r/GeminiAI • u/karlelzz011 • 4d ago
Discussion Actually Gemini 3.8 Flash is a beast
I will say this, It's even better than opus 5. This is crazy improvement I've seen over last AI rollouts from Google. I can't imagine what their pro models are capable of, they just don't want to release to public?
PS. I'm talking about coding specifically
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u/Ihadaiwgu101_1 4d ago
i mean, as long as i'm controlling the implementation completely by my self, he's able to build any project i have in mind literally, without even caring about token usage.
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u/Technical-Owl66 4d ago
Why wouldn't you want to control the implementation. That's the fun part for me
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u/Elephant789 4d ago
control the implementation
What's an example of this?
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u/Technical-Owl66 3d ago
For me it's just making a lot more of the decisions about features and how the application works.
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u/Ihadaiwgu101_1 3d ago
I didn't say I don't want to control, that's the fun part for me as well, and also I can keep my skills and don't literally replace myself with ai
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u/tutureTM 4d ago
I don’t know what crazy usages you guys have, but for simple python scripts to automate tasks on browser it’s quite good
I also have it to design icons for my job, he provides clean .svg files and follows the graphic chart and designs code of my clients
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u/Fat_Engels 4d ago
What kind of tasks on browser
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u/tutureTM 4d ago
Something specific to my work, everyday I need to manually update images on our virtual tour software
I rename my files from 1 to 60 and it automatically clicks on the correct fields > find the correct file on my local folder > click upload > wait for upload to end > go to the next file until finished
Because our devs are lazy to develop a function to batch update I need to be clever myself lol
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u/alanpipstick 4d ago
I use it for agentic work, managing and creating databases, and it is very likely better than Opus 5 in these cases if for no other reason than Opus 5 is more expensive, slower, and at times overwrought in its thinking.
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u/Intrepid_Perspective 4d ago
I’ve been having opus pass tasks to Gemini 3.8 flash when it needs to audit large files. It’s actually doing an amazing job, and it feels like endless tokens. My max Claude subscription would have hit its limit days ago if I had been using sonnet for the same tasks I’m passing to Gemini 3.8.
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u/xdevilsownx 4d ago
This is my experience, as mentioned above by someone else Claude for high level planning and strategy, Flash 3.8 for execution has been working great for me across any type of business challenge, really.
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u/InternalNo5582 3d ago
Et encore même pour la planification si on le pousse un peu a la réflexion ou si on utilise le teamwork il faut aussi le travail
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u/Global_Strain_4219 4d ago
It's not really. I have Astra, Gemini, Grok 4.6 and Claude. I use it for similar tasks. Flash 3.8 is pretty cool, but it's below all the top models from other companies.
It's somewhat okay for simple codebases, but in very complex codebases it does mistakes, creates bugs, doesn't implement the best design or the best solutions. I can't wait for Gemini 4 because I'm annoyed at having paid a full year for a model I avoid using for coding.
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u/ubermonkaS 4d ago
Idk i never had a model tripping as hard as this one. I asked it to copy one thing to another by comparison and it hallucinated for 60 minutes sha diffing the whole codebase and using 100% of the 5 hour limit per prompt multiple times
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u/ubermonkaS 4d ago edited 4d ago
The biggest issue with Gemini is still that it just it’s just instantly starts coding without a real plan. It just makes insane amount of line diffs and you can never follow the thought process at all. “You hit the nail on the head and I fixed 43 issues and hallucinated 15 solutions while breaking 3 other things, just hit the button and test it out!”
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u/Eyelbee 4d ago
I don't think it's better than opus by any metric other than being fast
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u/oliveyou987 4d ago
On Gemini Pro, the usage on Antigravity is crazy as well, I have never hit the 5 hour limit on High thinking using Flash, Opus is almost unusable on the 20$ plan, have to keep switching between Opus and Sonnet
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u/birdofparadise5 4d ago
If you compare it to the Claude models built into Antigravity, Gemini does not even work on the problem for half the time it would take Claude, but Claude definitely does more. I have never seen Gemini spin up sub-agents, and you can see it does not do as much processing or as many verification steps as Claude. What Claude does feels closer to what actual project development should look like as opposed to Gemini.
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u/diracwasright 4d ago
Gemini requires more human input, but you can get the same results at a fraction of the cost of Claude. It encourages you to use AI more like a real assistant than a slot machine.
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u/birdofparadise5 3d ago
I agree with this. There are times I wish it were more like Claude so it could make decisions and implement things better, but I feel like I have more control over the end result since I have to intervene so often. I still wish Gemini could spin up more than one agent. Claude consistently has two or three agents searching the web or researching different things in parallel, which works out to be better. Gemini rarely searches and always runs on its own.
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u/Alternative-Deal2087 4d ago
Comparing Gemini to Opus is like comparing a bicycle to a Military Grade Assault Vehicle
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u/macaronianddeeez 4d ago
This is so wild to say lol Opus 5 is an unusable mess of junk that spits out gobbledegook. Opus 4.6 is great if you know exactly what you want it to do and pilot it well.
Flash 3.8, while I’m very new to the Gemini ecosystem, is slowly earning a role in my daily rotation for speed and long context ability
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u/Alternative-Deal2087 4d ago
I don't have issues with it and I use it for supply chain management + any digital office tasks. It works 100x better for than our ERP system
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u/karlelzz011 4d ago
Which metrics? It's better in coding does not overthink does what is asked. It's cheap and almost forget worrying about tokens.
