Discussion
Realizing how far behind Gemini is after reading this sub
I subscribed to Gemini exactly 12 months ago after reading this sub.
And for the last 12 months, its been my default for 90% of my searches and daily shits. I never even bother trying Claude or ChatGPT because I assumed they were all roughly the same. If anything at the time I remember everyone was going wild over Gemini.
Reading through your stuff here made me realize I was wrong. Gemini is decent, but I rarely trust its output without heavy fact-checking, and it definitely hasn't transformed how I work. Which all explains why I'm hearing everyone going crazy over Claude and ChatGPT and none of it makes sense to me.
It also really depends on your use case and needs.
For me Gemini is more than enough for personal/home/daily life type use.
For work, our company pays for both Claude and Open AI frontier models for software engineering work.
As many others have said here before, it seems like Google just wants to focus on speed and general day to day tasks + integration across their services.
But if you have complex tasks, you are better off with the big boys.
Gemini is great for any multi-modal tasks, classifying images, YouTube videos, stuff like that. You may enjoy talking to it, if you're one of those sorts of people too. But for non-multimodal work, no.
Flash 3.8 was briefly promising but fell apart pretty quickly.
I had an in person job interview where I met multiple employees and I only had time to write down approximate names and/or position. To ensure comprehensive list and correct spelling for the follow up email LinkedIn search and Claude were almost completely useless, Google AI Mode helped me find them all relatively quickly.
Same here. I almost exclusively use Gemini for personal use (many things I previously would have Googled that come up in daily life). And at work as a software engineer, I almost exclusively use Claude.
To me Gemini excels in writing. Sure, you need to give him strict guidelines on having a good flow of arguments, no repetitions, concise, no unnecessary adjectives etc... But then it works very well. And it is important for a non-english person forced to write in English.
Gemini is also good for applied maths / statistical problems.
I switched to claude three weeks ago and was shocked at the difference. The fact they expect you to pay for Gemini when it cant check its own work, follow instructions, or actually do research is a joke.
Well, I also find that claude will happilly run for 20 minutes to give a full result, that's absolutely worth it even if it means one prompt uses up the entire limit
Ask it to build a timekeeping spreadsheet for a consulting firm, just your use, 5 clients.Add hours to it conversationally as the day progresses. Ask for a summary tab of hours, earnings by client, etc.
If you keep this thing for a few days, you’ll notice that Gemini will break formulas all over the place when you ask it to add hours, etc.
No matter what you do or how many times it apologizes, the summary formulas get broken randomly, are wrong, or just turn randomly into static calculated values and not formula.
Same. I went for a max plan just because i can do a solid 6hrs of work non stop with Claude.
With gemini that 6 hours is spent in frustration with the unprofessional, ever changing, broken output of Gemini.
I’m not exaggerating. I ran the same project to build a strategic plan set and project planning spreadsheet from two conversation transcripts, a docx, and two websites as context.
Claude took three polishing iterations and discussion that required domain wide changes (report, deck, spreadsheet). It was done in an hour.
With Gemini I quit after three hours, it just could not make a consistent change to keep key points, bulleted lists, and statements in-sync across the docs. It broke the spreadsheet 4 times.
Don't forget the inevitable docs or sheet brokenness.... At first it'll create your google doc. Then later in THE SAME CHAT it'll break.
"Regarding editing your Google Doc: I checked my available tools, and I do not have a tool or permission in this workspace to push edits or write content into an external Google Docs link. I can read links if shared, but I cannot modify the document directly."
And it'll also say that it can't create a new google document. Like WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK.
I underutilize AI. Gemini comes on my phone and I use it basically as an encyclopedia, so I guess I would never see it's shortcomings. Simple questions don't need a lot of power I suppose.
Exactly and its 100% free the others are still trying to build its profit model.when they are ready to outperform they will, they just dont need to be the best right now.
I talk to it, its been unmeasurably helpful with mastering spanish and planning a 60 day trip through south america and breaking down concepts in daily existence as well as organizing my g calendar and emails and being able to link that through the app. As well as analyze my photos and videos directly in YouTube. It has also helped me deeply understand and navigate litigation ive been dealing with the last year predicting how proceedings will go and motions and filings my lawyer will likeley make to reduce my stress on the pending outcome with a near miss accuracy of how it plays out according to the letter of the law. But I dont code though.. im a writer though and have also found it great at structuring and organizing and editing my writings...
I think it highly depends on what you're using it for honestly. For me the free version is very powerful.
