 3 was incredible on non-software/coding research. I have learned so much systems biology the last two months it blows my mind.
I had only started using Opus 4.6 this week. Sonnet it seems like is much better at having a long conversation with. Gemini is good for knowledge retrieval but I think Opus 4.6 has caught up. The biggest thing that made Gemini worth it for me the last 3 months is I crushed it with questions. I wouldn't have even got 10% of the Opus use that I got from Gemini before being made to slow down.
I have a deep research going right now on 3.1 for the first time and I honestly have no idea how I am going to tell if it is better than 3.
It seems like agentic coding Gemini wasn't as good but just asking it to write a function, I think it only didn't one shot what I asked it twice. Then fixed the problem on the next prompt.
I haven't logged in to bother with chatGPT in about 3 months now.
I am a professional software developer who has been programming for 40 years (C, C++, Python, assembly, any number of other languages). I work in ML (infrastructure, not research) and spent a decade working at Google.
In short, I consider Gemini to be a highly capable intern (grad student level) who is smarter and more tenacious than me, but also needs significant guidance to reach a useful goal.
I used Gemini to completely replace the software stack I wrote for my self-built microscope. That includes:
writing a brand new ESP32 console application for controlling all the pins of my ESP32 that drives the LED illuminator. It wrote the entire ESP-IDF project and did not make any major errors. I had to guide with updated prompts a few times but otherwise it wrote the entire project from scratch and ran all the build commands, fixing errors along the way. It also easily made a Python shared library so I can just import this object in my Python code. It saved me ~2-3 days of working through all the ESP-IDF details, and did a better job than I would have.
writing a brand new C++-based Qt camera interface (I have a camera with a special SDK that allows controlling strobe and trigger and other details. It can do 500FPS). It handled all the concurrency and message passing details. I just gave it the SDK PDF documentation for the camera (in mixed english/chinese), and asked it to generate an entire project. I had to spend some time guiding it around making shared libraries but otherwise it wrote the entire project from scratch and I was able to use it to make a GUI to control the camera settings with no additional effort. It ran all the build commands and fixed errors along the way. Saved me another 2-3 days and did a better job than I could have.
Finally, I had it rewrite the entire microscope stack (python with qt) using the two drivers I described above- along with complex functionality like compositing multiple images during scanning, video recording during scanning, mesaurement tools, computer vision support, and a number of other features. This involved a lot more testing on my part, and updating prompts to guide it towards my intended destination (fully functional replacement of my original self-written prototype). When I inspect the code, it definitely did a good job on some parts, while it came up with non-ideal solutions for some problems (for example, it does polling when it could use event-driven callbacks). This saved literally weeks worth of work that would have been a very tedious slog.
From my perspective, it's worked extremely well: doing what I wanted in less time than it would take me (I am a bit of a slow programmer, and I'm doing this in hobby time) and doing a better job (With appropriate guidance) than I could have (even if I'd had a lot of time to work on it). This greatly enhances my enjoyment of my hobby by doing tedious work, allowing me to spend more time on the interesting problems (tracking tardigrades across a petri dish for hours at a time). I used gemini pro 3 for this- it seems to do better than 2.5, and flash seemed to get stuck and loop more quickly.
I have only lightly used other tools, such as ChatGPT/Codex and have never used Claude. I tend to stick to the Google ecosystem for several reasons- but mainly, I think they will end up exceeding the capabilities of their competitors, due to their inherent engineering talent and huge computational resources. But they clearly need to catch up in a lot of areas- for example, the VS Code Gemini extension has serious problems (frequent API call errors, messed up formatting of code/text, infinite loops, etc).
I personally use it as my general purpose and coding model. It's good enough for my coding tasks most of the time, has very good and rapid web search grounding that makes the Google index almost feel like part of its training set, and Google has a family sharing plan with individual quotas for Google AI Pro at $20/month for 5 users which also includes 2 TB in the cloud. Family sharing is a unique feature for Gemini 3 Flash Thinking (300 prompts per day and user) & Pro (100 prompts per day and user).
I use Gemini for personal stuff such as travel planning and research on how to fix something, which product to buy, etc. My company has as Pro subscription so I use that instead of ChatGPT.
Various friends of mine work in non-technology companies (banking, industries, legal, Italy) and in pretty much all of them there's Gemini enterprise + NotebookLM.
In all of them the approach is: this is the solution, now find problems you can apply it to.
I have swapped to using gemini over chatgpt for casual conversation and question answering. there are some lacking features in the app but i get faster and more intelligent responses.
I use gemini for everything because I trust google to keep the data I send them safe, because they know how to run prod at scale, and they are more environmentally friendly than everyone else (tpu,us-central1).
This includes my custom agent / copilot / cowork (which uses vertex ai and all models therein). This is where I do more searching now (with genAi grounding) I'm about to work on several micro projects that will hold Ai a little differently.
All that being said, google Ai products suck hard. I hate using every one of them. This is more a reflection on the continued degradation of PM/Design at Big G, from before Ai, but accellationally worse since. I support removing Logan from the head of this shit show
disclaimer: long time g-stan, not so stan any more
I have run into a surprising number of basic syntax errors on this one. At least in the few runs I have tried it's a swing and a miss. Wonder if the pressure of the Claude release is pushing these stop gap releases.
It's fascinating to watch this community react to positively to Google model releases and so negatively toward OpenAI's. You all do understand that an ad revenue model is exactly where Google will go, right?
It's all so astroturfed so its hard to tell. I got the opposite impression though. Seemed like OpenAI had more fake positivity towards the top that i tried to skim, and this had way less and a lot of complaints.
Im biased I dont trust either of them, so perhaps im just hard looking for the hate and attributing all the positive stuff to advertising.
Gemini is the smartest model currently available. It is the only model out of the big ones that correcly identifies the specific versions of superhers in a collage I tested them with.
Google has a hugely valuable dataset of changes from decades of changes from top tier software engineers but it's so proprietary they can't use it to train their external models.
I dont have a real special usecase, i just use it whenever i think it will give better results than googling or thinking or i dont feel like getting annoyed by cookie popups.
And i dont think gpt3 was best, but it felt like it actually listened.
Now i tell it: "You did this and this wrong, i specifically told u the exact opposite. Can you please do what i asked you?"
And then it says something like: "Oh yes my bad, you are right and very very smart to have caught that you must be a super genius. I will now do what you asked me"
Does the same wrong thing again. and again and again.
I ask it to fix a mistake, it tells me it fixed it, gives 1:1 the same thing with more errors.
It also feels like it forgets mid convo way faster than it did.
Another preview release. Does that mean the recommended model by Google for production is 2.5 Flash and Pro? Not talking about what people are actually doing but the google recommendation. Kind of crazy if that is the case
Someone needs to make an actual good benchmark for LLM's that matches real world expectations, theres more to benchmarks than accuracy against a dataset.
We don't need real world benchmarks, if they were good for real world tasks people would use them
We need scientific benchmarks that tease out the nature of intelligence.
There are plenty of unsaturated benchmarks. Solving chess using "mostly" language modeling is still an open problem. And beyond that creating a machine that can explain why that move is likely optimal at some depth.
AI that can predict the output of another AI.
Gemini-3.0-flash-preview came out right away with the 3.0 release and I was expecting 3.0-flash-lite before a bump on the pro model. I wonder if they have abandoned that part of the Pareto/price-performance.
I agree, according to Googles terms you are not allowed to use the preview model for production use cases. And 3.0 has been in preview for a loooong time now :(
Appears the only difference to 3.0 Pro Preview is Medium reasoning. Model naming has long gone from even trying to make sense, but considering 3.0 is still in preview itself, increasing the number for such a minor change is not a move in the right direction.
My issue is that we haven't even gotten the release version of 3.0, that is also still in Preview, so may stick with 3.0 till that has been deemed stable.
Basically, what does the word "Preview" mean, if newer releases happen before a Preview model is stable? In prior Google models, Preview meant that there'd still be updates and improvements to said model prior to full deployment, something we saw with 2.5. Now, there is no meaning or reason for this designation to exist if they forgo a 3.0 still in Preview for model improvements.
ok , so they are scared that 5.3 (pro) will be released today/tomorrow and blow it out of the water and rushed it while they could still reference 5.2 benchmarks.
I don't think models blow other models anymore. We have the big 3 which are neck to neck in most benchmarks and the rest. I doubt that 5.3 will blow the others.
Google is terrible at marketing, but this feels like a big step forward.
As per the announcement, Gemini 3.1 Pro score 68.5% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, which makes it the top performer on the Terminus 2 harness [1]. That harness is a "neutral agent scaffold," built by researchers at Terminal-Bench to compare different LLMs in the same standardized setup (same tools, prompts, etc.).
It's also taken top model place on both the Intelligence Index & Coding Index of Artificial Analysis [2], but on their Agentic Index, it's still lagging behind Opus 4.6, GLM-5, Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.2.
Gemini consistently has the best benchmarks but the worst actual real-world results.
Every time they announce the best benchmarks I try again at using their tools and products and each time I immediately go back to Claude and Codex models because Google is just so terrible at building actual products.
They are good at research and benchmaxxing, but the day to day usage of the products and tools is horrible.
Try using Google Antigravity and you will not make it an hour before switching back to Codex or Claude Code, it's so incredibly shitty.
That's been my experience too; can't disagree. Still, when it comes to tasks that require deep intelligence (esp. mathematical reasoning [1]), Gemini has consistently been the best.
I don't use AI studio for my work. I used Antigravity/Gemini CLI and 3 pro was great for few weeks and now it's worse than 3 flash or any smaller model from competitor which are rated lower on benchmarks
IME, they definitely nerf models. gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 through AI Studio was amazing at release and steadily degraded. The quality started tanking around the time they hid CoT.
My sense is that the Gemini models are very capable but the Gemini CLI experience is subpar compared to Claude Code and Codex. I'm guess that it's the harness but since it can get confused, fall into doom loops, and generally lose the plot in a way that the model does not in Gemini Studio or the Gemini app.
I think a bunch of these harnesses are open source so it surprises me that there can be such a gulf between them.
It's not just the tooling. If you use Gemini in opencode it malfunctions in similar ways.
I haven't tried 3.1 yet, but 3 is just incompetent at tool use. In particular in editing chunks of text in files, it gets very confused and goes into loops.
The model also does this thing where it degrades into loops of nonsense thought patterns over time.
For shorter sessions where it's more analysis than execution, it is a strong model.
We'll see about 3.1. I don't know why it's not showing in my gemini CLI as available yet.
The speed of these 3.1 and Preview releases is starting to feel like the early days of web frameworks. It’s becoming less about the raw benchmarks and more about which model handles long-context 'hallucination' well enough to be actually used in a production pipeline without constant babysitting.
Sometimes it helps to also provide a drawio file that has the elements you wan't (eg. cloud service icons or whatever), but you just feed it the content you want diagrammed and let it eat.
Even if it's not completely correct, it usually creates something that's much closer to complete than a blank page.
I hope this works better than 3.0 Pro
I'm a former Googler and know some people near the team, so I mildly root for them to at least do well, but Gemini is consistently the most frustrating model I've used for development.
It's stunningly good at reasoning, design, and generating the raw code, but it just falls over a lot when actually trying to get things done, especially compared to Claude Opus.
Within VS Code Copilot Claude will have a good mix of thinking streams and responses to the user. Gemini will almost completely use thinking tokens, and then just do something but not tell you what it did. If you don't look at the thinking tokens you can't tell what happened, but the thinking token stream is crap. It's all "I'm now completely immersed in the problem...". Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress. It's bad at using tools and tries to edit files in weird ways instead of using the provided text editing tools. In Copilot it, won't stop and ask clarifying questions, though in Gemini CLI it will.
So I've tried to adopt a plan-in-Gemini, execute-in-Claude approach, but while I'm doing that I might as well just stay in Claude. The experience is just so much better.
For as much as I hear Google's pulling ahead, Anthropic seems to be to me, from a practical POV. I hope Googlers on Gemini are actually trying these things out in real projects, not just one-shotting a game and calling it a win.
Yes, this is very true and it speaks strongly to this wayward notion of 'models' - it depends so much on the tuning, the harness, the tools.
I think it speaks to the broader notion of AGI as well.
Claude is definitively trained on the process of coding not just the code, that much is clear.
Codex has the same limitation but not quite as bad.
This may be a result of Anthropic using 'user cues' with respect to what are good completions and not, and feeding that into the tuning, among other things.
Anthropic is winning coding and related tasks because they're focused on that, Google is probably oriented towards a more general solution, and so, it's stuck in 'jack of all trades master of none' mode.
Google are stuck because they have to compete with OpenAI. If they don’t, they face an existential threat to their advertising business.
But then they leave the door open for Anthropic on coding, enterprise and agentic workflows. Sensibly, that’s what they seem to be doing.
That said Gemini is noticeably worse than ChatGPT (it’s quite erratic) and Anthropic’s work on coding / reasoning seems to be filtering back to its chatbot.
So right now it feels like Anthropic is doing great, OpenAI is slowing but has significant mindshare, and Google are in there competing but their game plan seems a bit of a mess.
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I know this is only a partial answer, but I feel like Google is once again trying to build a product based on internal priorities, existing business protectionism, and internal business goals, rather than building a product that is listening actively to real use feedback as the primary priority.
It is the company’s constant kryptonite.
They seem to be, from my third part perspective, repeating the same ol’, same ol’ pattern. It is the “wave lesson” all over again.
Anthropic meanwhile is giving people what they want. They are really listening. And it’s working.
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> Claude is definitively trained on the process of coding not just the code
This definitely feels like it.
It's hard to really judge, but Gemini feels like it might actually write better code, but the _process_ is so bad that it doesn't matter. At first I thought it was bad integration by the GitHub Copilot, but I see it elsewhere now.
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Tell me more about Codex. I'm trying to understand it better.
I have a pretty crude mental model for this stuff but Opus feels more like a guy to me, while Codex feels like a machine.
I think that's partly the personality and tone, but I think it goes deeper than that.
(Or maybe the language and tone shapes the behavior, because of how LLMs work? It sounds ridiculous but I told Claude to believe in itself and suddenly it was able to solve problems it wouldn't even attempt before...)
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> Claude is definitively trained on the process of coding not just the code, that much is clear.
Nuance like this is why I don’t trust quantitative benchmarks.
The full aphorism is:
Jack of all trades, master of none, is oftentimes better than master of one.
Gemini just doesn’t do even mildly well in agentic stuff and I don’t know why.
OpenAI has mostly caught up with Claude in agentic stuff, but Google needs to be there and be there quickly
Because Search is not agentic.
Most of Gemini's users are Search converts doing extended-Search-like behaviors.
Agentic workflows are a VERY small percentage of all LLM usage at the moment. As that market becomes more important, Google will pour more resources into it.
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the agentic benchmarks for 3.1 indicate Gemini has caught up. the gains are big from 3.0 to 3.1.
For example the APEX-Agents benchmark for long time horizon investment banking, consulting and legal work:
1. Gemini 3.1 Pro - 33.2% 2. Opus 4.6 - 29.8% 3. GPT 5.2 Codex - 27.6% 4. Gemini Flash 3.0 - 24.0% 5. GPT 5.2 - 23.0% 6. Gemini 3.0 Pro - 18.0%
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I suspect a large part of Google's lag is due to being overly focused on integrating Gemini with their existing product and app lines.
My guess is that Gemini team didn't focus on the large-scale RL training for the agentic workload. And they are trying to catch up with 3.1.
I've had plenty of success with skills juggling various entities via CLI.
It's like anything Google - they do the cool part and then lose interest with the last 10%. Writing code is easy, building products that print money is hard.
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Can you explain what you mean by its bad at agentic stuff?
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Google is is also consistently the most frustrating chat system on top of the model. I use Gemini for non coding tasks. So I need to feed it a bunch of context (documents) to do my tasks - which can be pretty cumbersome. Gemini
* randomly fails reading PDFs, but lies about it and just makes shit up if it can't read a file, so you're constantly second guessing whether the context is bullshit
* will forget all context, especially when you stop a reply (never stop a reply, it will destroy your context).
* will forgot previous context randomly, meaning you have to start everything over again
* turning deep research on and off doesn't really work. Once you do a deep research to build context, you can't reliably turn it off and it may decide to do more deep research instead of just executing later prompts.
* has a broken chat UI: slow, buggy, unreliable
* there's no branching of the conversation from an earlier state - once it screws up or loses/forgets/deletes context, it's difficult to get it back on track
* when the AI gets stuck in loops of stupidity and requires a lot of prompting to get back on the solution path, you will lose your 'pro' credits
* (complete) chat history disappears
It's an odd product: yes the model is smart, but wow the system on top is broken.
