Ten days ago I had an experience with Gemini 3.8 flash that made me wonder if I was being routed to a different model under test. I was trying to use rocm with llama.cpp on my 128gb Strix Halo but could only get it to run Vulkan. I pasted the error message into agy and it proceeded to attach GDB to my GPU driver, reverse-engineer the kernel queue ioctl interface, and author an LD_PRELOAD C shim to get ROCm llama.cpp working on my Strix Halo. My jaw was hanging open the whole time.

Edit to add the fix: https://gist.github.com/birep/6f2c8d490c7a29820997d57bd654c3...

3.8 Flash is just quite good, and so is the Antigravity harness.

I use a mix of Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini holds it's own. Especially in writing, frontend, and sysadmin work. agy for configuring a NixOS system has been truly incredible.

Can confirm, I was doing a routine internet search thing for a curiosity 3 days ago (about the only thing I used Gemini for) and was surprised by how suddenly thorough and quality the response seemed, almost overnight.

For getting redroid running on my Linux system, 3.8 Flash decided to binary patch a .so file instead of getting the AOSP source code and patch/build it properly.

And I saw it do this twice, once for Android 14 and once for Android 16.

I think this is just within 3.8 flash's capabilities.

Can confirm - I am HEAVY claude user, but always like to check with AGY and CODEX in between. AGY with Gemini 3.8 flash cooked last couple of times and CODEX is basically out of the mix for me

My experience with Gemini 3.8 Flash has been awful; it gives me the most hallucinations out of the major models. I'm not using it for coding, but general research on different topics.

I've been tinkering with Gemini for several months and I think it's great. The most complex things I've had it do is create a rust emulator from a compiled game, as well as create a buildroot linux image, trouble shoot problems etc.

Gemini is honestly amazing sometimes. If they didn't force you to use a terrible harness, charge too much for way too little, and generally act like customers are a giant problem to be avoided I'm sure Google could take over the AI market.

Please tell me you published your findings even as an issue on the llama.cpp GitHub

I had a similar but less impressive experience recently with Muse Spark 1.3.

Asked pi agent it to identify the main hero sprite size of game I was running. It had a ton of shader effects so it was hard to determine.

It used some cli tools to identify that it was a game made with Godot, decompiled the executable but data was encrypted, broke the encryption after writing a brute force tool to test keys extracted from the exe, then proceeded to extract the game gd scripts and assets, only to answer the question of the sprite size.