For one reason or another everyone seems to be sleeping on Gemini. I have been exclusively using Gemini 3 Flash to code these days and it stands up right alongside Opus and others while having a much smaller, faster and cheaper footprint. Combine it with Antigravity and you're basically using a cheat code.

I've heard Opus 4.5 might have an edge especially in long running agentic coding scenarios (?) but personally yes Gemini 3 series is what I was expecting GPT-5 to be.

I'm also mostly on Gemini 3 Flash. Not because I've compared them all and I found it the best bar none, but because it fulfills my needs and then some, and Google has a surprisingly little noted family plan for it. Unlike OpenAI, unlike Anthropic. IIRC it's something like 5 shared Gemini Pro subs for the price of 1. Even being just a couple sharing it, it's a fantastic deal. My wife uses it during studies, I professionally with coding and I've never run into limits.

This comment is a bit confusing and surprising to me because I tried Antigravity three weeks ago and it was very undercooked. Claude was actually able to identify bugs and get the bigger picture of the project, while Gemini 3 with Antigravity often kept focusing on unimportant details.

My default everyday model is still Gemimi 3 in AI Studio, even for programming related problems. But for agentic work Antigravity felt very early-stages beta-ware when I tried it.

I will say that at least Gemimi 3 is usually able to converge on a correct solution after a few iterations. I tried Grok for a medium complexity task and it quickly got stuck trying to change minor details without being able to get itself out.

Do you have any advice on how to use Antigravity more effectively? I'm open to trying it again.

Yeah I don't understand why everyone seems to have forgotten about the Gemini options. Antigravity, Jules, and Gemini CLI are as good as the alternatives but are way more cost effective. I want for nothing with my $20/mo Google AI plan.

I've used Gemini CLI a fair amount as well—it's included with our subscription at work. I like it okay, but it tends to produce "lies" a bit too often. It tends to produce language that reads as over confident that it's found a problem or solution. This causes me extra work to verify or causes me extra time because I believed it. In my experience Claude Code does this quite a bit less.

It's the opposite experience for me. Gemini mostly produces made up and outdated stuff.

I think counter to the assumption of myself (and many), for long form agent coding tasks, models are not as easily hot swappable as I thought.

I have developed decent intuition on what kinds of problems Codex, Claude, Cursor(& sub-variants), Composer etc. will or will not be able to do well across different axes of speed, correctness, architectural taste, ...

If I had to reflect on why I still don't use Gemini, it's because they were late to the party and I would now have to be intentional about spending time learning yet another set of intuitions about those models.

For all the hype I see about Gemini, we integrated it with our product (an AI agent) and it consistently performs worse[0] than Claude Sonnet, Opus, and ChatGPT 5.2

[0] based on user Thumbs up/Thumbs down voting

Maybe it's the types of projects I work on but Gemini is basically unusable to me. Settled on Claude Code for actual work and Codex for checking Claude's work. If I try to mix in Gemini it will hallucinate issues that do not exist in code at very high rate. Claude and Codex are way more accurate at finding issues that actually exist.

Not my experience at all.

It fails to be pro-active. "Why didn't you run the tests you created?"

I want it to tell me if the implementation is working.

Feels lazy. And it hallucinates solutions frequently.

It pales in comparison to CC/Opus.

I can think of one major reason why Microsoft and Apple would prefer to feed their codebases into Claude than to Gemini.

I tried to use it, kept saying it was at max capacity and nothing would happen. I gave it a good day before giving up.

Oddly enough, as impressive as Gemini 3 is, I find myself using it infrequently. The thing Gemini 2.5 had over the other models was dominance in long context, but GPT5.2-codex-max and Opus 4.5 Thinking are decent at long context now, and collectively they're better at all the use cases I care about.

I think Gemini is an excellent model, it's just not a particularly great agent. One of the reasons is that its code output is often structured in a way that looks like it's answering a question, rather than generating production code. It leaves comments everywhere, which are often numbered (which not only is annoying, but also only makes sense if the numbering starts within the frame of reference of the "question" it's "answering").

It's also just not as good at being self-directed and doing all of the rest of the agent-like behaviors we expect, i.e. breaking down into todolists, determining the appropriate scope of work to accomplish, proper tool calling, etc.

I've never, ever had a good experience with Gemini (3 Pro). It's been embarrassingly bad every time I've tried it, and I've tried it lots of times. It overcomplicates almost everything, hallucinates with impressive frequency, and needs to be repeatedly nudged to get the task fully completed. I have no reason to continue attempting to use it.

For me it just depends on the project. Sometimes one or the other performs better. If I am digging into something tough and I think it's hallucinating or misunderstanding, I will typically try another model.

Eh, it's not near Opus at all, closer to Sonnet. It is nice though with Antigravity because it's free versus being paid in other IDEs like Cursor.

I don't think anyone is sleeping on it.

It's on the top of most leaderboards on lmarena.ai

I'm also using Gemini and it's the only option that consistently works for me so far. I'm using it in chat mode with copy&paste and it's pleasant to work with.

Both Claude and ChatGPT were unbearable, not primarily because of lack of technical abilities but because of their conversational tone. Obviously, it's pointless to take things personally with LLMs but they were so passive-aggressive and sometimes maliciously compliant that they started to get to me even though I was conscious of it and know very well how LLMs work. If they had been new hires, I had fired both of them within 2 weeks. In contrast, Gemini Pro just "talks" normally, task-oriented and brief. It also doesn't reply with files that contain changes in completely unrelated places (including changing comments somewhere), which is the worst such a tool could possibly do.

Edit: Reading some other comments here I have to add that the 1., 2. ,3. numbering of comments can be annoying. It's helpful for answers but should be an option/parameterization.

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It's ok, but it too frequently edits WAY more than it needs to in order to accomplish the task at hand.

GPT-5.2 sometimes does this too. Opus-4.5 is the best at understanding what you actually want, though it is ofc not perfect.

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