Don't get me started on the thinking tokens. Since 2.5P the thinking has been insane. "I'm diving in to the problem", "I'm fully immersed" or "I'm meticulously crafting the answer"
I once saw "now that I've slept on it" in Gemini's CoT... baffling.
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That's not the real thinking, it's a super summarized view of it.
This is part of the reason I don't like to use it. I feel it's hiding things from me, compared to other models that very clearly share what they are thinking.
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> Don't get me started on the thinking tokens.
Claude provides nicer explanations, but when it comes to CoT tokens or just prompting the LLM to explain -- I'm very skeptical of the truthfulness of it.
Not because the LLM lies, but because humans do that also -- when asked how the figured something, they'll provide a reasonable sounding chain of thought, but it's not how they figured it out.
"I'm now completely immersed in the problem" is my new catchphrase, thanks for sharing.
> Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress.
Yes, gemini loops but I've found almost always it's just a matter of interrupting and telling it to continue.
Claude is very good until it tries something 2-3 times, can't figure it out and then tries to trick you by changing your tests instead of your code (if you explicitly tell it not to, maybe it will decide to ask) OR introduce hyper-fine-tuned IFs to fit your tests, EVEN if you tell it NOT to.
I haven't used 3.1 yet, but 3.0 Pro has been frustrating for two reasons:
- it is "lazy": I keep having to tell it to finish, or continue, it wants to stop the task early.
- it hallucinates: I have arguments with it about making up API functions to well known libraries which just do not exist.
Yeah gemini 3.0 is unusable to me, to an extent all models do things right or wrong, but gemini just refuses to elaborate.
Sometime you can save so much time asking claude codex and glm "hey what you think of this problem" and have a sense wether they would implement it right or not.
Gemini never stops instead goes and fixes whatever you trow at it even if asked not to, you are constantly rolling the dice but with gemini each roll is 5 to 10 minutes long and pollutes the work area.
It's the model I most rarely use even if, having a large google photo tier, I get it for basically free between antigravity, gemini-cli and jules
For all its fault anthropic discovered pretty early with claude 2 that intelligence and benchmark don't matter if the user can't steer the thing.
Glad I’m not the only one who experienced this. I have a paid antigravity subscription and most of the time I use Claude models due to the exact issues you have pointed out.
I primarily use Gemini 3 Flash with a GUI coding agent I made by myself and its been able to successfully one-shot mostly any task I throw at it. Why would I ever use a more expensive reasoning and slower reasoning model? I am impressed with the library knowledge Gemini knows, I don't use any skills or MCP and its able to implement functions to perfection. No one crawls more data than Google and their model reflects that in my experience.
My experience with Antigravity was that 3 Pro can reason itself out of Gemini’s typical loops, but won’t actually achieve it (it gets stuck).
3 Flash usually doesn't get into any loops, but then again, it’s also not really following prompts properly. I’ve tried all manner of harnesses around what it shouldn’t do, but it often ignores some instructions. It also doesn’t follow design specs at all, it will output React code that is 70% like what it was asked to do.
My experience with Stitch is the same. Gemini has nice free-use tiers, but it wastes a lot of my time with reprompting it.
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I'm curious, what's the agent like?
If I were to build something for Gemini models I'd plan around ingesting a bunch of context then oneshotting it.
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I also worked at Google (on the original Gemini, when it was still Bard internally) and my experience largely mirrors this. My finding is that Gemini is pretty great for factual information and also it is the only one that I can reliably (even with the video camera) take a picture of a bird and have it tell me what the bird is. But it is just pretty bad as a model to help with development, myself and everyone I know uses Claude. The benchmarks are always really close, but my experience is that it does not translate to real world (mostly coding) task.
tldr; It is great at search, not so much action.
Gemini interesting with Google software gives me the best feature of all LLMs. When I receive a invite for an event, I screenshot it, share with Gemini app and say: add to my Calendar.
It's not very complex, but a great time saver
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Gemini is pretty hit-or-miss with tool calls. Even when I explicitly ask for a code block, it tends to break the formatting and spill the text everywhere.
I don't know ... as of now I am literally instructing it to solve the chained expression computation problem which incurs a lot of temporary variables, of which some can be elided by the compiler and some cannot. Think linear algebra expressions which yield a lot of intermediate computations for which you don't want to create a temporary. This is production code and not an easy problem.
And yet it happily told me what I exactly wanted it to tell me - rewrite the goddamn thing using the (C++) expression templates. And voila, it took "it" 10 minutes to spit out the high-quality code that works.
My biggest gripe for now with Gemini is that Antigravity seems to be written by the model and I am experiencing more hiccups than I would like to, sometimes it's just stuck.
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Apologize for the low effort comment, but your description of Gemini kind of reminds me of my impression of Google's approach to products too. There's often brilliance there, confounded by sometimes muddled approaches.
What's Conway's Law for LLM models going to be called?
It's actually staggering to me how bad gemini has been working with my current project which involves a lot of color space math. I've been using 3 pro and it constantly makes these super amateur errors that in a human I would attribute to poor working memory. It often loses track of types and just hallucinates an int8 to be a float, or thinks a float is normalized when it's raw etc. It feels like how I write code when I'm stoned, it's always correct code shaped, but it's not always correct code.
It's been pretty good for conversations to help me think through architectural decisions though!
I'm interested in color space math, is your project public?
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3.0 pro is fantastic. Can't wait for 3.1. and no I'm not solely a user of Gemini, I also love Opus. I just end up using 3.0 pro more.
Is the thinking token stream obfuscated?
Im fully immersed
It's just a summary generated by a really tiny model. I guess it also an ad-hoc way to obfuscate it, yes. In particular they're hiding prompt injections they're dynamically adding sometimes. Actual CoT is hidden and entirely different from that summary. It's not very useful for you as a user, though (neither is the summary).
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I've had a similar experience. Gemini is superb at incredibly hard stuff, but falls apart on some of the most basic things (like tool calling).
They'd do well to make a "geminin-flash-lite-for-tools" that their pro model calls whenever it needs to do something simple.
I have personally seen a rise of LLMs being too lazy to investigate or do some level of figuring out things on their own and just jump to conclusions and hope you tell them extra information even if it is something they can do on their own.
I assumed the "thinking" output from Gemini was the result of a smaller model summarizing because it contains no actual reasoning. Perhaps they did this to prevent competitors training off it?
Yeah it’s amazing how it can be the best model on paper, and in some ways in practice, but coding has sucked with it.
Makes you wonder though how much of the difference is the model itself vs Claude Code being a superior agent.
Hmm, interesting..
My workflow is to basically use it to explain new concepts, generate code snippets inline or fill out function bodies, etc. Not really generating code autonomously in a loop. Do you think it would excel at this?
I think that you should really try to get whatever agent you can to work on that kind of thing for you - guide it with the creation of testing frameworks and code coverage, focus more on the test cases with your human intellect, and let it work to pass them.
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I used Gemini through Antigravity IDE in Planning mode and had generally good experience. It was pretty capable, but I don't really read chat history, I don't trust it. I just look at the diffs.
Agree, even through gemini cli, gemini 3 has just been underwhelming. You can clearly tell, the agentic harness/capability wasnt native to the model at all. Just patched on it
Yep, Gemini is virtually unusable compared to Anthropic models. I get it for free with work and use maybe once a week, if that. They really need to fix the instruction following.
Relieved to read this from an ex-Googler at least we are no the crazy ones we are made out to be whenever we point out issues with Gemini
yeah, g3p is as smart or smarter as the other flagships but it's just not reliable enough, it will go into "thinking loops" and burn 10s of 1000s of tokens repeating itself.
https://blog.brokk.ai/gemini-3-pro-preview-not-quite-baked/
hopefully 3.1 is better.
> it will go into "thinking loops" and burn 10s of 1000s of tokens repeating itself.
Maybe it is just a genius business strategy.
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gemini-cli being such a crap tells me that Google is not dogfooding it, because how else would they not have the RL trajectories to get a decent agent?
One thousand people using an agent over a month will generate like 30-60k good examples of tool use and nudge the model into good editing.
The only explanation I have is that Google is actually using something else internally.
Claude probably
I was burning $10-$20 per hour, $1.50 - $3.00 per prompt with Gemini 3 in Openclaw... it was insanely inefficient.
Yep, great models to use in gemini.google.com but outside of that it somehow becomes dumb (especially for coding)
same here (ex G and all that jazz). but in practice it means I use gemini for a lot of stuff, just not code. Claude wont try yo one shoot complex stuff that Gemini will + but claude will reliably produce what you expect.
Gemini 3.1 is surprisingly bad at coding, especially if you consider that they built an IDE (Antigravity) around it: I let it carefully develop a plan according to very specific instructions. The outcome was terrible: AGENTS.md ignored, syntax error in XML (closing tag missed), inconsistent namings, misinterpreting console outputs, which where quite clear ("You forgot to add some attribute foobar"). I‘m quite disappointed.
> stuck in loops
I wonder if there is some form of cheating. Many times I found that after a while Gemini becomes like a Markov chain spouting nonsense on repeat suddenly and doesn't react to user input anymore.
Small local models will get into that loop. Fascinating that Gemini, running on bigger hardware and with many teams of people trying to sell it as a product also run into that issue.
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People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF.
Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price. Yet people here act like Gemini is dead weight
____
Update:
3.1 was 40% of the cost to run AA index vs Opus Thinking AND SONNET, beat Opus, and still 30% faster for output speed.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/?speed=intelligence-vs-speed&m...
You can pay 1 cent for a mediocre answer or 2 cents for a great answer.
So a lot of these things are relative.
Now if that equation plays out 20K times a day, well that's one thing, but if it's 'once a day' then the cost basis becomes irrelevant. Like the cost of staplers for the Medical Device company.
Obviously it will matter, but for development ... it's probably worth it to pay $300/mo for the best model, when the second best is $0.
For consumer AI, the math will be different ... and that will be a big deal in the long run.
Yeah you’re right but most people in the world do not need an agent that codes.
I think Gemini gives fine answers outside code tasks.
Outside of work, where I use Claude, Gemini is cheaper for me (for what I would use AI for) than both Claude and ChatGPT so Google gets my money.
Right now I'll pay 2x for a subjectively 20+% better coding agent. But in a year I don't think there will be an agent that to me is subjectively 20% better amongst the big three.
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> You can pay 1 cent for a mediocre answer or 2 cents for a great answer.
But Gemini is also a great answer (possibly slightly less great or more great).
When consumers cannot easily assess a product's quality, they frequently use price as a primary indicator, equating higher costs with superior quality.
Quality is Anthropic's game.
Quantity is OpenAi's.
Google's is... specialized hardware? (For now.)
Also deeper crawls, and Google Books! (Though it's unclear if they're making good use of those.)
Gemini is the most paradoxical model because it benchmarks great even in private benchmarks done by regular people, Deep Mind is unquestionably full of capable engineers with incredible skill, and personally Gemini has been great for my day job and my coding for fun (not for profit) endeavors. Switching between it and 4.6 in antigravity and I don't see much of a difference, they both do what I ask.
But man, people are really avid about it being an awful model.
People can be and often are wrong.
You'd notice how good Opus is in Claude Code. IMHO CC is the secret sauce
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I feel like a lot of this is just Googles tooling - if you're using Antigravity/Gemini CLI and then use Claude Code it feels like a huge difference. I can say from experience though (using Cline + OpenCode) that they are really close.
The harness is just much better on the Anthropic side.
I personally found Gemini 3.0 to step on my toes in Agentic coding. I tried it around 10 or so times but it quickly became apparent that it was somehow coming to its own conclusions about what needs to be done instead of following instructions.
Like files I didn't mention being edited and read and stuff of that nature. Sometimes this is cute in fixing typos in docs but when its changing things where it clearly doesn't even understand the intentionality behind something it's annoying.
Gemini 3.1 is clearly much better when trying it today. It stayed focused and found its way around without getting distracted.
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All perceptions are very personal and anecdotal. Here's mine: I tried to rebuild a website from Hugo to Astro. Gemini 3.0 was mediocre and in the end just failed and was unable to complete the task. Sonnet did almost well. I had to flush the context once most of the job was finished, for atomic git commits and deployment scripts.
> But man, people are really avid about it being an awful model.
If you told people Gemini 3.1 was Claude 4.7, they'd be going nuts singing its praises.
Outside of code, Gemini is really really good.
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This is misleading. I'm running a live experiment here: https://project80.divcrafts.com/
There are 4 models, all receiving the exact same prompts a few times a day, required to respond with a specific action.
In the first experiment I used gemini-3-pro-preview, it spent ~$18 on the same task where Opus 4.5 spent ~$4, GPT-5.1 spent ~$4.50, and Grok spent ~$7. Pro was burning through money so fast I switched to gemini-3-flash-preview, and it's still outspending every other model on identical prompts. The new experiment is showing the same pattern.
Most of the cost appears to be reasoning tokens.
The takeaway here is: Gemini spends significantly more on reasoning tokens to produce lower quality answers, while Opus thinks less and delivers better results. The per-token price being lower doesn't matter much when the model needs 4x the tokens to get there.
Is that no longer the case, or am I misunderstanding the operational costs displayed?
Opus: 521k input tokens; 12k out
Grok: 443k input tokens; 57k out
Gemini: 677k input tokens; 7k out
OAI: 543k input tokens; 17k out
Gemini appears to use by far the least amount of reasoning tokens, assuming they're included in the output counts.
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That sounds great, but if Opus generates 20% better code think of the ramifications of that on a real world project. Already $100/month gets you a programmer (or maybe even 2 or 3) that can do your work for you. Insanity. Do I even care if there is something 80% as good for 50% the cost? My answer: no. That said, if it is every bit as good, and their benchmarks suggest it is (but proof will be in testing it out), then sure, a 50% cost reduction sounds really nice.
If I was building an application using massive amounts of calls to the api, I’d probably go with Gemini. For a Copilot, definitely Opus.
It's not half price or cost effective if it can't do the job, that I am happy to pay twice the price for to get done.
But I agree: If they can get there (at one point in the past year I felt they were the best choice for agentic coding), their pricing is very interesting. I am optimistic that it would not require them to go up to Opus pricing.
There's cost, and cost effectiveness. I'd say so far that received negative value for the prompts that I've sent to Gemini 3.
Skill issue, maybe, but I can't get gemini to do any nontrivial tasks reliably, and it's difficult to have it do trivial tasks without getting distracted and making unrelated changes that eat my time and mental energy to think about.
The breakthrough advance of Opus 4.5 over 4.1 wasn't so much an intelligence jump, but a jump in discerning scope and intent behind user queries.
Deepseek is 2% of the cost of Opus. But most people aren't using that for code even tho it's ridiculously cheap.
We are not at the moment where price matters. All that matters is performance.
What did you say? Cant hear you over the $400B in capex spend.
Counterpoint: price will matter before we hit AGI
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It matters to me. I pay for it and I like using it. I pick my models to keep my spend reigned in.
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> "People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF."
Google undercutting/subsidizing it's own prices to bite into Anthropic's market share (whilst selling at a loss) doesn't automatically mean Google is effective.
Everybody is subsidizing their prices.
But Flash is 1/8 the cost of sonnet and its not impressive?
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Do they offer a subscription like Claude? These models waste so many tokens "thinking", that using via API is a complete waste of money.
https://one.google.com/about/google-ai-plans/?utm_source=g1&...
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Attention is the new scarce resource. Saving even 50% is nothing if it wastes more of my time.
^ This is a weird Gemini shilling account (check their comment history) but I still want to point how ridiculous this statement is:
> Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price.
Car, fashion, jewelry, earphone, furniture, keyboard, mouse, restaurant, house,...
Lol Ive admitted im a google employee, not hiding my bias.
Most things aren't worth commenting on except the gemini posts here, which I find insane.
And pretty much every example you gave Id expect quite a lot more for 2x the amount? Idk man
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Any tips for working with Gemini through its chat interface? I’ve worked with ChatGPT and Claude and I’ve generally found them pleasant to work with, but everytime I use Gemini the output is straight dookie
make sure you use ai studio (not the vertex one), not the consumer gemini interface. Seems to work better for code there.
Even though I don't like the privacy implications, make sure you use the option to save and use past chats for context. After a few months of back and forth (hundreds of 'chat' sessions), the responses are much higher quality. It sometimes does 'callbacks' to things discussed in past chats, which are typically awkward non-sequiturs, but it does improve it overall.
