My sense is that the Gemini models are very capable but the Gemini CLI experience is subpar compared to Claude Code and Codex. I'm guess that it's the harness but since it can get confused, fall into doom loops, and generally lose the plot in a way that the model does not in Gemini Studio or the Gemini app.

I think a bunch of these harnesses are open source so it surprises me that there can be such a gulf between them.

Its not just subpar, its not even sub-sub-par.

It goes into loops and never completes a task 8 times out of 10 that i've used it.

It's not just the tooling. If you use Gemini in opencode it malfunctions in similar ways.

I haven't tried 3.1 yet, but 3 is just incompetent at tool use. In particular in editing chunks of text in files, it gets very confused and goes into loops.

The model also does this thing where it degrades into loops of nonsense thought patterns over time.

For shorter sessions where it's more analysis than execution, it is a strong model.

We'll see about 3.1. I don't know why it's not showing in my gemini CLI as available yet.