alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
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
> 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.
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"
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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?
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.
> 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.
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.