> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors

This has not been my experience. I do Elixir primarily and Gemini has helped build some really cool products and massive refactors along the way. And it would even pick up security issues and potential optimizations along the way

What HAS been an issue constantly though was randomly the model will absolutely not respond at all and some random error would occur which is embarrassing for a company like Google with the infrastructure they own.

Out of curiosity, do you have any public projects (with public source code) you've made exclusively with Gemini, so one could take a look? I've tried a bunch of times to use Gemini to at least finish something small but I always end up sufficiently frustrated to abort it as the instruction-following seems so bad.