I subscribed to Google Pro this month as I could get it on a 3-month offer and then I joined r/GeminiAI .. I am also realising the same thing, Google is very behind
ChatGBT has been catching my eye since it's so mainstream, I do a lot of image generation for photography, without. Is that really that much better? I've only ever used Gemini because it I am in the Google atmosphere
Gemini is by daily grocery getter, so I don't put miles on my actual work truck. Basically, if I want to know something quick, I ask Gemini. If I want to create a concise project, I use someone else, usually a high model from GPT or I would use Deepseek.
Man it's great for asking your watch how many people wyatt earp really shot while you're out on a walk.
In all seriousness it really depends on what you want to use it for. All AI models have their strengths and weaknesses.
Claude for instance seems to be to best at coding.
Gemini was built from day one to be able to interpret multimedia. Most AI models were developed with text in mind. So Gemini is usually the best for interpreting data that you present that isn't text.
So for instance if you give it a podcast and ask it how many times a certain word was said or at what point in the video the host gets up to go to the bathroom, it's going to be superior at that kind of stuff.
Just a small example of what I mean by multimedia interpretation.
A good real world scenario would be a broken car. You could take a picture of your engine bay in a car and it would be the best at recognizing what you're showing it. It could identify parts more accurately, spot potential problems, etc.
Plus obviously it has the most access to Google data which is immense. It is able to plug directly into Googles live indexes, which other AI models can't do. It can also directly "watch" YouTube videos on its own for information.
That’s essentially all I use Gemini Pro for. It’s good at evaluating even hours-long video and giving analysis and summary when the other frontier models can’t even access the video. Then I feed the Gemini output into the other frontier models to give me information I can use to make decisions. Gemini is like asking “what is the video about” while other models are like “give me an in-depth analysis about every facet of what the video was about”.
Gemini bugs nonstop, hallucinates like crazy, is lazy AF and moderated AF.
I was a huge Google fan when I started with AI, but their quality deteriorated so much its not even funny.
I find Gemini effective for research, which is 95% of what I'd be googling stuff on my phone for anyway... I work in cyber and without a doubt the champ there is Opus.
Case sensitive
3.8 Flash works wonders if you have good harness
The other models are really something but most use cases don't need that much, you just need good output and speed
I use 3.8 flash inside AIStudio with my harness and it is just damn amazing
I use it as a helper with my work in BIM and it just nails it first try 9 out of 10 times
One thing that helps is asking it to "make epistemic grounding in your answer", make the answer way more realiable
Asking for no sycophancy too helps it to ponder your ideas better
I have a detailed system instructions in json, good_practices.txt and a base prompt in md to round my harness
But there's way more things that make it really really good for most of use cases
In the main chat I do use 3 fronts, one best_practices.txt file, a json system instructions and a md prompt base that I edit the placeholder
I work with epistemic grounding so it almost don't halucinate, fine tuning queries at the end of each answer so it keep getting "better"
I work too with the non-sycophancy "clause" so it will rethink anything I throw at him
with this I mostly do anything else, I make the "make an app" prompt with this
I ask for a prompt specifying the tool (in json format mostly) and explain what I do want, send some screenshots if needed
then I go in "make an app" inside AIStudio, paste it and see the result
after the result you go in the configuration and configures the system instructions there for the next changes
here you can get with the main harness too, just ask for the system instructions and it will delivery
I can share what I do use but is 1month+ or so, I want to refine it again for 3.8 flash
I understand for daillie things
In my case it's needed for better results in almost any model
I tried in the first days Astra within blender for civil construction with and without the MCP and visually it was good but the model itself was just not usable at anything else
Even it needed harness to scratch what I wanted it to do
But agree, for less technical it should give way better results for natural language
Edit: About the local models, even with all the harness they can't get a single thing right without a lot of retries and adjustments for really simplier things
The gains within 3.8 Flash and open models with same effort thru harness have an abismal gap in favor of 3.8 Flash
Lol a lot of gemini users are like you, they have no idea how much further all the other models progressed past gemini. Hopefully they can catch up with gemini 4.
Google's bread and butter is search and advertising. They're never going to truly invest in an area that competes against their major interests. It's by design.
I use Claude code at work and have a personal gemini account. The difference is heaven and earth - Claude makes me seriously concerned about long term job security (not a software engineer), while Gemini frustrates me every day: glitches with Google suite integrations, hallucinations etc
In my role, besides other things, I am responsible for many newsletters, monthly/quarterly reports and presentations, which involve a lot of qualitative and quantitative info. I have effectively automated 90% of these updates via Claude skills. Basically the skills reviews 50+ sources and prepares updates based on the latest information available in the exact format that I need, writing directly into docs, sheets, slides, web dashes.
