Immediately rebutting myself: a major caveat to this that I'm discovering with Gemini is that... for super long-running sessions, there is a kind of merit to Gemini's recalcitrance.

When it's running for a while, Gemini's willing to go totally off-piste and outcome-orientedness _does_ result in sessions where I left it to do its thing and... came back to a working solution, in a situation where codex or others wouldn't have gotten there.

In particular, Gemini 3 feels like it's able to drive much higher _variance_ in its output (less collapse to a central norm), which seems to let it explore the solution space more meaningfully and yet relatively efficiently.