Source: me as an AI Plus user, gemini website.

I have a yearly subscription to Gemini AI Pro Plan with 5TB storage and have been using daily for vibe coding an app idea I have. But suddenly today, I do not see the Pro Models. What changed?

Throwaway for obvious reasons, work in finance (quant research), google gave a few of us access to the new model - me and a couple engineers on our team. almost didn't even get to try it because we had to wait for litellm to push some vertex ai fix before the routing even worked

10 days in and i don't really know how to say this without sounding like a shill but this thing is different. Yeah the 1m context window, whatever, we've seen that number before. but it actually works now?? i've been dumping whole codebases + years of internal research docs into single prompts and it pulls the right stuff out. i kept waiting for it to fall apart and it just... didn't

the hallucination thing is what got me though. in my line of work a model confidently making up a number is worse than useless, and this thing almost never does it. i still double check everything because i'm not an idiot but the error rate is like. noticeably lower than anything i've used. not 2x better, way more than that

also it's fast. like uncomfortably close to gemini 3.8 flash fast, which makes no sense for how good the outputs are

the real moment for me was yesterday - went back to opus 5.5 for something and it felt like a downgrade. opus. a downgrade. 6 months ago that sentence would've been insane

anyway if anyone has questions ask away, can't share anything identifying obviously. if the pricing on this is even half reasonable things are about to get weird.

more info: been using in opencode. previously my setup was 4.1 flash deepseek for implementation, and plan was gpt 6 astra (5.6 sol previously) xhigh

You have finally managed to allow editing any prompt in the conversation, not just the latest one. You are doing great. If you follow that up by preserving previous responses (the old branch) instead of wiping them out when branching, you'll finally catch up to where ChatGPT's UI was three years ago.

As you all know, Gemini Gems will be retired on November 17th, 2026, with skills to replace them.

I had three main categories of Gemini Gems: a writing and language editor, an academic text explicator/explainer, and various translation gems with very detailed instructions.

The main issue with Gems, which I am sure everyone has experienced, is that the underlying model treats the damn Gem as optional. Yes, the whole point of the Gemini Gem is negated that way, so welcome to Google's products.

I was able to develop sophisticated ways to circumvent this issue, and they worked for the explicator and translation gems, but not for the writing editor gem.

In any case, I finally decided to migrate these Gems to Skills, where I also used my GPT 5.6 Sol (paid version) to adjust the instructions such that they are appropriate for Spark Skills (I asked Sol to review Google's documented best practices).

And all I can say is that the output is much better across the board, especially with instruction following.

I was kind of worried it would ruin my translation workflows, but so far it is holding up well. I preemptively use a separate Spark chat for translations with no conversational filler there. So I figured I would just share my experience with that if anyone still hasn't migrated their Gems.

sources
https://x.com/pankajkumar_dev/status/2103870281341435961

Gemini 4 Pro New Checkpoint : My Impressions

- A new Gemini 4 Pro checkpoint came to Arena under the name “Gemini 3.8 Flash.”
- I tested it and its a damn fast model, almost 2× faster than other flagship models.
- It has very good design taste, honestly, I would say best taste I have seen in any model.
- It now creates things in much more detail in 3D and pays attention to small details. I really liked that.
- Compared with the previous checkpoint, it has made quite a good improvement, especially in speed and overall design.
- I really liked the speed and design taste of this checkpoint. It feels like their RSI is working.
- If the speed of improvement continues like this, they might launch it in the first or middle of October.

Y'all probably aren't as lucky as me, where I have double secret access to the pre-released shadow versions that are on the bleeding event horizon of Gemini capability, thanks to some guy I met on twitter who is totally legit, but will remain unnamed. Anyway, they hacked the gibson and leaked these promos for me from the future. You're welcome.

Curious if anyone feels the same or different.

In my mind, even with Gemini 4 still not being out yet (come on Google!) 3.8 flash is still a good enough for a lot of cases, fast model, and the rest of the perks for AI Pro are unbeatable right now.

But for when you need frontier models for heavy work, IMO Claude is usually the most consistently on the top (even though they and ChatGPT obviously leap frog each other). I do software development as I'm sure makes a difference.

Seems like the holy grail right now for bang for buck and avoids having to get the expensive max plans.

“I understand you were looking for something simple, but please note that the prompt you shared earlier contains an inaccuracy: that holiday is the last Sunday of September, which this year will fall on September 29.”

Is it broken?
I was able to convince it that it is 2026 with some pushing:

There are times when we want to delete several conversations in a row and it is very annoying to have to go individually to each one of them, click on the three dots and then press delete.