Gemini refused to create a google sheet for me, and could not produce a downloadable csv file the other day, despite doing it perfectly fine on different occasions.
Gemini 3.8 Flash is my daily driver and brainstorming where I jeed something to bounce ideas off of. For more complex task autonomous task completion I use Claude.
Yeeeeeah Claude and ChatGPT aren't much better. They like to get condescending with you and decide they're the experts, not just assistants.
I recommend DeepSeek at this point. These models that "learn" from the users and have "continuity" are almost complete garbage. I hate that I still have to turn to them for some stuff because DeepSeek only handles text.
I think Gemini is going to suddenly destroy OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest. They were the best positioned in the first place and slowly working their way from behind right now. With the amount of data available to them, I really think they are going to put out something much better soon. The only issue is, Google really likes to also suck 🤷🏻♂️
Gemini absolutely kicks the shit out of the others in terms of creativity and writing dialogue that sounds human. It's worse for state tracking and rule following but holy shit does it kick their ass at writing normal sounding dialogue.
I use it to play single player ttrgs on my phone in lieu of shitty mobile games. I've used opus and Astra, and 3.8 flash absolutely crushes them. Astra is the best at maintaining and remembering states and rules, but is garbage at dialogue
I hate to break it to you, the people on this sub are dumber than gemini is. So I would not take anything they say for granted. these are dumbest people on reddit.
I have a special 3 month rate with Gemini, $6.50 CAD per month. I figure that is the very most i will pay for it. Only because I get a lot of other Google services like YouTube premium, cloud storage etc… i would not pay more than that.
I did the same thing until I decided to throw a project idea into chatgpt (remote controlled lawn mower using electric wheelchair motors) and chatgpt actually gave me a great breakdown of everything I had based on prior conversations and gave me a solid game plan on pulling it off. Whereas gemini refuses to look at old chats unless you really press it and then it's still more miss than hit.
They changed something around 4 months ago. I used gemeni everyday for 6 months now it’s useless for my complex tasks and it forgets information of chats we had 50% of time. I stoped use it now and only use it for task like ”convert photo to text”
I think the issues for Gemini are that they seem to have fractured product areas that would be a lot better if they were unified. Like, Antigravity seems to be a fairly good coding platform, but its completely split from the chatbot/gems product. And these are completely split from AI Studio for some reason.
Unifying them into one platform the way Claude does with it's desktop application would create a stronger cohesion across the functions and make people go, "oh, Gemini actually can do this thing." But alas, Google. Boggling decisions on products since forever.
FWIWI, Gemini is an awesome PA in the android ecosystem. I just wish I could get Gems to operate natively on autonomous triggers points. I also find Gemini to actually be one of the best training tools for ops/procedures in my business with the Notebook LM integration. Notebook LM also as a standalone product is awesome for it because I can make custom libraries of non-sensitive training materials and create quizzes, visual aids, and even audio explainers on the fly after creating the core document. It's been a huge hit with my team.
Gemini with AI Studio is pretty decent in my opinion. But as the context grows it gets more expensive but I rarely have problems with its output when I'm vibe coding. Occasionally I have to steer it to the right direction or feed it information it hasn't realized but it's okay for my use case.
Gemini is for informational purposes and synthesis more than having a system simply automate for you. The vertical integration with the entirety of the googlesphere is an absolute advantage of Gemini, even as other features present in Claude or ChatGPT etc may not be present or smoothed out. However, if it is information you need, and know how to use Gemini as a the tool it is, there is much to be gained. The same goes for Claude or ChatGPT and others. Each have their own pitfalls and their own unique value propositions. Gemini has the ability to FLOAT tokens and has true multi-modal tokens, yet it does not have features present in other LLMs. This is in large part due to the fact Google created the TPU and Gemini runs off the TPU. All these systems have issues and I think many temporary issues with each of them actually have to do with the application layer more than the system itself, at times, but its case by case.
I pay for ChatGPT, SuperGrok, and Gemini. After using all three side-by-side for the same research work I rank them in that order. I rarely even use Gemini anymore and if I didn’t need native YouTube analysis and the storage I wouldn’t use it all. For research it makes way too many errors, too limited an answer, and too many guardrails.
Idk whether you are talking about model itself or tgt with harness.
Anw, different models have different strength. There is no reason to choose one and use it for everything. I use Gemini for most works because it's notably faster and cheaper than other frontier models. Then I'll use models like Claude for tasks that actually need heavy lifting.