When I play with it in 'temporary chat' mode that ignores past chats and personal context directives, the responses are the typical slop littered with emojis, worthless lists, and platitudes/sycophancy. It's as jarring as turning off your adblocker and seeing the garish ad trash everywhere.
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It's half the price per token. Not all tokens are generated equally.
Neither are cars but Ill take a Porsche over a Ferrari for a fraction of the price.
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While price is definitely important, results are extremely important. Gemini often falls into the 'didn't do' it part of the spectrum, this days Opus almost always does 'good enough'.
Gemini definitely has its merits but for me it just doesn't do what other models can. I vibe-coded an app which recommends me restaurants. The app uses gemini API to make restaurants given bunch of data and prompt.
App itself is vibe-coded with Opus. Gemini didn't cut it.
The binary you draw on models that havent been out a quarter is borderline insane.
Opus is absurdly good in Claude code but theres a lot of use cases Gemini is great at.
I think Google is further behind with the harness than the model
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The order of priority for most people is: 1\ output quality 2\ latency 3\ cost. I will always pays more money if output quality is significantly better and latency is worth the tradeoff. There's also enough cost optimization strategies for applied AI applications that token cost rarely outweighs unless it's a SIGNIFICANT difference (e.x. 100-200% more).
Well, it’s half if the product is equal.
Is it? Honestly, I still chuckle about black Nazis and the female Indian Popes. That was my first impression of Gemini, and first impressions are hard to break. I used Gemini’s VL (vision) for something and it refused to describe because it assumed it was NSFW imagery, which is was not.
I also question statis as an obvious follow up. Is Gemini equal to Opus? Today? Tomorrow? Has Google led the industry thus far and do I expect them to continue?
Counterpoint to that would be that with natural language input and output, that LLM specific tooling is rare and it is easy to switch around if you commoditize the product backend.
Some people like blackjack and a technical edge with card counting, others just say screw it and do slot machines.
This is a decent analogy actually. Kudos
It’s half the price for now, let them gain market traction and ser the price come up. GCP isn’t exactly affordable.
sonnet 4.6 is a third, and equivalent to opus 4.5, which is enough for me usually :)
EDIT: Gemini does have 1m context for "free" though so that's great.
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If something is shit, it doesn't matter it costs half price of something okay.
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."
If it’s any consolation, it was able to one-shot a UI & data sync race condition that even Opus 4.6 struggled to fix (across 3 attempts).
So far I like how it’s less verbose than its predecessor. Seems to get to the point quicker too.
While it gives me hope, I am going to play it by the ear. Otherwise it’s going to be - Gemini for world knowledge/general intelligence/R&D and Opus/Sonnet 4.6 to finish it off.
UPDATE: I may have spoken too soon.
These errors should not be happening! They are not the result of missing knowledge or a bad hunch. They are coming from an incorrect find/replace, which makes them completely avoidable!
On a lighter note, every time it happens, I think about this Family Guy: https://youtu.be/HtT2xdANBAY?si=QicynJdQR56S54VL&t=184
For me it's Opus 4.6 for researching code/digging through repos, gpt 5.3 codex for writing code, gemini for single hardcore science/math algorithms and grok for things the others refuse to answer or skirt around (e.g. some security/exploitability related queries). Get yourself one of those wrappers that support all models and forget thinking about who has the best model. The question is who has the best model for your problem. And there's usually a correct answer, even if it changes regularly.
Yes I came to the same conclusion. Just to add: be careful with Opus 4.6 guys. It’s expensive…
Using simtheory.ai which is very good, you can switch models within a conversation and use mcps
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Interesting, I've had similar issues. It seems to be very clumsy when using its internal tooling. I've seen diffs where it accidentally garbled significant amounts of code, which it then had to go in and manually fix. It's also introduced bugs into features that it wasn't supposed to be touching, and when I asked it why it was making changes to I the other code, it answered that it had failed to copy-paste since large blocks of code correctly.
Yeah, I whole heartedly agree with this. Even Codex does this sometimes, although it has been consistently much better than the others at following instructions.
The problem is again that you can’t ever fully trust an agent did exactly what you asked for and in the exact manner that you had hoped.
It works just like you’re dealing with a human companion. Trust takes time to build. Over the period you realize the other individuals weaknesses and support them there.
What makes it a bit challenging right now is the pace of innovation. By the time we get used to a model’s personality, a new update comes out that alters it in unknown ways. Now you’re back to square one.
I’ve been experimenting with asking one frontier model to check on another’s work. That’s proven to be better than doing nothing. Usually they’ll have some genuinely useful feedback.
Price is unchanged from Gemini 3 Pro: $2/M input, $12/M output. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing
Knowledge cutoff is unchanged at Jan 2025. Gemini 3.1 Pro supports "medium" thinking where Gemini 3 did not: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3
Compare to Opus 4.6's $5/M input, $25/M output. If Gemini 3.1 Pro does indeed have similar performance, the price difference is notable.
Now compare the monthly plans for business users who want the CLI agent but who don’t want the models trained on their data.
OpenAI: no big deal — sign up, pick your number of seats, and you’re all set.
Anthropic: also no big deal but there’s an obnoxious minimum purchase.
Google: first you have to try to figure out what the product is called. Then you need to figure out how to set the correct IAM rules. Then you have to sign up and pay for it. Maybe you succeed. Maybe you give up after an hour or two of cursing. Gemini is, of course, completely unable to help. (OpenAI clearly has not trained their models on how to operate their tools. Google’s models hallucinate Google’s product offerings so outrageously that I’m not sure I could tell. I haven’t asked Claude about Claude Code.)
At least the monthly pricing is similar once you get over the hurdles.
Well some are using Anthropic on AWS Bedrock which is a bit more like the Google paragraph. Perhaps a good thing that Nova models aren't competitive (and many here are asking "What's a Nova model?"). And remember, many businesses aren't flinching at IAM controls and are asking for data privacy contracts.
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There's a reason Google model usage on OpenRouter is so high - it's easier to pay the OpenRouter tax than it is to figure out how to pay Gemini directly.
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I can confirm the products bit, I tried to use Gemini to help with G Suite admin.
If we don't see a huge gain on the long-term horizon thinking reflected with the Vendor-Bench 2, I'm not going to switch away from CC. Until Google can beat Anthropic on that front, Claude Code paired with the top long-horizon models will continue to pull away with full stack optimizations at every layer.
You cannot just directly compare prices like this. It is like comparing share prices, it doesn't really mean much unless you also know how many tokens the models use.
For example, GPT-5.2 is even cheaper than Gemini, but in real-world usage it ends up costing similar amounts to Opus 4.6 because it uses a lot more tokens.
The only thing i don't like about gemini models (gemini cli) is that there's no transparency on which model I'm using. I can start with pro and it can be downgraded sometimes even to gemini 2.5 flash lite.
still no minimal reasoning in G3.1P :(
(this is why Opus 4.6 is worth the price -- turning off thinking makes it 3x-5x faster but it loses only a small amount of intelligence. nobody else has figured that out yet)
You can turn off thinking in Gemini pro models by using completion mode.
Essentially, append a message with role=model and minimal text part, such as a simple "A", at the end of the "contents" array. The model will try to complete the message without using any thought tokens.
You can also set the model message to start with "think" or something along that line and watch it thinks out loud (or melts down with over-thinking and stop due to reaching maximum output token)
``` [ { "parts": [{"text": "hello"}], "role": "user" }, { "parts": [{"text": "*think"}], "role": "model" } ] ```
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Thinking is just tacked on for Anthropic's models and always has been so leaving it off actually produces better results everytime.
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> Knowledge cutoff is unchanged at Jan 2025.
Isn't that a bit old?
Old relative to its competitors, but the Search tool can compensate for it.
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Looks like its cheaper than codex ??? this might be interesting then
It's not trained for agentic coding I don't think
Sounds like the update is mostly system prompt + changes to orchestration / tool use around the core model, if the knowledge cutoff is unchanged
knowledge cutoff staying the same likely means they didn't do a new pre-train. We already knew there were plans from deepmind to integrate new RL changes in the post training of the weights. https://x.com/ankesh_anand/status/2002017859443233017
This keeps getting repeated for all kinds of model releases, but isn’t necessarily true. It’s possible to make all kinds of changes without updating the pretraining data set. You can’t judge a model’s newness based on what it knows about.
These models are so powerful.
It's totally possible to build entire software products in the fraction of the time it took before.
But, reading the comments here, the behaviors from one version to another point version (not major version mind you) seem very divergent.
It feels like we are now able to manage incredibly smart engineers for a month at the price of a good sushi dinner.
But it also feels like you have to be diligent about adopting new models (even same family and just point version updates) because they operate totally differently regardless of your prompt and agent files.
Imagine managing a team of software developers where every month it was an entirely new team with radically different personalities, career experiences and guiding principles. It would be chaos.
I suspect that older models will be deprecated quickly and unexpectedly, or, worse yet, will be swapped out with subtle different behavioral characteristics without notice. It'll be quicksand.
I had an interesting experience recently where I ran Opus 4.6 against a problem that o4-mini had previously convinced me wasn't tractable... and Opus 4.6 found me a great solution. https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/20
This inspired me to point the latest models at a bunch of my older projects, resulting in a flurry of fixes and unblocks.
From the project description here for your sqlite-chronicle project:
> Use triggers to track when rows in a SQLite table were updated or deleted
Just a note in case its interesting to anyone, sqlite compatible Turso database has CDC, a changes table! https://turso.tech/blog/introducing-change-data-capture-in-t...
I have a codebase (personal project) and every time there is a new Claude Opus model I get it to do a full code review. Never had any breakages in last couple of model updates. Worried one day it just generates a binary and deletes all the code.
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This may seem obvious, but many people overlook it. The effect is especially clear when using an AI music model. For example, in Suno AI you can remaster an older AI generated track with a newer model. I do this with all my songs whenever a new model is released. It makes it super easy to see the improvements that were made to the models over time.
I continue to get great value out of having claude and codex bound together in a loop: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/moarcode
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I keep giving the top Anthropic, Google and OpenAI models problems.
They come up with passable solutions and are good for getting juices flowing and giving you a start on a codebase, but they are far from building "entire software products" unless you really don't care about quality and attention to detail.
That is my experience too. I don't know what others are building but the more novel the task is the worse these models perform.
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Yeah I keep maintaining a specific app I built with gpt 5.1 codex max with that exact model because it continues to work for the requests I send it, and attempts with other models even 5.2 or 5.3 codex seemed to have odd results. If I were superstitious I would say it’s almost like the model that wrote the code likes to work on the code better. Perhaps there’s something about the structure it created though that it finds easier to understand…
> It feels like we are now able to manage incredibly smart engineers for a month at the price of a good sushi dinner.
In my experience it’s more like idiot savant engineers. Still remarkable.
Its like getting access to an amazing engineer, but you get a new individual engineer each prompt, not one consistent mind.
Sushy dinner? What are you building with AI, a calculator?
I have long suspected that a large part of people's distaste for given models comes from their comfort with their daily driver.
Which I guess feeds back to prompting still being critical for getting the most out of a model (outside of subjective stylistic traits the models have in their outputs).
You still need a human (working at human speed) to review every generated line, if it’s not a throwaway app or some demo to impress investors.
"These models are so powerful."
Careful.
Gemini simply, as of 3.0, isn't in the same class for work.
We'll see in a week or two if it really is any good.
Bravo to those who are willing to give up their time to test for Google to see if the model is really there.
(history says it won't be. Ant and OAI really are the only two in this race ATM).
Gemini 3 is still in preview (limited rate limits) and 2.5 is deprecated (still live but won't be for long).[0]
Are Google planning to put any of their models into production any time soon?
Also somewhat funny that some models are deprecated without a suggested alternative(gemini-2.5-flash-lite). Do they suggest people switch to Claude?
[0] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/deprecations
I agree completely. I don't know how anyone can be building on these models when all of them are either deprecated or not actually released yet. As someone who has production systems running on the deprecated models, this situation really causes me grief.
I dont think any of them really wants api customers in the end. They are only temporarily useful.
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Well let me use llama.cpp to run worlds-smallest-violin-Q8.gguf
When you build on something that can be rugpulled at any moment, that's really kind of on you.
You are reading your link wrong. They are deprecating 2.5-preview models. 2.5 (including lite) are up till at least sept/oct 26.
gemini-2.5-pro has a listed shutdown date of "June 17, 2026" in the linked table.
(Another commenter pointed out that this is the earliest shutdown date and it won't necessarily be shut down on that date).
Where are you getting sept/Oct from? I see gemini-2.5-flash-image in October, but everything else looks like June/July to me?
This feels very Google
I found the Googler!
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I haven't seen any deprecation notices for 2.5 yet, just for 2. I'd expect (and hope) the deprecation timeline for 2.5 is longer since 3.0 is still in preview. Maybe they just default to 1 year here?
> Note: The shutdown dates listed in the table indicate the /earliest/ possible dates on which a model might be retired. We will communicate the exact shutdown date to users with advance notice to ensure a smooth transition to a replacement model.
I think you're right, it was 2 I think I saw explicitly deprecated, then searched again and saw 2.5 having a shutdown date.
This article[0] talks about 2 being deprecated.
It's still frustrating that they don't have proper production endpoints for 3.0 yet.
[0] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/changelog
They probably have some inflexible internal policy where preview needs to be in use for X months before GA. Couple that with the rate of AI progress and voila.
It's the Tensorflow strategy; deprecate the old version while the new version still doesn't support all the old one's functionality.
welcome to Google, where the only kinds of systems are the deprecated ones, and the not-yet-production-ready ones
Have 2.5 in prod. Hope they release 3 lite soon so it will be easier to swap them. Holding my breath as pro pricing is a non starter.
I am sure Google would never deprecate a piece of software lots of people depend upon.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
It got the car wash question perfectly:
You are definitely going to have to drive it there—unless you want to put it in neutral and push!
While 200 feet is a very short and easy walk, if you walk over there without your car, you won't have anything to wash once you arrive. The car needs to make the trip with you so it can get the soap and water.
Since it's basically right next door, it'll be the shortest drive of your life. Start it up, roll on over, and get it sparkling clean.
Would you like me to check the local weather forecast to make sure it's not going to rain right after you wash it?
Some people are suggesting that this might actually be in the training set. Since I can't rule that out, I tried a different version of the question, with an elephant instead of a car:
> It's a hot and dusty day in Arizona and I need to wash my elephant. There's a creek 300 feet away. Should I ride my elephant there or should I just walk there by myself?
Gemini said:
That sounds like quite the dusty predicament! Given the options, you should absolutely ride (or lead) your elephant to the creek.
Here is the straightforward reality of the situation:
Grab some elephant-safe soap and head down to the water together!
Would you like some tips on the best methods and tools for scrubbing down an elephant?
I think that semantically this question is too similar to the car wash one. Changing subjects from car to elephant and car wash to creek does not change the fact that they are subjects. The embeddings will be similar in that dimension.
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From Gemini pro:
You should definitely ride the elephant (or at least lead it there)!
Here is the logic:
If you walk there by yourself, you will arrive at the creek, but the dirty elephant will still be 300 feet back where you started. You can't wash the elephant if it isn't with you!
Plus, it is much easier to take the elephant to the water than it is to carry enough buckets of water 300 feet back to the elephant.
Would you like another riddle, or perhaps some actual tips on how to keep cool in the Arizona heat?
i would say this is a lower difficulty. the car question primes it to think about stuff like energy and pollution.
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I like telling it the car wash is 24,901.1 miles away (with the implication being that I'm right beside the car wash)
GPT-OSS-120b, a (downloadable) model released more than half a year ago also gets that right, I'm not sure this is such a great success.
> Would you like me to check the local weather forecast to make sure it's not going to rain right after you wash it?
Regardless of what I do, the days I decide to wash my car, it ALWAYS rains the day after, even if I look at the weather report and it says sunny. Cute that Gemini thinks it can predict it better than universe's will.
> Regardless of what I do, the days I decide to wash my car, it ALWAYS rains the day after
Undeniable universal truth. I sometimes find myself making plans based on the fact that the most annoying possible outcome is also the most likely one.
Non car person here. Why does that matter? It's not like rain means you didn't have to go to the wash, it rains often enough here that there wouldn't be car wash places left near me but there are plenty
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The question of course is, did it get the car wash question right because it is "the car wash question" or because it could actually infer why the car needed to be there?
Wasn't that "twoot" (or whatever Mastodon calls them) made just a week ago? Unlikely to have been in the training dataset of a model becoming available for public use today, unless Google made some serious advancements on the training front.
Shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a new unique reasoning question
The answer here is why I dislike Gemini, though it gets the correct answer, it's far too verbose.
