I hope this works better than 3.0 Pro

I'm a former Googler and know some people near the team, so I mildly root for them to at least do well, but Gemini is consistently the most frustrating model I've used for development.

It's stunningly good at reasoning, design, and generating the raw code, but it just falls over a lot when actually trying to get things done, especially compared to Claude Opus.

Within VS Code Copilot Claude will have a good mix of thinking streams and responses to the user. Gemini will almost completely use thinking tokens, and then just do something but not tell you what it did. If you don't look at the thinking tokens you can't tell what happened, but the thinking token stream is crap. It's all "I'm now completely immersed in the problem...". Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress. It's bad at using tools and tries to edit files in weird ways instead of using the provided text editing tools. In Copilot it, won't stop and ask clarifying questions, though in Gemini CLI it will.

So I've tried to adopt a plan-in-Gemini, execute-in-Claude approach, but while I'm doing that I might as well just stay in Claude. The experience is just so much better.

For as much as I hear Google's pulling ahead, Anthropic seems to be to me, from a practical POV. I hope Googlers on Gemini are actually trying these things out in real projects, not just one-shotting a game and calling it a win.

Gemini just doesn’t do even mildly well in agentic stuff and I don’t know why.

OpenAI has mostly caught up with Claude in agentic stuff, but Google needs to be there and be there quickly

Don't get me started on the thinking tokens. Since 2.5P the thinking has been insane. "I'm diving in to the problem", "I'm fully immersed" or "I'm meticulously crafting the answer"

Glad I’m not the only one who experienced this. I have a paid antigravity subscription and most of the time I use Claude models due to the exact issues you have pointed out.

Relieved to read this from an ex-Googler at least we are no the crazy ones we are made out to be whenever we point out issues with Gemini

I also worked at Google (on the original Gemini, when it was still Bard internally) and my experience largely mirrors this. My finding is that Gemini is pretty great for factual information and also it is the only one that I can reliably (even with the video camera) take a picture of a bird and have it tell me what the bird is. But it is just pretty bad as a model to help with development, myself and everyone I know uses Claude. The benchmarks are always really close, but my experience is that it does not translate to real world (mostly coding) task.

tldr; It is great at search, not so much action.

Is the thinking token stream obfuscated?

Im fully immersed

Hmm, interesting..

My workflow is to basically use it to explain new concepts, generate code snippets inline or fill out function bodies, etc. Not really generating code autonomously in a loop. Do you think it would excel at this?

yeah, g3p is as smart or smarter as the other flagships but it's just not reliable enough, it will go into "thinking loops" and burn 10s of 1000s of tokens repeating itself.

https://blog.brokk.ai/gemini-3-pro-preview-not-quite-baked/

hopefully 3.1 is better.

> stuck in loops

I wonder if there is some form of cheating. Many times I found that after a while Gemini becomes like a Markov chain spouting nonsense on repeat suddenly and doesn't react to user input anymore.