That's only good for the web based UI. If you want Gemini API access which is what this article is about then you must go the AIStudio route and pricing is API usage based. It does have a free usage tier and new signups can get $300 in free credits for the paid tier so it's I think it's still a good deal, just not as good as using the subscriptions would be.
No? Isn't the article about Codex, which is roughly equivalent to "Gemini CLI" and Google's Antigravity? Google's subscriptions include quotas for both of those, albeit the $20 monthly "Pro" plan has had its "Pro" model quota slashed in the last few weeks. You still get a large number of "Gemini 3 Flash" queries, which has been good enough for the projects I've toyed with in Antigravity.
I guess that's true but I find Google's models better than their public tooling. The Pro subscription includes "Gemini Code Assist and Gemini CLI" but the Gemini Code Assist plugin for IntelliJ which is my daily driver is broken most of the time to the degree that it's completely unusable. Sometimes you can't even type in the input box.
The only way I can do serious development with Gemini models is with other tooling (Cline, etc) that requires API based access which isn't available as part of the subscription.
I bought one of the google AI packages that came with a pile of drive storage and Gemini access.
Unfortunately gemini as a coding agent is a steaming useless pile. They have no right selling it, cheap open weight Chinese models are better at this point.
It's not stupid it just is incompetent at tool use and makes bad mistakes. It constantly gets itself into weird dysfunctional loops when doing basic things like editing files.
I'm not sure what GOOG employees are using internally, but I hope they're not being saddled with Gemini 3.1. It's miles behind.
Are you using gemini CLI or antigravity? The former is not really comparable to the latter in terms of quality. I wouldn't say antigravity is as good as the competition but it's pretty close. Miles behind is overstating it.
Gemini CLI but also used the Gemini models via opencode. They're terrible at CLI tool use. Like I said, just editing text files, they fall over rapidly, constantly making mistakes and then mistakes fixing their mistakes.
Antigravity wants me to switch IDEs, and I'm not going to do that.
Gemini 3.1 is a good coding agent. We've been totally spoiled now. Also, if you use Antigravity you can burn up Opus 4.6 credits off your Goog account instead, before you have to switch to Gem 3.1.
I use the free Chat AIs all the time; Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Mistral.
In the last month they have all clamped down quite heavily. I use to be able to deep-dive into a subject, or fix a small Python project, multiple times per day on the free Web UIs.
Claude, this morning, modified a small Python project for me and that single act exhausted all my free usage for the day. In the past I could do multiple projects per day without issue.
Same with ChatGPT. Gemini at least doesn't go full on "You can use this again at 1100AM", but it does fallback to a model that works very poorly.
Grok and Mistral I don't really use that much, but Grok's coding isn't that bad. The problem is that it is not such a good application for deep-diving a topic, because it will perform a web search before answering anything, making it take long.
Mistral tends to run out of steam very quickly in a conversation. Never tried code on it though.
That's only good for the web based UI. If you want Gemini API access which is what this article is about then you must go the AIStudio route and pricing is API usage based. It does have a free usage tier and new signups can get $300 in free credits for the paid tier so it's I think it's still a good deal, just not as good as using the subscriptions would be.
No? Isn't the article about Codex, which is roughly equivalent to "Gemini CLI" and Google's Antigravity? Google's subscriptions include quotas for both of those, albeit the $20 monthly "Pro" plan has had its "Pro" model quota slashed in the last few weeks. You still get a large number of "Gemini 3 Flash" queries, which has been good enough for the projects I've toyed with in Antigravity.
I guess that's true but I find Google's models better than their public tooling. The Pro subscription includes "Gemini Code Assist and Gemini CLI" but the Gemini Code Assist plugin for IntelliJ which is my daily driver is broken most of the time to the degree that it's completely unusable. Sometimes you can't even type in the input box.
The only way I can do serious development with Gemini models is with other tooling (Cline, etc) that requires API based access which isn't available as part of the subscription.
1 reply →
Google is by far the best deal for AI, they give you so many 'buckets' of usage for a variety of products, and they seem to keep adding them.
2 replies →
I bought one of the google AI packages that came with a pile of drive storage and Gemini access.
Unfortunately gemini as a coding agent is a steaming useless pile. They have no right selling it, cheap open weight Chinese models are better at this point.
It's not stupid it just is incompetent at tool use and makes bad mistakes. It constantly gets itself into weird dysfunctional loops when doing basic things like editing files.
I'm not sure what GOOG employees are using internally, but I hope they're not being saddled with Gemini 3.1. It's miles behind.
Are you using gemini CLI or antigravity? The former is not really comparable to the latter in terms of quality. I wouldn't say antigravity is as good as the competition but it's pretty close. Miles behind is overstating it.
Gemini CLI but also used the Gemini models via opencode. They're terrible at CLI tool use. Like I said, just editing text files, they fall over rapidly, constantly making mistakes and then mistakes fixing their mistakes.
Antigravity wants me to switch IDEs, and I'm not going to do that.
Gemini 3.1 is a good coding agent. We've been totally spoiled now. Also, if you use Antigravity you can burn up Opus 4.6 credits off your Goog account instead, before you have to switch to Gem 3.1.
Good luck sticking within limits, I have been burning up my baseline limits insanely fast within a few prompts, a marked change from a few weeks ago.
There's a few complaints online about the same happening to multiple users.
Otherwise anti-gravity has been great.
I use the free Chat AIs all the time; Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Mistral.
In the last month they have all clamped down quite heavily. I use to be able to deep-dive into a subject, or fix a small Python project, multiple times per day on the free Web UIs.
Claude, this morning, modified a small Python project for me and that single act exhausted all my free usage for the day. In the past I could do multiple projects per day without issue.
Same with ChatGPT. Gemini at least doesn't go full on "You can use this again at 1100AM", but it does fallback to a model that works very poorly.
Grok and Mistral I don't really use that much, but Grok's coding isn't that bad. The problem is that it is not such a good application for deep-diving a topic, because it will perform a web search before answering anything, making it take long.
Mistral tends to run out of steam very quickly in a conversation. Never tried code on it though.