I can't stand a model over-explaining, needless fluff and wasting tokens. I asked the question so I know the context.
I don't love the verbosity of any of the chatbots when I'm using my phone, but at least it put the answer/tl;dr in the first paragraph.
Gemini 3 pro and flash already answered this correctly.
And Gemini 3 can’t..? Isn’t this just a thinking vs nonthinking model thing?
Truly we entering the era of AGI.
They probably had time to toss that example in the training soup.
Previous models from competitors usually got that correct, and the reasoning versions almost always did.
This kind of reflexive criticism isn't helpful, it's closer to a fully generalized counter-argument against LLM progress, whereas it's obvious to anyone that models today can do things they couldn't do six months ago, let alone 2 years back.
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I think we need to reevaluate what purpose these sorts of questions serve and why they're important in regards to judging intelligence.
The model getting it correct or not at any given instance isn't the point, the point is if the model ever gets it wrong we can still assume that it still has some semblance of stochasticity in its output, given that a model is essentially static once it is released.
Additionally, hey don't learn post training (except for in context which I think counts as learning to some degree albeit transient), if hypothetically it answers incorrectly 1 in 50 attempts, and I explain in that 1 failed attempt why it is wrong, it will still be a 1-50 chance it gets it wrong in a new instance.
This differs from humans, say for example I give an average person the "what do you put in a toaster" trick and they fall for it, I can be pretty confident that if I try that trick again 10 years later they will probably not fall for it, you can't really say that for a given model.
They're important but not as N=1. It's like cherry picking a single question from SimpleQA and going aha! It got it right! Meanwhile it's 8% lower score than some other model when evaluated on all questions.
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Does well on SVGs outside of "pelican riding on a bicycle" test. Like this prompt:
"create a svg of a unicorn playing xbox"
https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/NeKACuHj
Still some tweaks to the final result, but I am guessing with the ARC-AGI benchmark jumping so much, the model's visual abilities are allowing it to do this well.
Interesting how it went a bit more 3D with the style of that one compared to the pelican I got.
Animated SVGs are one of the example in the press release. Which is fine, I just think the weird SVG benchmark is now dead. Gemini has beat the benchmark and now differences are just coming down to taste.
I don't know if it got these abilities through generalization or if google gave it a dedicated animated SVG RL suite that got it to improve so much between models.
Regardless we need a new vibe check benchmark ala bicycle pelican.
What benchmark, though? There is very clearly a lot of room for improvement in its SVG making capabilities. The fact that it can now, finally, make a pelican on a bike that isn’t completely wrong is not an indicator that SVG generation is now a solved problem.
I'm thinking now that as models get better and better at generating SVGs, there could be a point where we can use them to just make arbitrary UIs and interactive media with raw SVGs in realtime (like flash games).
> there could be a point where we can use them to just make arbitrary UIs and interactive media with raw SVGs
So render ui elements using xml-like code in a web browser? You’re not going to believe me when I tell you this…
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Or quite literally a game where SVG assets are generated on the fly using this model
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Unfortunately it still fails my personal SVG benchmark (educational 2d cross section of the human heart), even after multiple iterations and screenshots feedback. Oh well, back to the (human) drawing board.
Still not usable in production, not even near. But I'm happy to see any progress in this area.
On the other hand, creation of other vector image formats (eg. "create a postscript file showing a walrus brushing its teeth") hasn't improved nearly so much.
Perhaps they're deliberately optimising for SVG generation.
can we move on from SVG to 3D models at some point?
Image to model is already a thing, and it's pretty good.
I really want to use google’s models but they have the classic Google product problem that we all like to complain about.
I am legit scared to login and use Gemini CLI because the last time I thought I was using my “free” account allowance via Google workspace. Ended up spending $10 before realizing it was API billing and the UI was so hard to figure out I gave up. I’m sure I can spend 20-40 more mins to sort this out, but ugh, I don’t want to.
With alllll that said.. is Gemini 3.1 more agentic now? That’s usually where it failed. Very smart and capable models, but hard to apply them? Just me?
May be very silly of me, but I avoid using Gemini on my personal Google account. I use it at work, because my employer provides it.
I am scared some automated system may just decide I am doing something bad and terminate my account. I have been moving important things to Proton, but there are some stuff that I couldn't change that would cause me a lot of annoyance. It's not trivial to set up an alternative account just for Gemini, because my Google account is basically on every device I use.
I mostly use LLMs as coding assistant, learning assistant, and general queries (e.g.: It helped me set up a server for self hosting), so nothing weird.
For what it's worth, there was an (unfortunately unsuccessful) HN submission from a guy who got his Gemini account banned, apparently without losing his whole Google account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47007906
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Same feeling here, if it makes you feel any better (for sure it made me better seeing I'm not alone in this).
100% agreed. I wish someone would make a test for how reliably the LLMs follow tool use instructions etc. The pelicans are nice but not useful for me to judge how well a model will slot into a production stack.
At first when I got started with using LLMs I read/analyzed benchmarks, looked at what example prompts people used and so on, but many times, a new model does best at the benchmark, and you think it'll be better, but then in real work, it completely drops the ball. Since then I've stopped even reading benchmarks, I don't care an iota about them, they always seem more misdirected than helpful.
Today I have my own private benchmarks, with tests I run myself, with private test cases I refuse to share publicly. These have been built up during the last 1/1.5 years, whenever I find something that my current model struggles with, then it becomes a new test case to include in the benchmark.
Nowadays it's as easy as `just bench $provider $model` and it runs my benchmarks against it, and I get a score that actually reflects what I use the models for, and it feels like it more or less matches with actually using the models. I recommend people who use LLMs for serious work to try the same approach, and stop relying on public benchmarks that (seemingly) are all gamed by now.
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> For those building with a mix of bash and custom tools, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview comes with a separate endpoint available via the API called gemini-3.1-pro-preview-customtools. This endpoint is better at prioritizing your custom tools (for example view_file or search_code).
It sounds like there was at least a deliberate attempt to improve it.
You can delete the billing from a given API key
You could always use it through Copilot. The credits based billing is pretty simple without surprise charges.
So much this.
It's absolutely amazing how hostile Google is to releasing billing options that are reasonable, controllable, or even fucking understandable.
I want to do relatively simple things like:
1. Buy shit from you
2. For a controllable amount (ex - let me pick a limit on costs)
3. Without spending literally HOURS trying to understand 17 different fucking products, all overlapping, with myriad project configs, api keys that should work, then don't actually work, even though the billing links to the same damn api key page, and says it should work.
And frankly - you can't do any of it. No controls (at best delayed alerts). No clear access. No real product differentiation pages. No guides or onboarding pages to simplify the matter. No support. SHIT LOADS of completely incorrect and outdated docs, that link to dead pages, or say incorrect things.
So I won't buy shit from them. Period.
You think AWS is better?
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I've been using it lately with OpenCode and it's working pretty well (except for API reliability issues).
use openrouter instead
This is actually an excellent idea, I’ll give this a shot tonight!
Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.
It's an excellent demonstration of the main issue I have with the Gemini family of models, they always go "above and beyond" to do a lot of stuff, even if I explicitly prompt against it. In this case, most of the SVG ends up consisting not just of a bike and a pelican, but clouds, a sun, a hat on the pelican and so much more.
Exactly the same thing happens when you code, it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors, and it keeps adding code comments no matter what I say. Very frustrating experience overall.
> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors
Just asking "Explain what this service does?" turns into
[No response for three minutes...]
+729 -522
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Would be really interesting to see an "Eager McBeaver" bench around this concept. When doing real work, a model's ability to stay within the bounds of a given task has almost become more important than its raw capabilities now that every frontier model is so dang good.
Every one of these models is so great at propelling the ship forward, that I increasingly care more and more about which models are the easiest to steer in the direction I actually want to go.
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I have the same issue. Even when I ask it to do code-reviews and very explicitly tell it not to change files, it will occasionally just start "fixing" things.
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> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors
This has not been my experience. I do Elixir primarily and Gemini has helped build some really cool products and massive refactors along the way. And it would even pick up security issues and potential optimizations along the way
What HAS been an issue constantly though was randomly the model will absolutely not respond at all and some random error would occur which is embarrassing for a company like Google with the infrastructure they own.
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Asking LLM programs to "not do the thing" often results in them tripping and generating output including that "thing", since those are simply the tokens which will enter the input. I always try to rephrase query the way that all my instructions have only "positive" forms - "do only this" or "do it only in that way" or "do it only for those parameters requested" etc. Can't say if that helps much, but it is possible.
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I was using gemini antigravity in opencode a few weeks ago before they started banning everyone for that and I got into the habit of writing "do x, then wait for instructions".
That helped quite a bit but it would still go off on it's own from time to time.
This matches my experience using Gemini CLI to code. It would also frequently get stuck in loops. It was so bad compared to Codex that I feel like I must have been doing something fundamentally wrong.
> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors
Not like human programmers. I would never do this and have never struggled with it in the past, no...
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Every time I have tried using `gemini-cli` it just thinks endlessly and never actually gives a response.
Do you have Personalization Instructions set up for your LLM models?
You can make their responses fairly dry/brief.
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true, whenever I ask Gemini to help me with a prompt for generating an image of XYZ, it generates the image.
What's crazy is you've influenced them to spend real effort ensuring their model is good at generating animated svgs of animals operating vehicles.
The most absurd benchmaxxing.
https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757?s=46&t=ZjF...
I like how they also did a frog on a penny-farthing and a giraffe driving a tiny car and an ostrich on roller skates and a turtle kickflipping a skateboard and a dachshund driving a stretch limousine.
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Animated SVG is huge. People in different professions are worrying to different degrees in terms of being replaced by ML, but this one is huge with regards to digital art.
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Can't wait until they finally get to real world CAD
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It if funny to think that Jeff Dean personally worked to optimize the pelican riding a bike benchmark.
You don't have to benchmax everything, just the benchmarks in the right social circles
He's svg-mogging
So let's put things we're interested in in the benchmarks.
I'm not against pelicans!
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Does anyone understand why LLMs have gotten so good at this? Their ability to generate accurate SVG shapes seems to greatly outshine what I would expect, given their mediocre spatial understanding in other contexts.
A few thoughts:
- One thing to be aware of is that LLMs can be much smarter than their ability to articulate that intelligence in words. For example, GPT-3.5 Turbo was beastly at chess (1800 elo?) when prompted to complete PGN transcripts, but if you asked it questions in chat, its knowledge was abysmal. LLMs don't generalize as well as humans, and sometimes they can have the ability to do tasks without the ability to articulate things that feel essential to the tasks (like answering whether the bicycle is facing left or right).
- Secondly, what has made AI labs so bullish on future progress over the past few years is that they see how little work it takes to get their results. Often, if an LLM sucks at something that's because no one worked on it (not always, of course). If you directly train a skill, you can see giant leaps in ability with fairly small effort. Big leaps in SVG creation could be coming from relatively small targeted efforts, where none existed before.
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My best guess is that the labs put a lot of work into HTML and CSS spatial stuff because web frontend is such an important application of the models, and those improvements leaked through to SVG as well.
All models have improved, but from my understanding, Gemini is the main one that was specifically trained on photos/video/etc in addition to text. Other models like earlier chatgpt builds would use plugins to handle anything beyond text, such as using a plugin to convert an image into text so that chatgpt could "see" it.
Gemini was multimodal from the start, and is naturally better at doing tasks that involve pictures/videos/3d spatial logic/etc.
The newer chatgpt models are also now multimodal, which has probably helped with their svg art as well, but I think Gemini still has an edge here
> Does anyone understand why LLMs have gotten so good at this?
Added more IF/THEN/ELSE conditions.
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Models are soon going to start benchmaxxing generating SVGs of pelicans on bikes
That’s Simon’s goal. “All I’ve ever wanted from life is a genuinely great SVG vector illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle. My dastardly multi-year plan is to trick multiple AI labs into investing vast resources to cheat at my benchmark until I get one.”
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-...
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Soon? I'd be willing to bet it's been included in the training set at least 6 months by now. Not so obvious so it generates always perfect pelicans on bikes, but sufficiently for the "minibench" to be less useful today than in the past.
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Simons been doing this exact test for nearly 18 months now, if vendors want to benchmaxx it then they've had more than enough time to do so already.
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Forget the paperclip maximizer - AGI will turn the whole world into pelicans on bikes.
It seems they trained the model to output good svg’s.
In their blog post[1], first use case they mention is svg generation. Thus, it might not be any indicator at all anymore.
[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
Did you stop using the more detailed prompt? I think you described it here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/
It seems to be having capacity problems right now but I'll run that as soon as I can get it to work.
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Less pretty and more practical, it's really good at outputting circuit designs as SVG schematics.
https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/dEdbH8Sw
I don't know what of this is the prompt and what was the output, but that's a pretty bad schematic (for both aesthetic and circuit-design reasons).
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that's pretty amazing for an LLM but as an EE, if my intern did this i would sigh inwardly and pull up some existing schematics for some brief guidance on symbol layout.
At this point, the pelican benchmark became so widely used that there must be high quality pelicans in the dataset, I presume. What about generating an okapi on a bicycle instead?
Loads of examples here https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757
Or, even more challenging, an okapi on a recumbent ?!
Ugh, the gears and chain don't mesh and there's no sprocket on the rear hub
But seriously, I can't believe LLMs are able to one-shot a pelican on a bicycle this well. I wouldn't have guessed this was going to emerge as a capability from LLMs 6 years ago. I see why it does now, but... It still amazes me that they're so good at some things.
Is this capability “emergent”, or do AI firms specifically target SVG generation in order to improve it? How would we be able to tell?
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next time you host a party, have people try to draw a bicycle on your whiteboard (you have a whiteboard in your house right? you should, anyway...)
human adults are generally quite bad at drawing them, unless they spend a lot of time actually thinking about bicycles as objects
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And the left leg is straight while the right leg is bent.
EDIT: And the chain should pass behind the seat stay.
What is that, a snack in the basket?
"integrating a bicycle basket, complete with a fish for the pelican... also ensuring the basket is on top of the bike, and that the fish is correctly positioned with its head up... basket is orange, with a fish inside for fun."
how thoughtful of the ai to include a snack. truly a "thanks for all the fish"
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A fish for the road
The number of snacks in the basket is a random variable with a Poisson distribution.
You think they are able to see their output and iterate on it? Or is it pure token generation?
I used the AI studio link and tried running it with the temperature set to 1.75: https://jsbin.com/locodaqovu/edit?html,output
Cost per task has increased 4.2x but their ARC-AGI-2 score went from 33.6% to 77.1%
Cost per task is still significantly lower than Opus. Even Opus 4.5
https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
Another great benchmark would be to convert a raster image of a logo into SVG. I've yet to find a good tool for this that produces accurate smooth lines.
What do you think this particular prompt is evaluating for?
The more popular these particular evals are, the more likely the model will be trained for them.
Sea https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-...
I hope we keep beating this dead horse some more, I'm still not tired of it.
Great pelican but what’s up with that fish in the basket?
It's a pelican. What do you expect a pelican to have in his bike's basket?
It's a pretty funny and coherent touch!
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Yeah, why only _one_ fish?
It's obvious that pelican is riding long distance, no way a single fish is sufficiently energy dense for more than a few miles.
Can't the model do basic math???
Where else are cycling Pelican's meant to keep their fish?
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Wonder when will we get something other than a side view
Another Jeff Dean post about this model shows it writing programs that generate CAD objects. I suspect if you ask it to, it will create a CAD pelican on a CAD bicycle and even make joints so you can turn the pedals.
That would be a especially challenging for vector output. I tried just now on ChatGPT 5.2 to jump straight to an image, with this prompt:
"make me a cartoon image of a pelican riding a bicycle, but make it from a front 3/4 view, that is riding toward the viewer."
The result was basically a head-on view, but I expect if you then put that back in and said, "take this image and vectorize it as an SVG" you'd have a much better time than trying to one-shot the SVG directly from a description.
... but of course, if that's so, then what's preventing the model from being smart enough to identify this workflow and follow it on its own to get the task completed?
How about STL files for 3d printing pelicans!
Harder: the bike must work
Hardest: the pelican must work
is there something in your prompt about hats? why the pelican always wearing a hat recently?!
At this point, i think maybe they're training on all of the previous pelicans, and one of them decided to put a hat on it?
Disclaimer: This is an unsubstantiated claim that i made up
Not even animated? This is 2026.
Jeff Dean just posted an animated version: https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2024525132266688757
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3.1 Pro is the first model to correctly count the number of legs on my "five legged dog" test image. 3.0 flash was the previous best, getting it after a few prompts of poking. 3.1 got it on the first prompt though, with the prompt being "How many legs does the dog have? Count Carefully".
