What do people think of Google's Gemini (Pro?) compared to Claude for code?

I really like a lot of what Google produces, but they can't seem to keep a product that they don't shut down and they can be pretty ham-fisted, both with corporate control (Chrome and corrupt practices) and censorship

Gemini is amazing for taking a merge file of your whole repo, dropping it in there, and chatting about stuff. The level of whole codebase understanding is unreal, and it can do some amazing architectural planning assistance. Claude is nowhere near able to do that.

My tactic is to work with Gemini to build a dense summary of the project and create a high level plan of action, then take that to gpt5 and have it try to improve the plan, and convert it to a hyper detailed workflow xml document laying out all the steps to implement the plan, which I then hand to claude.

This avoids pretty much all of Claude's unplanned bumbling.

I don't think Gemini Pro is necessarily worse at coding, but in my experience Claude is substantially better at "terminal" tasks (i.e. working with the model through a CLI in the terminal) and most of the CLIs use Claude, see https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard.

For the web ui (chat)? I actually really like gemini 2.5 pro.

For the command line tool (claude code vs gemini code)? It isn't even close. Gemini code was useless. Claude code was mostly just slow.

Gemini is better at helping to debug difficult problems that require following multiple function calls.

I think Claude is much more predictable and follows instructions better- the todo list it manages seems very helpful in this respect.

I used to like it a lot but I feel like it got dumber lately. Am I imagining things or has anyone else observed this too?

Pretty much every time Claude code is stuck or more or less just coding in circles i use Gemini PRO to analyze the code/data and feed the response into Claude to solve it. I also have much more success with Gemini when creating big sql transforming scripts or similar. Both are quite bad on bigger tasks, they get you 60% and then i spend days and days to trying to get to 100% .. its such a time sink when i select the wrong task for the llm.

In my recent tests I found it quite smart at analyzing bigger picture (i.e. "hey, test failing not because of that, but because of whole assumption has changed and let me rewrite this test from scratch". But it also got stuck few times "I can't edit file, I'm stuck, let me try completely differently". But the biggest difference so far is the communication style - it's a bit.. snarky? I.e. comments like "yeah, tests are failing - as I suspected". Why the f it suspected failing test on the project it sees for the first time? :D

Personally gemini has been giving me better results. Claude keeps trying to generate react code even when the whole context and my command is svelte, and failing constantly to give me something that can at least run, gemini, on the other hand has been pretty good with styling, and useful with the bussines logic. I dont get all the hype around claude.

It's doing rather well at thinking, but not at coding. When it codes, often enough it runs in circles and ignores input. Where I find it useful is to read through larger codebases and distill what I need to find out from it. Even using gemini from claude to consult it for certain things. Opus is also like that btw, but a bit better at coding. Sonnet though, excels at coding.. from my experience though.

According to the guys from Amp Claude Sonnet/Opus are better at tool use.

Gemini frequently didn't write code for me for no explicable reason, and just talked about a hypothetical solution. Seems like a tooling issue though.

If you could control the model with system command, it would be very good. But at last I have failed miserably. Model is too verbose and helpful.

In my experience it's better at lower level stuff, like systems programming. A pass afterwards with claude makes the code more readable.

The Gemini CLI tool is atrocious. It might work sometimes for analyzing code, but for modifying files, never. The inevitable conclusion of every session I've ever tried has been an infinite loop. Sometimes it's an infinite loop of self-deprecation, sometimes just repeating itself to failure, usually repeating the same tool failure until it catches it as an infinite loop. Tool usage frequently (we're talking 90% of the time) fails. It's also, frankly, just a bummer to talk to. The "personality" is depressed, self-deprecating, and just overall really weird.

That's been my experience, anyway. Maybe it hates me? I sure hate it.

It sucks.