For code generation, nothing so far beats Opus. More likely than not it generated working code and fixed bugs that Gemini 2.5 pro couldn't solve or even Gemini Code Assist. Gemini Code Assist is better than 2.5 pro, but has way more limits per prompt and often truncates output.

I found Anthropic’s models untrustworthy with SQL (e.g. confused AND and OR operator precedence - or simply forgot to add parens, multiple times), Gemini 2.5 pro has no such issues and identified Claude’s mistakes correctly.

Don’t sleep on Codex-CLI + gpt-5. While the Codex-CLI scaffolding is far behind CC, the gpt-5 code seems solid from what I’ve seen (you can adjust thinking level using /model).

The article is not comparing models, but how the models are used by tools, in this case Claude Code. It's not merely a thin wrapper around an API.

for me gemini 2.5 pro with thinking tokens enabled blows Opus out of the water for "difficult problems".

Let’s say that is correct, you can still just use Opus in Cursor or whatever.