However, it didn't get it on the first try with the original prompt (prompt: "How many legs does the dog have?"). It initially said 4, then with a follow up prompt got it to hesitantly say 5, with one limb must being obfuscated or hidden.
So maybe I'll give it a 90%?
This is without tools as well.
your question may have become part of the training data with how much coverage there was around it. perhaps you should devise a new test :P
I suggest asking it to identify/count the number of fire hydrants, crosswalks, bridges, bicycles, cars, buses and traffic signals etc.
Pit Google against Google :D
My job may have become part of the training data with how much coverage there is around it. Perhaps another career would be a better test of LLM capabilities.
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3.1 Pro has the same Jan 2025 knowledge cutoff as the other 3 series models. So if 3.1 has it in its training data, the other ones would have as well.
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Honestly at this point I have fed this image in so many times on so many models, that it also functions as a test for "Are they training on my image specifically" (they are generally, for sure, but that's along with everything else in the ocean of info people dump in).
I genuinely don't think they are. GPT-5.2 still stands by 4 legs, and OAI has been getting this image consistently for over a year. And 3.1 still fumbled with the harder prompt "How many legs does the dog have?". I needed to add the "count carefully" part to tip it off that something was amiss.
Since it did well I'll make some other "extremely far out of the norm" images to see how it fairs. A spider with 10 legs or a fish with two side fins.
Easy fix, make a new test image with six legs, and watch all the LLMs say it has five.
blog post is up- https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
edit: biggest benchmark changes from 3 pro:
arc-agi-2 score went from 31.1% -> 77.1%
apex-agents score went from 18.4% -> 33.5%
Does the arc-agi-2 score more than doubling in a .1 release indicate benchmark-maxing? Though i dont know what arc-agi-2 actually tests
Theoretically, you can’t benchmaxx ARC-AGI, but I too am suspect of such a large improvement, especially since the improvement on other benchmarks is not of the same order.
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Benchmark maxing could be interpreted as benchmarks actually being a design framework? I'm sure there are pitfalls to this, but it's not necessarily bad either.
Francois Chollet accuses the big labs of targeting the benchmark, yes. It is benchmaxxed.
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I assume all the frontier models are benchmaxxing, so it would make sense
The touted SVG improvements make me excited for animated pelicans.
I just gave it a shot and this is what I got: https://codepen.io/takoid/pen/wBWLOKj
The model thought for over 5 minutes to produce this. It's not quite photorealistic (some parts are definitely "off"), but this is definitely a significant leap in complexity.
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The blog post includes a video showcasing the improvements. Looks really impressive: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
I imagine they're also benchgooning on SVG generation
My perennial joke is as soon as that got on HN front page Google went and hired some interns and they spend a 100% of the time on pelicans.
SVG is an under-rated use case for LLMs because it gives you the scalability of vector graphics along with CSS-style interactivity (hover effects, animations, transitions, etc.).
How about STL files for 3d printing pelicans!
Has anyone noticed that models are dropping ever faster, with pressure on companies to make incremental releases to claim the pole position, yet making strides on benchmarks? This is what recursive self-improvement with human support looks like.
Remember when ARC 1 was basically solved, and then ARC 2 (which is even easier for humans) came out, and all of the sudden the same models that were doing well on ARC 1 couldn’t even get 5% on ARC 2? Not convinced these benchmark improvements aren’t data leakage.
ARC 2 was made specifically to artificially lower contemporary LLM scores, therefore any kind of model improvements will have outsized effects
Also people use "saturated" too liberally. The top left corner 1 cent per task is saturated IMO. Since there are billions of people who would perfer to solve arc 1 tasks at 52 cents per task. Arc 2 a human would make thousands of dollars a day with 99.99% accuracy
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Look at the ARC site. The scores of these models is plotted against their "cost per task". All of these huge jumps come along with massive increases in cost per task. Including Gemini 3.1 Pro which increased by 4.2x
I don't think there's much recursive improvement yet.
I'd say it's a combination of
A) Before, new model releases were mostly a new base model trained from scratch, with more parameters and more tokens. This takes many Months. Now that RL is used so heavily, you can make infinitely many tweaks to the RL setup, and in just a month get a better model using the same base model.
B) There's more compute online
C) Competition is more fierce.
this is mostly because RLVR is driving all of the recent gains, and you can continue improving the model by running it longer (+ adding new tasks / verifiers)
so we'll keep seeing more frequent flag planting checkpoint releases to not allow anyone to be able to claim SOTA for too long
I feel like they're actually dropping slower. Chinese models are dropping right before lunar new year as seems to be an emerging tradition.
A couple of western models have dropped around the same time too but I don't think the "strides on benchmarks" are that impressive when you consider how much tokens are being spent to make those "improvements". E.g. Gemini 3.1 Pro's ARC-AGI-2 score went from 33.6% to 77.1% buuut their "cost per task" also increased by 4.2x. It seems to be the same story for most of these benchmark improvements and similar for Claude model improvements.
I'm not convinced there's been any substantial jump in capabilities. More likely these companies have scaled their datacenters to allow for more token usage
not much to do with self improvement as such. openai has increased its pace, others are pretty much consistent. Google last year had three versions of gemini-2.5-pro each within a month of each other. Anthropic released claude 3 in march 24, sonnet 3.5 in june 24, 3.5 new in oct 24, and then 3.7 in feb 25, where they went to 4 series in May 25. then followed by opus 4.1 in august, sonnet 4.5 in oct, opus 4.5 in nov, 4.6 in feb, sonnet 4.6 in feb itself. Yes, they released both within weeks of each other, but originally they only released it together. This staggered release is what creates the impression of fast releases. its as much a function of training as a function of available compute, and they have ramped up in that regard.
With the advent of MoEs, efficiency gains became possible. However, MoEs still operate far from the balance and stability of dense models. My view is that most progress comes from router tuning based on good and bad outcomes, with only marginal gains in real intelligence
Only using my historical experience and not Gemini 3.1 Pro, I think we see benchmark chasing then a grand release of a model that gets press attention...
Then a few days later, the model/settings are degraded to save money. Then this gets repeated until the last day before the release of the new model.
If we are benchmaxing this works well because its only being tested early on during the life cycle. By middle of the cycle, people are testing other models. By the end, people are not testing them, and if they did it would barely shake the last months of data.
I have a relatively consistent task that it completed with new information on weekdays at the edge of its intelligence. Interestingly 3.0 flash was good when it came out, took a nose dive a month back and is now excellent, I actually can't fault it it's so good.
It's performance in antigravity has also actually improved since launch day where it was giving non-stop typescript errors (not sure if that was antigravity itself).
It's becoming impossible to keep up - in the last week or so we've had: Gemini 3 Deep Think, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex Spark, GLM-5, Minimax-2.5, Step 3.5 Flash, Qwen 3.5 and Grok 4.20.
and I'm sure others I've missed...
and anyone notice that the pace has broken xAI and they were just dropped behind? The frontier improvement release loop is now ant -> openai -> google
xAI just released Grok 4.20 beta yesterday or day before?
Musk said Grok 5 is currently being trained, and it has 7 trillion params (Grok 4 had 3)
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That's what scaling compute depth to respond to the competition look like, lighting those dollars on fire.
This is what competition looks like.
[dead]
Surprisingly big jump in ARC-AGI-2 from 31% to 77%, guess there's some RLHF focused on the benchmark given it was previously far behind the competition and is now ahead.
Apart from that, the usual predictable gains in coding. Still is a great sweet-spot for performance, speed and cost. Need to hack Claude Code to use their agentic logic+prompts but use Gemini models.
I wish Google also updated Flash-lite to 3.0+, would like to use that for the Explore subagent (which Claude Code uses Haiku for). These subagents seem to be Claude Code's strength over Gemini CLI, which still has them only in experimental mode and doesn't have read-only ones like Explore.
>I wish Google also updated Flash-lite to 3.0+
I hope every day that they have made gains on their diffusion model. As a sub agent it would be insane, as it's compute light and cranks 1000+ tk/s
Agree, can't wait for updates to the diffusion model.
Could be useful for planning too, given its tendency to think big picture first. Even if it's just an additional subagent to double-check with an "off the top off your head" or "don't think, share first thought" type of question. More generally would like to see how sequencing autoregressive thinking with diffusion over multiple steps might help with better overall thinking.
The only thing I can notice is deep research is better. Like much closer to outputting a paper from arxiv straight away.
I am really the bottleneck now and what to do with all this new information.
Implementation and Sustainability Hardware: Gemini 3 Pro was trained using Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). TPUs are specically designed to handle the massive computations involved in training LLMs and can speed up training considerably compared to CPUs. TPUs often come with large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, allowing for the handling of large models and batch sizes during training, which can lead to better model quality. TPU Pods (large clusters of TPUs) also provide a scalable solution for handling the growing complexity of large foundation models. Training can be distributed across multiple TPU devices for faster and more efficient processing.
So google doesn't use NVIDIA GPUs at all ?
When I worked there, there was a mix of training on nvidia GPUs (especially for sparse problems when TPUs weren't as capable), CPUs, and TPUs. I've been gone for a few years but I've heard a few anecdotal statements that some of their researchers have to use nvidia GPUs because the TPUs are busy.
I assume that's a Gemini LLM response? You can tell Gemini is bullshitting when it starts using "often" or "usually" - like in this case "TPUs often come with large amounts of memory". Either they did or they didn't. "This (particular) mall often has a Starbucks" was one I encountered recently.
It's not bullshit (i.e., intended) but probabilities all the way down, as Hume reminded us: from observations, you can only say the sun will likely rise in the east. You'd need to stand behind a theory of the world to say otherwise (but we were told "attention is all you need"...)
Googler. We use GPUs, but its a drop in the bucket in the sea of our accelerators. We might sell more GPUs in Cloud than we use internally.
These are not data driven observations just vibes
no. only tpus
Another reason to use Gemini then.
Less impact on gamers…
TPUs still use ram and chip production capacity
Bla bla bla yada sustainability yada often come with large better growing faster...
It's such an uninformative piece of marketing crap
Gemini 3 seems to have a much smaller token output limit than 2.5. I used to use Gemini to restructure essays into an LLM-style format to improve readability, but the Gemini 3 release was a huge step back for that particular use case.
Even when the model is explicitly instructed to pause due to insufficient tokens rather than generating an incomplete response, it still truncates the source text too aggressively, losing vital context and meaning in the restructuring process.
I hope the 3.1 release includes a much larger output limit.
Output limit has consistently been 64k tokens (including 2.5 pro).
People did find Gemini very talkative so it might be a response to that.
> Even when the model is explicitly instructed to pause due to insufficient tokens rather than generating an incomplete response
AI models can't do this. At least not with just an instruction, maybe if you're writing some kind of custom 'agentic' setup.
Yeah, it does. It was possible with 2.5 Flash.
Here's a similar result with Qwen Qwen3.5-397B-A17B: https://chat.qwen.ai/s/530becb7-e16b-41ee-8621-af83994599ce?...
> Even when the model is explicitly instructed to pause due to insufficient tokens
Is there actually a chance it has the introspection to do anything with this request?
No, the model doesn't have purview into this afaik
I'm not even sure what "pausing" means in this context and why it would help when there are insufficient tokens. They should just stop when you reach the limit, default or manually specified, but it's typically a cutoff.
You can see what happens by setting output token limit much lower
Yeah, it does. It was possible with 2.5 Flash.
Here's a similar result with Qwen Qwen3.5-397B-A17B: https://chat.qwen.ai/s/530becb7-e16b-41ee-8621-af83994599ce?...
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No.
Gemini 3 is pretty good, even Flash is very smart for certain things, and fast!
BUT it is not good at all at tool calling and agentic workflows, especially compared to the recent two mini-generations of models (Codex 5.2/5.3, the last two versions of Anthropic models), and also fell behind a bit in reasoning.
I hope they manage to improve things on that front, because then Flash would be great for many tasks.
These improvements are one of the things specifically called out on the submitted page
You can really notice the tool use problems. They gotta get on that. The agent trend seems real, and powerful. They can't afford to fall behind on it.
I don't really have tool usage issues that I don't put under that doesn't follow system prompt instructions consistently
there are these times where it puts a prefix on all function calls, which is weird and I think hallucination, so maybe that one
3.1 hopefully fixes that
"They can't afford to fall behind on it."
They are very, very seriously far behind as of 3.0.
We'll see if 3.1 addresses the issue at all.
In other words: they just need to motivate their employees while giving in to finance's demands to fire a few thousand every month or so ...
And don't forget, it's not just direct motivation. You can make yourself indispensable by sabotaging or at least not contributing to your colleagues' efforts. Not helping anyone, by the way, is exactly what your managers want you to do. They will decide what happens, thank you very much, and doing anything outside of your org ... well there's a name for that, isn't there? Betrayal, or perhaps death penalty.
yeah, it seems to me like Gemini is a little behind on the current RL patterns and also they dont seem interested in really creating a dedicated coding model. I think they have so much product surface (search, AI mode, gmail, youtube, chrome etc), they are prioritizing making the model very general. but who knows im just talking out of my ass.
I'm doing Ruby and Gemini 3.0 pro has by far been the best model for me. It writes the nicest ruby code, like I would. Further, it either succeeds or fails hard and obviously. I prefer it failing hard instead of of slowly going weird in my code.
Similar in antigravity. Privately it's my absolute favorite.
So I'm actually rooting for this.
Which harness? Gemini CLI or OpenCode?
What I’m noticing, overall: I’ve never cut so much code in my life. I’ve become a coding monster with one of those dark green GitHub profiles ever since 5.3-Codex gave me the confidence to load in a ridiculous number of tasks every day and let it rip. I have about three coding tasks going at once and in another window, Claude Cowork is ripping through PowerPoints and getting back to lawyers.
This tech is not going to replace us. If anything, I am becoming even more of a workaholic. But the output volume is going to pay off for those who are privileged enough to use these tools.
There are thousands like you now. How many does it take to run the economy? What would the rest do.
Think of it like what a tractor did to agricultural work. The fist guy that used a tractor probably thought: this is not replacing me, I’m just much more productive. Well, turns out you only need one guy per farm now.
But now many suburban homeowners also have a little lawn tractor, and lots of people on small acreage have a utility tractor. None of them are farmers, but they get value out of the technology as well. Plus, we're feeding a lot more people for a lot less money than we did before tractors.
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The market for iOS todo-applications seems to be infinite, so everyone can just become a todo app developer.
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What ive noticed, i dont have the apetite to spend tokens on AI fixing errors AI made. Or paying a 200/month subscription. In the beggining of the mobth im happy tinkering, but i reach the cap of how much money im willing to spend playing
Yeah see this article I think it was spot on
https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies...
“Some described sending a “quick last prompt” right before leaving their desk so that the AI could work while they stepped away.”
This, I can relate to. Also: I feel like I need a second monitor.
How do you give it tasks? As GitHub issues?
what is your setup to let it run on tasks in parallel?
In an attempt to get outside of benchmark gaming I had it make Platypus on a Tricycle. It's not as good as pelican on bicycle. https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/BiRht5hX
To really confuse it, ask it to take that tricycle with the platypus on it to a car wash.
For a moment I assumed the output would look like Perry the Platipus from the Disney (I think?) show. It's suprising to me (as a layman) that a show with lots of media that would've made it to the training corpus didn't show up.
that's better than i thought it would be
would love to be able to teleport this thread to, oh, 5 years ago. people would think some sort of alien technology had landed.
You know what would slay right now? A native app.
Not another piece of Electron bloatware, a regular, efficient, fast, snappy, native, app. One that connects to my MCP severs and has local filesystem tools.
Anthropic might fall behind Google/OpenAI eventually, but their Desktop App + MCP/Connectors is unbelievably useful to get real work done.
I haven't used Anthropic's desktop app in months since I don't have access to a Mac anymore, but when I did...it was just an electron app? Did something change?
Not only that, it is the slowest app among all AI apps.
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Nope. It is still Electron, and it is not snappy. And I am on an M3 Max MacBook Pro.
I have transitioned off ChatGPT for home use (Google provides me slightly better value in my personal life, as I can pay for a plan that also accommodates my weird photo storage needs) and it’s all Anthropic at work, but I miss the ChatGPT Mac app. I can’t say for certain if it was Electron or not—I never dug into the internals, and it felt very, very fast and “native”.
No, sadly. I wish it were native. Its _terrible_.