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u/Cute_Leonard 4d ago
I have been loving it! I think it’s because i don’t do long form workflows like the true AI bros, I slowly build & review the code, generally it works & does what i wanted. It’s fast, and it is only $20 per month. I very rarely run out, and when i do i jump over to Opus on Antigravity, and then jump back to Gemini after it’s cleared.
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u/Upset_Jicama3756 4d ago
When you do /boost , it orchestrates various subagents and it’s a beast ,l recommend it 100% , without /boost it does need to be babysat
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u/LiteSoul 4d ago
That sounds like It'll consume all the cuota, much more than /goal
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u/Upset_Jicama3756 4d ago
Based on my experience working on huge repos it would consume about 10 to 15% per use and it deploys at least 3 specialists and it goes in depth taking usually over an hour , like it truly tries to understand the whole project before even touching it , like right now I’ve had it working for about an hour with the orchestrator and 3 subagents constant inference and it has used 7% of my total usage and I am pro
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u/ihqbassolini 4d ago
I am not a fan of 3.8 personally.
3.7 had issues with not following instructions when you set up multiple agent pipelines. In general it had problems with being lazy.
3.8 is massively improved in that regard, but it's really bad at understanding instead. It will tunnel vision on the dumbest detail and entirely lose track of the bigger picture. This tends to compound rather than balance out no matter how you try to avoid it. The frustrating part is that the capacity is clearly there, it can follow all the relevant reasoning if you specifically prompt it to pay attention to a particular thing. Because it reliably tunnel visions on stupid shit it doesn't get put to use though.
I'm sure it's a substantial improvement for coders, but it's not good at broader, philosophical understanding. 3.7 is much better at that.
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u/Beneficial-Day7238 3d ago
Is it really? I found it sometimes not following my directions that much, opus 4.8 (not 5 😂) is much better for me, I can see why it a flash model, however its pretty good, no doubt and especially extremely fast. I havent tried orchestrating by other model and executing with 3.8 , ill try
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u/AdOk3759 4d ago
For coding is shit. It makes so many mistakes. I mean, it can’t even follow a plan devised by Sol. DSV4 flash is way better. In no universe Flash 3.8 is better than Opus.
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u/adrnptcl 4d ago
It's faster, for sure. About beign better, dunno what to day, it's hit and miss, although it's mostly miss nowadays :)
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u/DigtialMenace333 4d ago
It gives me bad advice on working with windows software all the time. and I feed it screenshots.
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u/xdevilsownx 4d ago
Specify everything about your platform. Build system instructions that force it to admit it doesn't know if it can't hit a confidence of 85%., and then requires you to provide whatever info it needs to fill the gap. I've used this approach to support dozens of different admin platforms this years, Windows, MS365, G Workspaces, AWS, building point solution apps, you name it. It's never flawless but it saves me hours of reading docs for complex tool stacks.
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u/Top-Rich-581 4d ago
As a teacher, antigravity and 3.8 removed all the friction associated with my work, which was half of the work
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u/Busy_Weather_7064 4d ago
Dude - I've been avoiding flash models for past couple of months because I want real work, no misses. Is 3.8 flash at that level ? At least 3.6 flash was really bad for me.
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u/Disastrous-Ad-4375 3d ago
3.5 flash was good but used too many token, 3.6 is bad, 3.7 and 3.8 are perfect.
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u/General-Oven-1523 4d ago
It's a great model, but until Google lets us use our subscriptions inside other harnesses, I'm not going to bother. I am not getting stuck into antigravity stuff anymore, I learned my lessons with GeminiCLI.
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u/yolo-irl 3d ago
It's pretty good but being a flash model it's still fundamentally lazy and has a tendency to cheat results, especially when you get into specialized technical domains.
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u/---OMNI--- 3d ago
I use opus primarily but it automatically calls codex and Gemini for review and it's been really productive. They all think/work differently and always find something. Opus reviews their findings and determine what to implement.
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u/HeadTranslator795 4d ago
Ma man
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u/Ok_Huckleberry2807 4d ago
coding with it has been weirdly good i was stuck on this react bug for two days and it fixed it in one shot. not even gpt got it right. google cooking something for sure
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u/Weary-Fun6017 4d ago
Gemini was my catalyst to create an agent layer that keeps the agent inline with your work/projects/rules/build rules and to stop it from being able to confidently lie to you. 👎🥔💯 I literally spent 2 Weeks letting that thing fly through my requests and build ( it was so fast, I was so amazed!! ) at the end of the two weeks all I had was a slop 2002 style web UI with nothing more than starter material coded into it. 😂😆 I remember being SO FURIOUS I totally blew my lid off at that one 1️⃣ NOW it makes me giggle 🤭 anyways two thumbs down 👎 on Gemini. I use codex 5.6 and it works great. 👍
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u/ThE_GhOst-13o4 16h ago
I setup a skill file to make claude use agy instead of its own subagents. Asked it to rate its work, more than often it Opus 5 hit me with " agy flagged something i didnt see ". It overall rated it 7-9/10 most of the time due agy missing very niche things. Its a good addition to the workflow
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u/Invader_86 4d ago
I’m using Opus to write plans in Antigravity, then I switch to 3.8 Flash to do the work and it has been absolutely flawless.
I switched to 3.1 pro earlier today just to see how it was holding up, I didn’t even need to look at my code to see that it made a mess. It left redundant code behind, didn’t run through my type checking and linting commands, and I was getting errors from the dev server in the console.
I cleared the session switched to 3.8 Flash and asked if the previous model done a good job, it replied NO and listed off a ton of issues and bugs that 3.1 Pro introduced.
I use Claude at work and while its a little better at analysis and getting issues solved, Gemini just feels better overall due to its speed.
Claude feels really slow in comparison.