The fact that gemini 3.8 flash is so high up there just tells you this is an awful benchmark.

Try and use gemini 3.8 yourself for any real world work and you'll see it's terrible. It'll just go in circles reading the same file 20 times for no reason making hundreds of tool calls for a simple change.

EDIT: I was using gemini cli... it's not a harness issue lol

There's no such things as gemini cli these days. It's called "agy" (short for antigravity). And if you don't know what this is, you're probably 3-6 months behind already.

PS: I just googled to find out "gemini cli" still exists as a webpage. The very google thing that happened in 2026 is no one uses it. The correct harness is called agy or antigravity for Gemini 3.8 Flash.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiCLI/comments/1tuqr05/switched...

You sure it was 3.8 Flash? It hasn't been called Gemini cli in a WHILE...

havent tried that model, but it sounds like a potential harness issue. Have you tried it in different harnesses?

Hard disagree. I use 3.8 flash in Antigravity a lot, and thoroughly prefer it to most Pro-class models. It's really fast, and I've had it make crazy progress on compiler-like problems that previous models including Opus simply failed at. On ultra plan you can have it going for hours, and make incremental progress with good prompting for review interrupts. It solved a problem I couldn't solve for weeks in under 6 hours. 10k LOC total. The harness and test suite is key.

Why so brazenly confident? Isn’t it possible that the benchmark is correct, and your experience is correct too, but you haven’t tried all the thousand different modalities of work that programming encompasses and so maybe you don’t actually have standing to judge?