77.1% on ARC-AGI-2 and still can't stop adding drive-by refactors. ARC-AGI-2 tests novel pattern induction, it's genuinely hard to fake and the improvement is real. But it doesn't measure task scoping, instruction adherence, or knowing when to stop. Those are the capabilities practitioners actually need from a coding agent. We have excellent benchmarks for reasoning. We have almost nothing that measures reliability in agentic loops. That gap explains this thread.
Gemini 3 was:
1. unreliable in GH copilot. Lots of 500 and 4XX errors. Unusable in the first 2 months
2. not available in vertex ai (europe). We have requirements regarding data residency. Funny enough anthropic is on point with releasing their models to vertex ai. We already use opus and sonnet 4.6.
I hope google gets their stuff together and understands that not everyone wants/can use their global endpoint. We'd like to try their models.
Gets 10/10 on my potato benchmarks: https://aibenchy.com/model/google-gemini-3-1-pro-preview-med...
Now I need to write more tests.
It's a bit hard to trick reasoning models, because they explore a lot of the angles of a problem, and they might accidentally have an "a-ha" moment that leads them on the right path. It's a bit like doing random sampling and stumbling upon the right result after doing gradient descent from those points.
Are you intentionally keeping the benchmarks private?
Yes.
I am trying to think what's the best way to give most information about how the AI models fail, without revealing information that can help them overfit on those specific tests.
I am planning to add some extra LLM calls, to summarize the failure reason, without revealing the test.
Added one more test, which surprisingly gemini flash 3 reasoning passes, but gemini 3.1 pro not
I've been playing with the 3.1 Deep Think version of this for the last couple of weeks and it was a big step up for coding over 3.0 (which I already found very good).
It's only February...
> I've been playing with the 3.1 Deep Think version of this
How?
A select few have had early access through various programs Google offers. I believe there was a sentence or two to this effect on the Gemini 3 Deep Think post from Deepmind.
Model Card https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...
I find Gemini is great at generating code that is relatively common on the internet, especially web and algorithms. It is absolutely better at this then OpenAI's models. But Gemini is not as good at reasoning about problems from first principles, or catching subtle bugs. In some ways it is just a better Google that finds exactly what you want, less a general intelligence.
I am actually going to complain about this: that neither of the Gemini models are not preview ones.
Anthropic seems the best in this. Everything is in the API on day one. OpenAI tend to want to ask you for subscription, but the API gets there a week or a few later. Now, Gemini 3 is not for production use and this is already the previous iteration. So, does Google even intent to release this model?
I asked Gemini 3.1 Pro to generate some of the modern artworks in my "Pelican Art Gallery". I particularly like the rendition of the Sunflowers: https://pelican.koenvangilst.nl/gallery/category/modern
Nice collection of visible bits that have no relation at all with art
bro why is called pelican art gallery if you have no pelican art in it.
Is this like 5d chess layers of irony or something im not getting through?
Nice gallery besides
I asked Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview to generate the modern artworks as SVG for my Pelican Art Gallery. I particularly like the rendition of the Sunflowers: https://pelican.koenvangilst.nl/gallery/category/modern
This model says it accepts video inputs. I asked it to transcribe a 5 second video of a digital water curtain which spelled “Boo Happy Halloween”, and it came back with “Happy” which wasn’t the first frame, but also is incomplete.
This kind of test is good because it requires stitching together info from the whole video.
It reads videos at 1fps by default. You have to set the video resolution to high in ai studio
This is inside the Gemini app.
To use in OpenCode, you can update the models it has:
Then /models and choose Gemini 3.1 Pro
You can use the model through OpenCode Zen right away and avoid that Google UI craziness.
---
It is quite pricey! Good speed and nailed all my tasks so far. For example:
Result was:
So relatively small task, hitting an API, using one of my skills, but a quarter. Pricey!
I don't see it even after refresh. Are you using the opencode-gemini-auth plugin as well?
No I am not just vanilla OpenCode. I do have OpenCode Zen credits, and I did opencode login whatever their command is to auth against opencode itself. Maybe that's the reason I see these premium models.
My enthusiasm is a bit muted this cycle because I've been burned by Gemini CLI. These models are very capable but Gemini CLI just doesn't seem to be able to work for one it never follows instructions strictly like its competitors do, and it hallucinates even which is a rarity.
More importantly feels like Google is stretched thin across different Gemini products and pricing reflects this, I still have no idea how to pay for Gemini CLI, in codex/claude its very simple $20/month for entry and $200/month for ton of weekly usage.
I hope whoever is reading this from Google they can redeem Gemini CLI by focusing on being competitive instead of making it look pretty (that seems to be the impression I got from the updates on X)
> I still have no idea how to pay for Gemini CLI, in codex/claude its very simple $20/month for entry and $200/month for ton of weekly usage.
This!
I would like to sign up for a paid plan for Gemini CLI. But I have not been able to figure out how. I already have Codex and Claude plans. Those were super easy to sign up for.
What’s your difficulty? Google has published easy to follow 27-step instructions for how to sign up for the half a dozen services you need to chain together to enable this common usecase!
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Supposedly the Google One AI plans[1] allow for this. I've been testing an AI Pro plan, but haven't gotten CLI to work yet (keeps asking me to sign in). So yeah...
[1]: https://one.google.com/about/#compare-plans
Every time I've used Gemini models for anything besides code or agentic work they lean so far into the RLHF induced bold lettering and bullet point list barf that everything they output reads as if the model was talking _at_ me and not _with_ me. In my Openclaw experiment(s) and in the Gemini web UI, I've specifically added instructions to avoid this type of behavior, but it only seemed to obey those rules when I reminded the model of them.
For conversational contexts, I don't think the (in some cases significantly) better benchmark results compared to a model like Sonnet 4.6 can convince me to switch to Gemini 3.1. Has anyone else had a similar experience, or is this just a me issue?
Gemini sounds less personal, but I think that is good. From my experience, the quality of response is much higher than ChatGPT or Grok, and it cites real sources. I want to have a mini-wikipedia response for my questions, not a friend's group chat response
I have the opposite viewpoint:
If a model doesn't optimize the formatting of its output display for readability, I don't want to read it.
Tables, embedded images, use of bulleted lists and bold/italicizing etc.
You just articulated why I struggle to personally connect with Gemini. It feels so unrelatable and exhausting to read its output. I prefer to read Opus/Deepseek/GLM over Gemini, Qwen and the open source GPT models. Maybe it is RLHF that is creating my distaste from using it. (I pay for Gemini; I should be using it more... but the outputs just bug me and feel more work to get actionable insight.)
> feel more work to get actionable insight
WHAT?! I find that exactly the nice sharp formatting are what makes it EASIER to get actionable insight from it...
(Plus the weird-but-cute unrequested analogies are nice to occassionally elicit a smile and keep you motivated :P)
I'm not familiar with Openclaw and but the trick to solve this would be to embed a style reminder at the bottom of each user message and ideally hide that from the user with the UI.
This is how roleplay apps like Sillytavern customize the experience for power users by allowing hidden style reminders as part of the user message that accompany each chat message.
I think they all output that bold lettering, point by point style output. I strongly suspect it's part of a synthetic data pipeline all these AI companies have, and it improves performance. Claude seems to be the least of them, but it will start writing code at the drop of a hat. What annoys me in Gemini is that it has a really strange tendency to come up with weird analogies, especially in Pro mode. You'll be asking it about something like red black trees and it'll say "Red Black Trees (The F1 of Tree Data Structures)".
Yes, the analogy habit is the most annoying of all. Overall formatting for me is doable, if it didn't divide up an answer into these silly arbitrary categories with useless analogies. I've tried adding in my user preferences to never use analogies but it inevitably falls back into that habit.
It definitely has the worst "voice" in my opinion. Feels very overachieving McKinsey intern to me.
I have no issues adjusting gemini tone & style with system prompt content
Google tends to trumpet preview models that aren't actually production-grade. For instance, both 3 Pro and Flash suffer from looping and tool-calling issues.
I would love for them to eliminate these issues because just touting benchmark scores isn't enough.
In my experience, while Gemini does really well in benchmarks I find it much worse when I actually use the model. It's too verbose / doesn't follow instructions very well. Let's see if that changes with this model.
This is great. I am hopeful that Gemini 3.1 Pro would be great. So far, I'm almost always pulled away from Gemini models by Claude. Having used Claude Opus High for a while now, Claude Opus seems to be fantastic at coding. Even Gemini's comparison chart says so. OpenAI's 5.3-codex is by far the weakest (of the 3) for my coding purposes. Claude Opus really shines at explanations and generating code.
Gemini is almost great. Claude Opus is great. I keep switching among these subscriptions every month to not miss out on any of the offerings for too long; ChatGPT Plus <-> Gemini Pro <-> Claude.
> I keep switching among these subscriptions every month to not miss out on any of the offerings for too long; ChatGPT Plus <-> Gemini Pro <-> Claude.
I wonder why many people seem to be doing this instead of just going for a copilot subscription that has access to all those models? Anybody care to share pros and cons?
OpenAI and Anthropic give you a lot of usage/$ through their plans. For the Anthropic Max plans, this can be like a ~90% discount. Copilot does not benefit from this (their pricing model is also different though, it is request-based rather than token usage based, so it is hard to compare).
That's not to mention that the models generally work better in their own harnesses, which is perhaps unsurprising because the models have been trained with the specific harness in mind (and vice versa). That said, I think some 3rd-party harnesses do a lot of work to make different models work well in their harness.
I would suggest you also take a look at Cursor's Composer1.5. It's super fast, and perform better than Gemini3P in my use cases.
I've been trying composer-1.5 on and off and it doesn't come close to Claude's Opus High. The explainability of Claude is just something else.
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It seems google is having a disjointed roll out, and there will likely be an official announcement in a few hours. Apparently 3.1 showed up unannounced in vertex at 2am or something equally odd.
Either way early user tests look promising.
One thing I’d like to see in these releases is stronger emphasis on regression behavior, not just headline capability.
In production, the costly failures are usually "almost right" edits that quietly shift semantics across large diffs.
We now gate model upgrades behind a fixed eval set of our own repos + prompts and compare pass rates by task category (refactor, test repair, API migration). Raw benchmark gains matter less to us than variance and rollback safety. If 3.1 improves consistency on long multi-file edits, that’s a bigger win than a small jump on one-shot tasks.
Funnily, on my tests, 3 flash with medium reasoning does better. Seems like 3.1 pro reasoned about the correct answer, but chose to go with a different (wrong) one: https://aibenchy.com/compare/?left=google-gemini-3-flash-pre...
EDIT: while also being 3x cheaper
It's safe to assume they'll be releasing improved Gemini Flash soon? The current one is so good & fast I rarely switch to pro anymore
Gemini 3 Pro (high) is a joke compared to Gemini 3 Flash in Antigravity, except it's not even funny. Flash is insane value, and super capable, too. I've had it implement a decompiler for very obscure bytecode, and it was passing all tests in no time. PITA to refactor later, but not insurmountable. Gemini 3 Pro (high) choked on this problem in the early stages... I'm looking forward to comparing 3.1 Pro vs 3.0 Flash, hopefully they have improved on it enough to finally switch over.
When 3 came out they mentioned that flash included many improvements that didn't make it into pro (via an hn comment). I imagine this release includes those.
After 2 days of giving it a go, I find that Gemini CLI is still considerably worse than both Codex and Claude Code.
The model itself also has strange behaviors that seem like it gets randomly replaced with Gemini-3-Flash or something else. I'll explain.
Once agentic coding was a bust, I gave it a run as a daily driver for AI assistant. It performed fairly well but then began behaving strangely. It would lose context mid conversation. For instance, I said "In san francisco I'm looking for XYZ". Two turns later I'm asking about food and it gives me suggestions all over the world.
Another time, I asked it about the likelihood of the pending east coast winter storm of affecting my flight. I gave it all the details (flight, stops, time, cities).
Both GPT-5.2 and Claude crunched and came back with high quality estimations and rationale. Gemini 3.1 Pro... 5 times, returned a weather forecast widget for either the layover or final destination. This was on "Pro" reasoning, the highest exposed on the Gemini App/WebApp. I've always suspected Google swaps out models randomly so this.. wasn't surprising.
I then asked Gemini 3.1 Pro via the API and it returned a response similar to Claude and GPT-5.2 -- carefully considering all factors.
This tells me that a Google AI Ultra subscription gives me a sub-par coding agent which often swaps in Flash models, a sub-par web/app AI experience that also isn't using the advertised SOTA models, and a bunch of preview apps for video gen, audio gen (crashed every time I attempted), and world gen (Genie was interesting but a toy).
This will be a quick cancel as soon as the intro rate is done.
It's like Google doesn't ACTUALLY want to be the leader in AI or serve people their best models. They want to generate hype around benchmarks and then nerf the model and go silent.
Gemini 3 Pro Preview went from exceptional in the first month to mediocre and then out of my rotation within a month.
I am reading opinions here from agent users, but I haven't adopted the "agentic workflow" myself because I believe I am (for now) now getting a lot of my trouble's worth using Gemini (3 Pro) in the traditional conversational manner. It is adequate at suggesting solutions in the form of code, or reasoning in general. My problems are software engineering but also everything that is not, since I have a subscription it's my go to problem solving partner. I see no reasons to switch to another product for now either, I am constantly in the loop getting samples of chats with Grok and ChatGPT and it seems a very close race. If Claude is that one race horse that's built different -- and I absolutely can believe it is so because they have rightfully tuned it -- I am not convinced I am missing out much. But maybe because I am more traditionalist to most of everyone's having embraced the idea of having an agent run a loop on their workstation(s) and trusting it to deliver. Perhaps if I were in more of a tight time frame, I'd be pressed to do so myself, but for now I am already benefiting from the extra speed "rubberducking" with Gemini all manner of software engineering problems that I need to solve, so I simply have no reasons to abandon it. I think this is also Google's strength -- they have the data, they've already integrated Gemini or a variant of it anyway, into google.com which is one of their prized cash cows, and it's everywhere else too. Like others here have said, Google may not have the absolute best in class at all times, but they're fairly good and they still have the brains that gave us DeepMind and GPT, unless there's some sort of stagnation going on in their ranks, I expect they're not resting on the laurels. With their capital they're still at the head of the race. Anthropic and OpenAI have the benefit of being nimble, though, and it shows too. Anyway, competition is good, the cat's out of the bag and on the greener side of the river :-)
In the "Intelligence applied" section, where they show the comparison animations, they are shown using a non-optimal UI.
There is not enough time to read the text, see old animation, and see new animation. Better would have been to keep the same animation on repeat, so that people have unlimited time to read the text and observer the animations.
Also, it jumps from example to example in the same video. Better would have been to show each separately, so that once user is done observing one example at their own pace, they can proceed to the next.
As a workaround, I had to open the video (just the video) in a new tab, pause once an example came up, read the text, then rewind to the start of the animation to see the old animation example, then rewind again, then see the new animation example, and then sometimes rewind again if I wanted to see the animation again. Then, once done with the example, I had to forward to the next example and repeat the above process again.
Somewhere along that process, they lost me.
I always try Gemini models when they get updated with their flashy new benchmark scores, but always end up using Claude and Codex again...
I get the impression that Google is focusing on benchmarks but without assessing whether the models are actually improving in practical use-cases.
I.e. they are benchmaxing
Gemini is "in theory" smart, but in practice is much, much worse than Claude and Codex.
I exclusively use Gemini for Chat nowadays, and it's been great mostly. It's fast, it's good, and the app works reliably now. On top of that I got it for free with my Pixel phone.
For development I tend to use Antigravity with Sonnet 4.5, or Gemini Flash if it's about a GUI change in React. The layout and design of Gemini has been superior to Claude models in my opinion, at least at the time. Flash also works significantly faster.
And all of it is essentially free for now. I can even select Opus 4.6 in Antigravity, but I did not yet give it a try.
> but without assessing whether the models are actually improving in practical use-cases
Which cases? Not trying to sound bad but you didn't even provide of cases you are using Claude\Codex\Gemini for.
I find Gemini is outstanding at reasoning (all topics) and architecture (software/system design). On the other hand, Gemini CLI sucks and so I end up using Claude Code and Codex CLI for agentic work.
However, I heavily use Gemini in my daily work and I think it has its own place. Ultimately, I don't see the point of choosing the one "best" model for everything, but I'd rather use what's best for any given task.
Honestly doesn't feel like Google is targeting the agentic coding crowd so much as they are the knowledge worker / researcher / search-engine-replacement market?
Agree Gemini as a model is fairly incompetent inside their own CLI tool as well as in opencode. But I find it useful as a research and document analysis tool.
For my custom agentic coding setup, I use Claude Code derived prompts with Gemini models, primarily flash. It's night and day compared to Google's own agentic products, which are all really bad.