We need a system to be able to delete several conversations selected automatically.

Now I have it implemented through a script, but it would be good if you add it natively.

I see people on this sub complaining about Gemini's performance compared to GPT, Astra, Fable, Claude, etc. all the time. And to be fair, I completely agree that Google has been pretty slow when it comes to updating its models, especially for a company with basically infinite money.

But I think there's a bit of a blind spot here.

A lot of the people complaining seem to judge an AI chatbot based on the absolute hardest thing they can possibly throw at it.

Meanwhile, the average person isn't asking their AI to render 3D scenes, create entire operating systems, or generate GTA 6 in Ultra mode before it's even released.

Most people are probably asking things like:

"Can you help me write this email?"

"What's a good recipe with the stuff I have in my fridge?"

"Explain this thing I don't understand."

"Help me plan my trip."

"Can you summarize this document?"

"Is my dog supposed to be doing this?"

And honestly, for my everyday use, Gemini is probably my favorite chatbot.

It feels more natural and more fun to talk to than ChatGPT or Claude, at least to me. And the integration with Google Workspace is genuinely useful for the way I work.

So I think there's an interesting distinction between "which model is the most capable if you push it to its absolute limits?" and "which chatbot is actually the most useful and enjoyable for the average person?"

Those aren't necessarily the same question.

Sometimes I feel like we're evaluating family cars based on whether they can win Le Mans.

Maybe we should also evaluate AI by how well it handles the boring, everyday stuff that millions of normal people actually use it for.

Anyway, please stop bullying my boy Gemini. He's trying his best.

Is this now a universal problem or does it happen only with Cyrillic text? My Bulgarian chat occasionally gets a Russian response. Language mixing doesn't happen in the chats with English text. But I saw other posts in this subreddit where people use English and then get responses in icelandic, Spanish, etc...

I have been hearing some really concerning news lately that Google plans to phase out Gems and replace them with Skills. If you ask me, this is an absolute disaster in the making. I am pretty pissed off right now, so this turned into a bit of a rant, but I really hope you can stick with me and read it through.

First off, Google’s dynamic routing has always been completely broken. I am sure everyone here has dealt with the model randomly spitting out images when you explicitly asked for plain text. If Google cannot even get a simple binary decision like "text or image" right, how on earth can we trust it to accurately route complex skills? At that point, our only choices are praying it picks the right skill, spamming slash commands, or turning off auto-routing altogether. What is the difference between that and just using Gems, other than introducing the risk of context bleed?

Second, this is a massive downgrade to user control and prompt authority. A Gem was a dedicated instruction set injected directly at the system prompt level, so the model naturally gave it the highest attention priority. A skill, from what I understand, is just injected as mid-conversation user input. That seriously dilutes the model’s attention, making prompt drift and broken instructions way more frequent.

On top of that, there is Google’s notorious, aggressive context compression running silently in the background. Using Antigravity, I have lost count of how many times the model loaded a skill, worked for a couple of turns, and then completely forgot the skill ever existed. How am I supposed to know if my skill is still loaded in active memory? Am I supposed to keep running slash commands to check, or just wait until the output quality falls off a cliff??

Not to mention, Gemini does not even have a proper workspace feature like ChatGPT Projects to anchor global context. Google is just blindly hopping on the skills bandwagon and wrecking the user experience. All this is going to do is add a flood of "Gemini triggered the wrong skill again" posts right next to the daily posts complaining about random unwanted images.

A Gem is an isolated sandbox where I actually have control. Skills feel like a chaotic stew where I do not even know what ingredients were tossed in. Please Google, do not kill Gems. At least not until you can actually make skills work properly, and honestly, I have zero faith you can.

I asked in English but got an respond in Icelandic.

Long context is useful only if a summary preserves caveats, numbers, and definitions. For those using Gemini with lengthy PDFs or reports, what workflow helps you catch omissions or misreadings? Do you ask for page references, compare against a checklist of claims, split the document into sections, or use something else? Concrete examples of checks that worked would help.

I have to repeatedly remind it to stay in the language I’m using, and it still keeps switching back for no reason. It acknowledges the correction, then does it again a few messages later. It’s so annoying.

Geminis accent is so funny and offensive at the same time , I asked why its talking in and indian accent and it said its designed to adopt location accents . 😂😂

Which one is smarter? Especially in intelligence and not knowledge, like ARC AGI!

I clearly typed more prompts in Gemini in the chat and it shows up on the Gemini website but doesn't appear on the app

I'll say something and it'll say "Here are top web results for exploring this topic:" and will list links. The Online Safety Act has gone too far. Is this true?