Comment by urbsgpw

Exactly my experience. I'm building an AI document-extraction platform, so I had to benchmark a bunch of models — on the cost:quality:latency:adherence picture, flash wins hands down for structured extraction. (Caveat: I've only tested the three US labs and Mistral.). So like u said, totally viable in prod for a relatively static tool. Didn't build the tool suite with gemini, but if you use service mode it currently mainly runs on flash.

Haven't done any serious coding work with the flash models though — but I'm seeing more and more HN comments from people who seem to have picked it up for that in the last couple of months.