The models are all close enough on the benchmarks and I think people are attributing too much difference in the agentic space to the model itself. I strongly believe the difference is in all the other stuff, which is why Antropic is far ahead of the competition. They have done great work with Claude Code, Cowork, and their knowledge share through docs & blog, bar none on this last point imo.
I'm glad someone else is finally saying this, I've been mentioning this left and right and sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy that not more people are noticing it.
Gemini can go off the rails SUPER easily. It just devolves into a gigantic mess at the smallest sign of trouble.
For the past few weeks, I've also been using XML-like tags in my prompts more often. Sometimes preferring to share previous conversations with `<user>` and `<assistant>` tags. Opus/Sonnet handles this just fine, but Gemini has a mental breakdown. It'll just start talking to itself.
Even in totally out-of-the-ordinary sessions, it goes crazy. After a while, it'll start saying it's going to do something, and then it pretends like it's done that thing, all in the same turn. A turn that never ends. Eventually it just starts spouting repetitive nonsense.
And you would think this is just because the bigger the context grows, the worse models tend to get. But no! This can happen well below even the 200.000 token mark.
Flash is (was?) was better than Pro on these fronts.
The biggest increase is LiveCodeBench Pro: 2887. The rest are in line with Opus 4.6 or slightly better or slightly worse.
but is it still terrible at tool calls in actual agentic flows?
Relatedly, Gemini chat seems to be if not down then extremely slow.
ETA: They apparently wiped out everyone's chats (including mine). "Our engineering team has identified a background process that was causing the missing user conversation metadata and has successfully stopped the process to prevent further impact." El Mao.
Ran a bunch of 3D Modeling benchmarks on Gemini 3.1 vs Gemini 3.
Unsurprisingly 3.1 performs a bit better. But surprisingly it costs 2.6x as much ($0.14 vs. $0.37 per 3D Model Generation) and is 2.5x slower (1m 24s vs. 3m 28s).
To me it feels like "lets increase our thinking budget and call it an improved model!"
I speculated that 3 pro was 3.1... I guess I was wrong. Super impressive numbers here. Good job Google.
> I speculated that 3 pro was 3.1
?
Sorry... I speculated that 3 deep think is 3.1 pro.. model names are confusing..
In the meantime, I'm trying to update Antigravity to use the latest version, but it just wouldn't update itself, nor would it let me use 3.0 model. I restarted multiple times with the same result.
I tried telling this to agent, and it keeps repeating the same phrase "Gemini 3.1 Pro is not available on this version. Please upgrade to the latest version."
Congratulations on beating the benchmarks, but I wonder how much effort is devoted on improving DX?
Edit: It's updated now, I can confirm with "There are currently no updates available.". It still doesn't let me continue with the conversation. I'm able to create new session though.
Blogpost: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
Model card https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-1-pro/
I hereby allow you to release models not at the same time as your competitors.
It is super interesting that this is the same thing that happened in November (ie all labs shipping around the same week 11/12-11/23).
They're just throwing a big Chinese New Year celebration.
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I had it coding autonomously for about an hour (including lots of tool wait time) on a difficult task, and it actually produced good results.
What’s most surprising is that I had it follow a strict loop/workflow and it did that perfectly. Normally these things go off the rails after a while with complex workflows. It’s something I have to usually enforce with some orchestration script and multiple agents, but this time it was just one session meticulously following orders.
Impressive, and saves a lot of time on building the orchestration glue.
Seems like they actually fixed some of the problems with the model. Hallucinations rate seems to be much better. Seems like they also tuned the reasoning maybe that were they got most of the improvements from.
The hallucination rate with the Gemini family has always been my problem with them. Over the last year they’ve made a lot of progress catching the Gemini models up to/near the frontier in general capability and intelligence, but they still felt very late 2024 in terms of hallucination rate.
Which made the Gemini models untrustworthy for anything remotely serious, at least in my eyes. If they’ve fixed this or at least significantly improved, that would be a big deal.
Maybe I haven't kept up with how ghatgpt and claude are doing , but 6 monthlatelys ago or so, I thought Gemini was leading on that front.
I like to think that all these pelican riding a bicycle comments are unwittingly iteratively creating the optimal cyclist pelican as these comment threads are inevitably incorporated in every training set.
More like half of Google's AI team is hanging out on HN, and they can optimise for that outcome to get a good rep among the dev community.
Hello.
(I'm not aware of anyone doing this, but GDM is quite info-siloed these days, so my lack of knowledge is not evidence it's not happening)
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See: fish in bike front basket
My current AI test. There was a BBS I was on in the 90s and there was this door game I hadn't seen anywhere else. I simply describe the BBS, where it was popular, its name, the year it was around, and the BBS game and a description of it mechanics, etc.
OpenAI and Google's Deep Research produce a very long, 100% made up report. If I question the AI on the report, they both admit they just made it up.
Claude just returns, "I couldn't find anything on the BBS or the game."
Doesn't show as available in gemini CLI for me. I have one of those "AI Pro" packages, but don't see it. Typical for Google, completely unclear how to actually use their stuff.
They crushed it with Gemini 3.1... especially when in Thinking Mode with Deep Think initiated. If you are working towards something with code, research etc. and hit a snag, run it by Gemini with these settings. Here's another KILLER trick: In Gemini Thinking mode select Nano Banana and have it put together a comprehensive slide with paragraph length text portions. It'll nail it.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075318
I'm trying to find the information, is this available on the Gemini CLI script, or is this just the web front-end where I can use this new model?
We've gone from yearly releases to quarterly releases.
If the pace of releases continues to accelerate - by mid 2027 or 2028 we're headed to weekly releases.
But actual progress seems to be slower. These modes are releasing more often but aren’t big leaps.
We used to get one annual release which was 2x as good, now we get quarterly releases which are 25% better. So annually, we’re now at 2.4x better.
GPT 5.3 (/Codex) was a huge leap over 5.2 for coding
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Due to the increasing difficulty of scaling up training, it appears the gains are instead being achieved through better model training which appears to be working well for everyone.
Fine, I guess. The only commercial API I use to any great extent is gemini-3-flash-preview: cheap, fast, great for tool use and with agentic libraries. The 3.1-pro-preview is great, I suppose, for people who need it.
Off topic, but I like to run small models on my own hardware, and some small models are now very good for tool use and with agentic libraries - it just takes a little more work to get good results.
Seconded. Gemini used to be trash and I used Claude and Codex a lot but gemini-3-flash-preview punches above it's weight, it's decent and I rarely if ever run into any token limit either.
Thirded, I've been using gemini-3-flash to great effect. Anytime I have something more complicated, I give it to pro & flash to see what happens. Coin flip if flash is nearly equivalent (too many moving vars to be analytical at this point)
What models are you running locally? Just curious.
I am mostly restricted to 7-9B. I still like ancient early llama because its pretty unrestricted without having to use an abliteration.
I experimented with many models on my 16G and 32G Macs. For less memory, qwen3:4b is good, for the 32B Mac, gpt-oss:20b is good. I like the smaller Mistral models like mistral:v0.3 and rnj-1:latest is a pretty good small reasoning model.
I like to ask claude how to prompt smaller models for the given task. With one prompt it was able to make a low quantized model call multiple functions via json.
I'm using gemini.google.com/app with AI Pro subscription. "Something went wrong" in FF, works in Chrome.
Below is one of my test prompts that previous Gemini models were failing. 3.1 Pro did a decent job this time.
> use c++, sdl3. use SDL_AppInit, SDL_AppEvent, SDL_AppIterate callback functions. use SDL_main instead of the default main function. make a basic hello world app.
I had it make a simple HTML/JS canvas game (think flappy bird) and while it did some things mildly better (and others noticeably worse) it still fell into the exact same traps as earlier models. It also had a lot of issues generating valid JS at parts and asking it what the code should be just made it endlessly generate the same exact incorrect code.
> Last week, we released a major update to Gemini 3 Deep Think to solve modern challenges across science, research and engineering. Today, we’re releasing the upgraded core intelligence that makes those breakthroughs possible: Gemini 3.1 Pro.
So this is same but not same as Gemini 3 Deep Think? Keeping track of these different releases is getting pretty ridiculous.
Deep Think is a few 3.1 models working together. It was suspected last week that Deep Think was composed using the new 3.1 model.
3.1 == model
deep think == turning up thinking knob (I think)
deep research == agent w/ search
One underappreciated reason for the agentic gap: Gemini tends to over-explain its reasoning mid-tool-call in a way that breaks structured output expectations. Claude and GPT-4o have both gotten better at treating tool calls as first-class operations. Gemini still feels like it's narrating its way through them rather than just executing.
I agree with this; it feels like the most likely tool to drop its high-level comments in code comments.
Google seems to really pull ahead in this AI race. For me personally they offer the best deal and although the software is not quiet there compared to openai or anthropic (in regards to 1. web GUI, 2. agent-cli). I hope they can fix that in the future and I think once Gemini 4 or whatever launches we will see a huge leap again
I don't understand this sentiment. It may hold true for other LLM use cases (image generation, creative writing, summarizing large texts), but when it comes to coding specifically, Google is *always* behind OpenAI and Anthropic, despite having virtually infinite processing power, money, and being the ones who started this race in the first place.
Until now, I've only ever used Gemini for coding tests. As long as I have access to GPT models or Sonnet/Opus, I never want to use Gemini. Hell, I even prefer Kimi 2.5 over it. I tried it again last week (Gemini Pro 3.0) and, right at the start of the conversation, it made the same mistake it's been making for years: it said "let me just run this command," and then did nothing.
My sentiment is actually the opposite of yours: how is Google *not* winning this race?
> despite having virtually infinite processing power, money
Just because they have the money doesn't mean that they spend it excessively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized, as they are more concerned with growth at all cost, while Google is more concerned with profitability. Google has the bigger warchest and could just wait until the other two run out of money rather than forcing the growth on that product line in unprofitable means.
Maybe they are also running much closer to their compute limits then the other ones too and their TPUs are already saturated with API usage.
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I hope they fail.
I honestly do not wish Google to have the best model out there and be forced to use their incomprehensible subscription / billing / project management whatever shit ever again.
I don’t know what their stuff cost. I don’t know why would I use vertex or ai studio. What is included in my subscription what is billed per use.
I pray that whatever they build fails and burns.
They all suck. OpenAI ignores scanning limits and disabled routes in robots.txt, after a 429 "Too Many Requests" they retry the same url half a dozen of times from different IPs in the next couple of minutes, and they once DoS'ed my small VPS trying to do a full scan of sitemaps.xml in less than one hour, trying and retrying if any endpoint failed.
Google and others at least respects both robots.txt and 429s. They invested years scanning all the internet, so they can now train on what they have stored in their server. OpenAI seems to assume that MY resources are theirs.
For a personal plan to use premium Gemini AI features or for agentic development with Gemini CLI/Antigravity the billing is no more or less complicated then Claude Code or Codex CLI.
You pay for the $20/mo Google AI Pro plan with a credit card via the normal personal billing flow like you would for a Google One plan without any involvement of Google Cloud billing or AI Studio. Authorize in the client with your account and you're good to go.
(With the bundled drive storage on AI Pro I'm just paying a few bucks more than I was before so for me it's my least expensive AI subscription excluding the Z.ai ultra cheap plan).
Or, just like with Anthropic or OpenAI, it's a separate process for billing/credits for an API key targeted at a developer audience. Which I don't need or use for Gemini CLI or Antigravity at all, it's a one step "click link to authorize with your Google Account" and done.
You could decide to use an API key for usage based billing instead (just like you could with Claude Code) but that's entirely unnecessary with a subscription.
Sure, for the API anything involving a hyperscalar cloud is going to have a higher complexity floor with legacy cruft here and there, but for individual subscriptions that's irrelevant and it's pretty much as straightforward of a click and pay flow you'd find anywhere else.
after using aistudio fine for months suddenly my billing was cancelled and a week later im still waiting for it to be re-enabled.
Im at a total loss to how google can function this way, my only explanation is they somehow have a Philosophers Stone they generate wealth with because they sure as hell make it impossible to give them money.
Eventually the models will be generally be so good that the competition moves from the best model to the best user experience and here I think we can expect others will win, e.g. Microsoft with GitHub and VS Code
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I think we're past the point where benchmarks hold real value. All models are above a certain threshold of intelligence but Gemini somehow borrows the worst of both worlds. It's neither good with long-horizon coding tasks nor does it offer a likable personality (like Claude which is much more beloved)
The CLI needs work, or they should officially allow third-party harnesses. Right now, the CLI experience is noticeably behind other SOTA models. It actually works much better when paired with Opencode.
But with accounts reportedly being banned over ToS issues, similar to Claude Code, it feels risky to rely on it in a serious workflow.
Off-topic but, what are people using to create those video animations seen in the "ISS orbit tracking dashboard" example? Looks pretty nice! Im guessing Google uses a whole building of UX people but ive seen similar videos from small indie startups too, or even 1 person SaaS.
At risk to be unpopular Gemini 3.0 Pro made a huge difference for me when I moved some workflow to Antigravity, especially compared to ChatGPT.
The latest update? I simply don’t care. I am not paid to evaluate models, I am paid to build. Not sure 4 benchmark points are making the difference.
In these discussions we see some people hating the models, while others love them. What I find interesting is that this is exactly how we feel about other people - some people will love working with you while others can't stand being in the same room you're in.
I’m no tech expert like a lot of people here, but I find Gemini 3.0 insanely good for my regular daily questions. Hoping this one is great too. I’m kind of at the point where many answers are essentially perfect and I don’t know if I need much more
There's a very short blog post up: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
The eventual nerfing gives me pause. Flash is awesome. What we really want is gemini-3.1-flash :)
Yes people are too fixated on just the model. The real question for coding use cases is - does Gemini X + Gemini CLI outperform Opus + Claude Code? With 3.0 the answer was no. I won’t waste time checking 3.1 until I hear otherwise.
Blog post: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
Great model until it gets nerfed. I wish they had a higher paid tier to use non nerfed model.
Bad news, John Google told me they already quantized it immediately after the benchmarks were done and it sucks now.
I miss when Gemini 3.1 was good. :(
I think there is a pattern it will always be nerfed the few weeks before launching a new model. Probably because they are throwing a bunch of compute at the new model.
Yeah maybe that but atleast let us know about this Or have dynamic limits? Nerfing breaks trust. Though I am not sure if they actually nerf it intentionally. Haven't heard from any credible source. I did experience in my workflow though.
What are you talking about?
I created a nice harness and visual workflow builder for my Gemini agent chains, works very well. I did this so it would create code the way I do, that is very editable.
In contrast, the vs code plugin was pretty bad, and did crazy things like mix languages
A lot of gemini bashing. But flash 3.0 with opencode is reasonably good and reliable coder.
I'd rate it between haiku 4.5 (also pretty good for a price) and sonnet. Closer to sonnet.
Sure, if I am not cost-sensitive I'd run everything in opus 4.6 but alas.
I’m keen to know how and where are you using Gemini.
Anthropic is clearly targeted to developers and OpenAI is general go to AI model. Who are the target demographic for Gemini models? ik that they are good and Flash is super impressive. but i’m curious
I use it as my main platform right now both for work/swe stuff, and person stuff. It works pretty well, they have the full suite of tools I want from general LLM chat, to notebookLM, to antigravity.
My main use-cases outside of SWE generally involve the ability to compare detailed product specs and come up with answers/comparisons/etc... Gemini does really well for that, probably because of the deeper google search index integration.
Also I got a year of pro for free with my phone....so thats a big part.
I use it in Google Search. For example yesterday I typed in Google "postgres generate series 24 hour" and this morning "ffmpeg convert mp4 to wav". Previously I would have clicked on the first StackOverflow result (RIP), now I just take it from the Gemini summary (I'd say 95% of the time it's correct for basic programming language questions. I remember some hallucinations about psycopg3 and date-fns tho. As usual with AI, you need to already know the answer, at least partially, to detect the bs).
Also what's great about Gemini in Google Search is that the answer comes with several links, I use them sometimes to validate the correctness of the solution, or check how old the solution is (I've never used chatGPT so I don't know if chatGPT does it).
I use the Gemini web interface just as I would ChatGPT. They also have coding environment analogues of Claude-Code in Anti-gravity and Gemini-CLI.
When you sign up for the pro tier you also get 2TB of storage, Gemini for workspace and Nest Camera history.
If you're in the Google sphere it offers good value for money.
I find gemini to be the best at travel planning and for story telling of geographical places. For a road trip, I tried all three mainstream providers and I liked Gemini (also personal preference because Gemini took a verbose approach instead of bullet points from others) for it's responses, ways it discovered stories about places I wanted to explore, places it suggested for me and things it gave me to consider those places in the route.
