Comment by bredren
9 hours ago
Can anyone who has extensive, recent, experience with Claude code and Codex contextualize the current Gemini CLI product experience?
9 hours ago
Can anyone who has extensive, recent, experience with Claude code and Codex contextualize the current Gemini CLI product experience?
Gemini models have consistently disregarded rules and gone their own way for me. They will finish a task and get it done frequently way above the scope that you gave it, but they take a million shortcuts to get there. e.g. deciding the linter isn't important and disabling the pre commit hook. coding features you didn't ask for.
I have and use both Claude Code and Gemini CLI, and still don't consider Gemini worth starting for coding except to review Claude's output in critical commits (on a security boundary, maybe broad refactors, etc.), though I try side-by-side every now and then just to see the state of things. I also use Gemini Pro in a security scanning harness to act as a second set of eyes, but Opus is better at finding security bugs than Gemini, so I don't know that it's accomplishing anything beyond just using Opus.
Gemini Pro 3.1 for agentic coding is still clumsy. It chews a lot, has a harder time with tools and interacting with the codebase. I haven't tried any 3.5 version, yet, though. The benchmarks look promising.
I'll note I like the Google models' prose better than any others at the moment, though. Even the small open models (Gemma 4 family) have excellent prose, relatively speaking, that doesn't stink of the LLMisms that I find so annoying about OpenAI (especially) and Anthropic models. So, I'll probably start using Gemini for writing API docs, even if all code is Claude.
I would argue that prose is just a prompt issue. GPT 5.5 outout is easier to control whan Gemini by prompting. Having better defaults does not make it necessarily better.
I would disagree. I think it'd take a lot of prompting to make GPT 5.5 not have the underlying personality of GPT, which I find awful. They have knobs in ChatGPT to choose a "professional" tone, which improves it somewhat, but even that is still the worst prose of any leading model.
My default AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md/etc. is a few sentences from Strunk and White, to try to make all the models not suck at writing. It helps keep the models brief, but it doesn't actually make models with shitty prose have good prose. The relevant portion of my agents file is: "Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." Which might add up roughly the same as "be brief" in the weights, I don't know.
If you have a prompt that makes GPT a decent-to-good writer, I would like to see it.
Gemini produces decent-to-good prose without prompting, which improves if instructed to be concise. The other models, even the frontier models, do not have decent-to-good prose without prompting, and even with prompting, rarely elevate to what I would consider Good Enough. Part of this may be that GPT and Claude models get used a lot more heavily, and so I'm highly tuned into their idiosyncrasies. The heavy use of emojis, the click-bait headline style, etc. that they both use unprompted. All of that is repugnant to me, so anything that doesn't do all that by default, or at least not as aggressively, has a huge leg up.
My anecdote: smart but too stubborn to be useful.
I have been trying Gemini since 2.5 for coding.
It is the smartest for creative web stuff like HTML/CSS/JS.
But it has been very stubborn with following instructions like AGENTS.md.
And architecturally for large projects I tested, the code isn't on par with Opus 4.5+ and GPT 5.3+.
I would rather use DeepSeek 4 Flash on High (not max) than Gemini even if they had the same cost.
I currently use GPT 5.5 + DeepSeek 4 Flash.
BUT I didn't test Gemini 3.5 Flash yet. And it seems, from another comment in this post, that the Antigravity quota for is bricked for Google Pro plans which is the plan I have. So I don't have high hopes.