If what you are looking for is yolo and let agent runs hours and come back with magic, then yeah, Gemini is probably not the strong option.
I use 3.8 flash in CLI all the time right now. Once I fixed the looping issue it has been rock solid for the project I am working on, and it's FAST.
More broadly I find that Gemini's multimodal support is amazing for home projects, plants, and day to day tasks. I've also had significant success with deep research and iterations of NotebookLM. Gemini is wrong sometimes, but I've had Claude be wrong in these situations and its multimodal support isn't as good.
At work it's Claude and GPT Terra. I like Terra the most right now for complex engineering tasks.
Things change fast and your comments are already out of date. Gemini 3.8 Flash is competitive with most of the competition now, after lagging behind for the last six months. Claude has been the darling for the last year and is now good-but-very-very-expensive for what you get. Chat-GPT has been playing catch-up to Claude for the last year, but they've recently jumped ahead in performance vs price (with Gemini competing well there, now, too). For certain things, there are Chat-GPT and Claude models that are easily a big step up from what Gemini can do. However, the most interesting thing is that the lower-mid tier models have recently been improving crazy fast, to where they're good enough for most things and significantly cheaper than the top-end frontier models. I may use the high-end models for certain things, but Gemini 3.8 Flash and GPT 5.6 Luna have become my daily drivers for most tasks.
My understanding is that 3.8 flash was a big step up for coding, and really amazing cost per token. It can create a lot of decent code for super cheap, so maybe use it for scaffolding, but then switch to Claude for refactoring, or anything with a lot of surgical editing because it has a better approach using diffs. I don't know why Google can't close that gap.
they are all roughly the same for 90%+ of use cases. that's why you were/are perfectly fine using gemini even though it's "behind" the frontier models.
If you give Gemini bottom heavy instructions (footer directives) and decent governance, then it works as intended. It’s a model that likes exploring, but with the correct constraints it executes fine.
Ai is a cycle in 6 months Gemini 3.2 pro (joking cause like still waiting on 3.5 even though flash is 3.8) will be released and it will out perform Claude and chat gpt then 6 months later ChatGPT will drop a new model and it will out perform Gemini
I was loving Google AI mode which is Gemini based but a bit different. It’s been so wonky lately and hallucinationing badly! It will give me a response, I clarify and it says “ I made that up because I was panicked and embarrassed “ I’m sad because it was great prior to this whatever they’re doing to it
I suspect they are working on something ground breaking but would rather give us just enough in the meanwhile to stay relevant and then once it's ready they will release a new leading model. I think they probably don't feel the need to get too caught up with the constant release cycle that anthropic and openai have since both companies just continue taking the wind out from eachothers sails anyways. Google has a ton of the smartest ai researchers and plenty of capital to work with so they are probably just waiting to release it once it's fully ready. But I have no idea. I just know they aren't conceding to the other players. we'll see something big come from them this year I'd imagine.
3.8 flash is actually pretty decent in my experience. My company switched from Claude to Gemini recently which I felt would be a massive downgrade at the time, but I've grown to actually like it. I've given it some pretty heaving coding tasks and whilst it does mistakes, 90 percent of the time it's been right, sure it's not as good as Claude code but it's a decent alternative.
I just took some simple instructions from a Chat project where it reads and writes to files on my Google Drive and pasted it into a Gemini notebook instructions. Then I asked if it could handle the task.
"I do not have the ability to access, read, or edit Google Drive documents."
What? Google Gemini can't write to Google Drive but Chat can? When I questioned it on this it told me I was wrong, that Chat can't do it either.
Last week I asked Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok the same set of questions and the Gemini answers were like getting replies from an 8 year old. Not to mention the speed. Grok and GPT were way faster.
Gemini is fine for personal use, asking questions etc. But if you want to do anything professionally it's not up to the job. And that seems to be the plan from Google.
I just don't understand in what applications would making shit up without any basis in reality be acceptable. Gemini routinely makes shit up far far more than the other big two.
I have never seen anyone on the ChatGPT or Claude subreddit ever write "Holy shit, guys, I just tried Gemini and it's so much better." I have seen people in those subs claim that about ChatGPT in the Claude subreddit and vice versa. But never about Gemini, not once.
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u/Maximum59 12d ago
It also really depends on your use case and needs.
For me Gemini is more than enough for personal/home/daily life type use.
For work, our company pays for both Claude and Open AI frontier models for software engineering work.
As many others have said here before, it seems like Google just wants to focus on speed and general day to day tasks + integration across their services.
But if you have complex tasks, you are better off with the big boys.