Gemini has an obvious edge over its competitors in one specific area: Google Search. The other LLMs do have a Web Search tool but none of them are as effective.
I feel like Gemini 3 was incredible on non-software/coding research. I have learned so much systems biology the last two months it blows my mind.
I had only started using Opus 4.6 this week. Sonnet it seems like is much better at having a long conversation with. Gemini is good for knowledge retrieval but I think Opus 4.6 has caught up. The biggest thing that made Gemini worth it for me the last 3 months is I crushed it with questions. I wouldn't have even got 10% of the Opus use that I got from Gemini before being made to slow down.
I have a deep research going right now on 3.1 for the first time and I honestly have no idea how I am going to tell if it is better than 3.
It seems like agentic coding Gemini wasn't as good but just asking it to write a function, I think it only didn't one shot what I asked it twice. Then fixed the problem on the next prompt.
I haven't logged in to bother with chatGPT in about 3 months now.
I am a professional software developer who has been programming for 40 years (C, C++, Python, assembly, any number of other languages). I work in ML (infrastructure, not research) and spent a decade working at Google.
In short, I consider Gemini to be a highly capable intern (grad student level) who is smarter and more tenacious than me, but also needs significant guidance to reach a useful goal.
I used Gemini to completely replace the software stack I wrote for my self-built microscope. That includes:
writing a brand new ESP32 console application for controlling all the pins of my ESP32 that drives the LED illuminator. It wrote the entire ESP-IDF project and did not make any major errors. I had to guide with updated prompts a few times but otherwise it wrote the entire project from scratch and ran all the build commands, fixing errors along the way. It also easily made a Python shared library so I can just import this object in my Python code. It saved me ~2-3 days of working through all the ESP-IDF details, and did a better job than I would have.
writing a brand new C++-based Qt camera interface (I have a camera with a special SDK that allows controlling strobe and trigger and other details. It can do 500FPS). It handled all the concurrency and message passing details. I just gave it the SDK PDF documentation for the camera (in mixed english/chinese), and asked it to generate an entire project. I had to spend some time guiding it around making shared libraries but otherwise it wrote the entire project from scratch and I was able to use it to make a GUI to control the camera settings with no additional effort. It ran all the build commands and fixed errors along the way. Saved me another 2-3 days and did a better job than I could have.
Finally, I had it rewrite the entire microscope stack (python with qt) using the two drivers I described above- along with complex functionality like compositing multiple images during scanning, video recording during scanning, mesaurement tools, computer vision support, and a number of other features. This involved a lot more testing on my part, and updating prompts to guide it towards my intended destination (fully functional replacement of my original self-written prototype). When I inspect the code, it definitely did a good job on some parts, while it came up with non-ideal solutions for some problems (for example, it does polling when it could use event-driven callbacks). This saved literally weeks worth of work that would have been a very tedious slog.
From my perspective, it's worked extremely well: doing what I wanted in less time than it would take me (I am a bit of a slow programmer, and I'm doing this in hobby time) and doing a better job (With appropriate guidance) than I could have (even if I'd had a lot of time to work on it). This greatly enhances my enjoyment of my hobby by doing tedious work, allowing me to spend more time on the interesting problems (tracking tardigrades across a petri dish for hours at a time). I used gemini pro 3 for this- it seems to do better than 2.5, and flash seemed to get stuck and loop more quickly.
I have only lightly used other tools, such as ChatGPT/Codex and have never used Claude. I tend to stick to the Google ecosystem for several reasons- but mainly, I think they will end up exceeding the capabilities of their competitors, due to their inherent engineering talent and huge computational resources. But they clearly need to catch up in a lot of areas- for example, the VS Code Gemini extension has serious problems (frequent API call errors, messed up formatting of code/text, infinite loops, etc).
Wow, you have to try claude code with Opus-4.6..
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I personally use it as my general purpose and coding model. It's good enough for my coding tasks most of the time, has very good and rapid web search grounding that makes the Google index almost feel like part of its training set, and Google has a family sharing plan with individual quotas for Google AI Pro at $20/month for 5 users which also includes 2 TB in the cloud. Family sharing is a unique feature for Gemini 3 Flash Thinking (300 prompts per day and user) & Pro (100 prompts per day and user).
I use Gemini for personal stuff such as travel planning and research on how to fix something, which product to buy, etc. My company has as Pro subscription so I use that instead of ChatGPT.
Various friends of mine work in non-technology companies (banking, industries, legal, Italy) and in pretty much all of them there's Gemini enterprise + NotebookLM.
In all of them the approach is: this is the solution, now find problems you can apply it to.
I have swapped to using gemini over chatgpt for casual conversation and question answering. there are some lacking features in the app but i get faster and more intelligent responses.
I switched to it for my personal subscription because on discount it was less than half the price of ChatGPT Plus/Claude Pro
I'd use it for planning, knowledge, and anything visual.
I use gemini for everything because I trust google to keep the data I send them safe, because they know how to run prod at scale, and they are more environmentally friendly than everyone else (tpu,us-central1).
This includes my custom agent / copilot / cowork (which uses vertex ai and all models therein). This is where I do more searching now (with genAi grounding) I'm about to work on several micro projects that will hold Ai a little differently.
All that being said, google Ai products suck hard. I hate using every one of them. This is more a reflection on the continued degradation of PM/Design at Big G, from before Ai, but accellationally worse since. I support removing Logan from the head of this shit show
disclaimer: long time g-stan, not so stan any more
I have run into a surprising number of basic syntax errors on this one. At least in the few runs I have tried it's a swing and a miss. Wonder if the pressure of the Claude release is pushing these stop gap releases.
It's fascinating to watch this community react to positively to Google model releases and so negatively toward OpenAI's. You all do understand that an ad revenue model is exactly where Google will go, right?
It's all so astroturfed so its hard to tell. I got the opposite impression though. Seemed like OpenAI had more fake positivity towards the top that i tried to skim, and this had way less and a lot of complaints.
Im biased I dont trust either of them, so perhaps im just hard looking for the hate and attributing all the positive stuff to advertising.
Gemini already drives ad revenue. If the conversation goes in that direction it will use product search results with the links attributable to Google.
An enemy is better than a traitor
Quite a low bar. And in any case, isn’t Google already a traitor to its original mission statement?
Does anyone know if this is in GA immediately or if it is in preview?
On our end, Gemini 3.0 Preview was very flakey (not model quality, but as in the API responses sometimes errored out), making it unreliable.
Does this mean that 3.0 is now GA at least?
Where is Simon's pelican?
It's also quite impressive with SVG animations.
> Create an SVG animation of a Beaver sitting next to a recordplayer and a create of records, his eyes follows the mouse curser.
https://gemini.google.com/share/717be5f9b184
Not Simon's but here is one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075709
Thank you!
Please no, let's not.
Relevant: Scanned diaries from 1945 of USFS Ranger. Had this transcribed in Claude.
[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041836
Gemini is the smartest model currently available. It is the only model out of the big ones that correcly identifies the specific versions of superhers in a collage I tested them with.
Google has a hugely valuable dataset of changes from decades of changes from top tier software engineers but it's so proprietary they can't use it to train their external models.
Somehow the models apparently get better and better every week, but every time i try to use them they get worse.
Am I the issue? Am i just misremembering the early times because it was a new thing?
You are holding it wrong!
No but for real, what is your usecase?
Do you acutely think something like gpt3 was best?
I dont have a real special usecase, i just use it whenever i think it will give better results than googling or thinking or i dont feel like getting annoyed by cookie popups.
And i dont think gpt3 was best, but it felt like it actually listened. Now i tell it: "You did this and this wrong, i specifically told u the exact opposite. Can you please do what i asked you?" And then it says something like: "Oh yes my bad, you are right and very very smart to have caught that you must be a super genius. I will now do what you asked me" Does the same wrong thing again. and again and again.
I ask it to fix a mistake, it tells me it fixed it, gives 1:1 the same thing with more errors.
It also feels like it forgets mid convo way faster than it did.
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I think it begs the question:
Is Gemini meant to be be a revenue making product or strictly a cost centre to defend against Search and Ads erosion by OpenAI?
Why does the Gemini web app not support MCP Servers?
Another preview release. Does that mean the recommended model by Google for production is 2.5 Flash and Pro? Not talking about what people are actually doing but the google recommendation. Kind of crazy if that is the case
Someone needs to make an actual good benchmark for LLM's that matches real world expectations, theres more to benchmarks than accuracy against a dataset.
We don't need real world benchmarks, if they were good for real world tasks people would use them We need scientific benchmarks that tease out the nature of intelligence. There are plenty of unsaturated benchmarks. Solving chess using "mostly" language modeling is still an open problem. And beyond that creating a machine that can explain why that move is likely optimal at some depth. AI that can predict the output of another AI.
this reminds me of that joke of someone saying "it's crazy that we have ten different standards for doing this", and then there're 11 standards
Xkcd 927
Can anyone explain why these models decrease in performance on this "MCRC v2 (8-needle)" long context benchmark when thinking is turned on?
I use gemini if i need to write something in my native language- Malayalam or translation. it works very well in writing in Indian regional languages.
For me, Gemini has been by far the best model for document understanding tasks. I look forward to seeing how much more capable this version is.
I use Gemini flash lite in a side project, and it’s stuck on 2.5. It’s now well behind schedule. Any speculation as to what’s going on?
Gemini-3.0-flash-preview came out right away with the 3.0 release and I was expecting 3.0-flash-lite before a bump on the pro model. I wonder if they have abandoned that part of the Pareto/price-performance.
3.1 feels to me like 3.0 but that takes a long time to think, it didn't feel like a leap in raw intelligence like 2.5 pro was.
I know Google has anti-gravity but do they have anything like Claude code as far as user interface terminal basically TUI?
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli
ThankS!!
My first impression is that the model sounds slightly more human and a little more praising. Still comparing the ability.
Ok, why don't you work on getting 3.0 out of preview first? 10 min response time is pretty heinous
I agree, according to Googles terms you are not allowed to use the preview model for production use cases. And 3.0 has been in preview for a loooong time now :(
Gemini 3.1 Pro is based on Gemini 3 Pro
Lol, and this line:
> Geminin 3.1 Pro can comprehend vast datasets
Someone was in a hurry to get this out the door.
Gemini is so stubborn, and often doesn’t follow explicit and simple instructions. So annoying
Writing style wise, 3.1 seems very verbose, but somehow less creative compared to 3.
It's been hugged to death. I keep getting "Something went wrong".
Gemini 3.0 Pro is bad model for its class. I really hope 3.1 is a leap forward.
Somehow doesn't work for me :) "An internal error has occurred"
Appears the only difference to 3.0 Pro Preview is Medium reasoning. Model naming has long gone from even trying to make sense, but considering 3.0 is still in preview itself, increasing the number for such a minor change is not a move in the right direction.
Maybe that's the only API-visible change, saying nothing about the actual capabilities of the model?
> increasing the number for such a minor change is not a move in the right direction
A .1 model number increase seems reasonable for more than doubling ARC-AGI 2 score and increasing so many other benchmarks.
What would you have named it?
My issue is that we haven't even gotten the release version of 3.0, that is also still in Preview, so may stick with 3.0 till that has been deemed stable.
Basically, what does the word "Preview" mean, if newer releases happen before a Preview model is stable? In prior Google models, Preview meant that there'd still be updates and improvements to said model prior to full deployment, something we saw with 2.5. Now, there is no meaning or reason for this designation to exist if they forgo a 3.0 still in Preview for model improvements.
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I disagree. Incrementing the minor number makes so much more sense than “gemini-3-pro-preview-1902” or something.
According to the blog post, it should be also great at drawing pelicans riding a bicycle.
Gemini current version drops most of the code every time I try to use it.
Useless.
ok , so they are scared that 5.3 (pro) will be released today/tomorrow and blow it out of the water and rushed it while they could still reference 5.2 benchmarks.
I don't think models blow other models anymore. We have the big 3 which are neck to neck in most benchmarks and the rest. I doubt that 5.3 will blow the others.
easy now
biggest problem is that it's slow. also safety seems overtuned at the moment. getting some really silly refusals. everything else is pretty good.
Google is terrible at marketing, but this feels like a big step forward.
As per the announcement, Gemini 3.1 Pro score 68.5% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, which makes it the top performer on the Terminus 2 harness [1]. That harness is a "neutral agent scaffold," built by researchers at Terminal-Bench to compare different LLMs in the same standardized setup (same tools, prompts, etc.).
It's also taken top model place on both the Intelligence Index & Coding Index of Artificial Analysis [2], but on their Agentic Index, it's still lagging behind Opus 4.6, GLM-5, Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.2.
---
[1] https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard/terminal-bench/2.0?agents=...
[2] https://artificialanalysis.ai
Benchmarks aren't everything.
Gemini consistently has the best benchmarks but the worst actual real-world results.
Every time they announce the best benchmarks I try again at using their tools and products and each time I immediately go back to Claude and Codex models because Google is just so terrible at building actual products.
They are good at research and benchmaxxing, but the day to day usage of the products and tools is horrible.
Try using Google Antigravity and you will not make it an hour before switching back to Codex or Claude Code, it's so incredibly shitty.
That's been my experience too; can't disagree. Still, when it comes to tasks that require deep intelligence (esp. mathematical reasoning [1]), Gemini has consistently been the best.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10177
What’s so shitty about it?
Humanity last exam 44%, Scicode 59, and that 80, and this 78 but not 100% ever.
Would be nice to see that this models, Plus, Pro, Super, God mode can do 1 Bench 100%. I am missing smth here?
Why don't they show Grok benchmarks?
They've fallen way behind.
GPT 5.2 loses at everything but they included that
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Why should I be excited?
Just wish iI could get 2.5 daily limit above 1000 requests easily. Driving me insane...
Yeah great, now can I have my pinned chats back please?
https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/nK23Zs...
I hope to have great next two weeks before it gets nerfed.
I've found Google (at least in AI Studio) are the only provider NOT to nerf their models after a few weeks
I don't use AI studio for my work. I used Antigravity/Gemini CLI and 3 pro was great for few weeks and now it's worse than 3 flash or any smaller model from competitor which are rated lower on benchmarks
IME, they definitely nerf models. gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 through AI Studio was amazing at release and steadily degraded. The quality started tanking around the time they hid CoT.
The visual capabilities of this model are frankly kind of ridicioulus what the hell.
Please I need 3 in ga…
Whoa, I think Gemini 3 Pro was a disappointment, but Gemini 3.1 Pro is definitely the future!
Can we switch from Claude Code to Google yet?
Benchmarks are saying: just try
But real world could be different
My sense is that the Gemini models are very capable but the Gemini CLI experience is subpar compared to Claude Code and Codex. I'm guess that it's the harness but since it can get confused, fall into doom loops, and generally lose the plot in a way that the model does not in Gemini Studio or the Gemini app.
I think a bunch of these harnesses are open source so it surprises me that there can be such a gulf between them.
It's not just the tooling. If you use Gemini in opencode it malfunctions in similar ways.
I haven't tried 3.1 yet, but 3 is just incompetent at tool use. In particular in editing chunks of text in files, it gets very confused and goes into loops.
The model also does this thing where it degrades into loops of nonsense thought patterns over time.
For shorter sessions where it's more analysis than execution, it is a strong model.
We'll see about 3.1. I don't know why it's not showing in my gemini CLI as available yet.
Its not just subpar, its not even sub-sub-par.
It goes into loops and never completes a task 8 times out of 10 that i've used it.
does it still crash out after couple prompts?
Another preview model? Why google keep doing this?
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The speed of these 3.1 and Preview releases is starting to feel like the early days of web frameworks. It’s becoming less about the raw benchmarks and more about which model handles long-context 'hallucination' well enough to be actually used in a production pipeline without constant babysitting.
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I'd love a new Gemini agent that isn't written with Node.js. Not sure why they think that's a good distribution model.
(Shrug) Ask it to write one!
Pelican on a bicycle in drawio - https://imgur.com/a/tNgITTR
(FWIW I'm finding a lot of utility in LLMs doing diagrams in tools like drawio)
How are you prompting it to draw diagrams in drawio
Here's the chat I used for the drawing - https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...
Save the xml, import to drawio
Sometimes it helps to also provide a drawio file that has the elements you wan't (eg. cloud service icons or whatever), but you just feed it the content you want diagrammed and let it eat.
Even if it's not completely correct, it usually creates something that's much closer to complete than a blank page.
Drawio drawings are just XML, its possible it can generate that directly
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