alt Hacker NewsAre Googlers themselves happy using Gemini coding agent instead of Claude Code or Codex? (no snark, I'm really asking)
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If you mean specifically the Gemini VS Code Extension: it's terrible compared to Claude Code or Codex. I don't know how they can get away with it. Just constant timeouts, weird failure modes, have to start a new chat to switch modes... but I don't think any of that is specific to gemini the model- it seems to be the extension.
As for actual solutions to problems ignoring the VS Code extension aspect, I find all three premiere models to be excellent coding agents for my purposes.
Note that coding is not the only use of Gemini or any of these models. It's also not what this article is talking about. Gemini can be not the best coding agent, but very good at other things.
The point of dogfooding is exactly that: if we're unhappy, we're the ones to improve.
Last month, Steve Yegge suggested that they are not: https://xcancel.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2043747998740689171
I for one can't tell the difference between Claude and Gemini for coding. And the internal agent tooling is many times faster than Claude Code in my experience.
they use a web based vscode like (cider) with a custom agent
Antigravity comes to mind
they use claude code at deepmind
Not a Googler, but I use gemini in JetBrains Junie and have no issues with it. It's cheap, very fast and most importantly actually listens to you.
Codex?
Yes. The models are good, the models are fast, and the internal tooling has caught up at this point too. There's a lot of UI/UX/tooling stuff that's still being worked through, integrations with VCS, and solving deeper problems that I probably can't talk about, but I'd say the frustrations of most are about the rate of change much more than the actual abilities.
One thing that's interesting is a bunch of internal thought leaders who swear by the Flash models over the Pro models. Whether this is true or not doesn't really matter, the interesting bit to me is that we are at a point with the models where "better" models are not necessarily more useful, and that faster with more work on the harnesses may be a better trade-off.