3 ms·

I really don’t understand the hype around Gemini. Opus/Sonnet/GPT are much better for agentic workflows. Seems people get hyped for the first few days. It also

by lvl155 11mo ago

I really don’t understand the hype around Gemini. Opus/Sonnet/GPT are much better for agentic workflows. Seems people get hyped for the first few days. It also has a lot to do with Claude code and Codex.

egeozcan 11mo ago
I'm completely the opposite. I find Gemini (even 2.5 Pro) much, much better than anything else. But I hate agentic flows, I upload the full context to it in aistudio and then it shines - anything agentic cannot even come close.
- jiggawatts 11mo ago
  I recently wrote a small CLI tool for scanning through legacy codebases. For each file, it does a light parse step to find every external identifier (function call, etc...), reads those into the context, and then asks questions about the main file in question. It's amazing for trawling through hundreds of thousands of lines of code looking for a complex pattern, a bug, bad style, or whatever that regex could never hope to find. For example, I recently went through tens of megabytes(!) of stored procedures looking for transaction patterns that would be incompatible with read committed snapshot isolation. I got an astonishing report out of Gemini Pro 3, it was absolutely spot on. Most other models barfed on this request, they got confused or started complaining about future maintainability issues, stylistic problems or whatever, no matter how carefully I prompted them to focus on the task at hand. (Gemini Pro 2.5 did okay too, but it missed a few issues and had a lot of false positives.) Fixing RCSI incompatibilities in a large codebase used to be a Herculean task, effectively a no-go for most of my customers, now... eminently possible in a month or less, at the cost of maybe $1K in tokens.
  - mrtesthah 11mo ago
    If this is a common task for you, I'd suggest instead using an LLM to translate your search query into CodeQL[1], which is designed to scan for semantic patterns in a codebase. 1. https://codeql.github.com/ https://codeql.github.com/
  - jammaloo 11mo ago
    Is there any chance you'd be willing to share that tool? :)
    - jiggawatts 11mo ago
      It's a mess vibe coding combined with my crude experiments with the new Microsoft Agent Framework. Not something that's worth sharing! Also, I found that I had to partially rewrite it for each "job", because requirements vary so wildly. For example, one customer had 200K lines of VBA code in an Access database, which is a non-trivial exercise to extract, parse, and cross-reference. Invoking AI turned out to be by far the simplest part of the whole process! It wasn't even worth the hassle of using the MS Agent Framework, I would have been better off with plain HTTPS REST API calls.
  - baq 11mo ago
    +1 - Gemini is consistently great at SQL in my experience. I find GPT 5 is about as good as gemini 2.5 pro (please treat is as praise). Haven't had a chance to put Gemini 3 to a proper sql challenge yet.
- skerit 11mo ago
  I think you're both correct. Gemini is _still_ not that good at agentic tool usage. Gemini 3 has gotten A LOT better, but it still can do some insane stupid stuff like 2.5
jdgoesmarching 11mo ago
Personally my hype is for the price, especially for Flash. Before Sonnet 4.5 was competitive with Gemini 2.5 Pro, the latter was a much better value than Opus 4.1.
thousand_nights 11mo ago
with gemini you have to spend 30 minutes deleting hundreds of useless comments littered in the code that just describe what the code itself does
- iamdelirium 11mo ago
  I haven't had a comment generated for 3.0 pro at all unless specified.
- energy123 11mo ago
  The comments would improve code quality because it's a way for the LLM to use a scratchpad to perform locally specific reasoning before writing the proceeding code block, which would be more difficult for the LLM to just one shot. You could write a postprocessing script to strip the comments so you don't have to do it manually.
int_19h 11mo ago
Gemini is a lot more bang for the buck. It's not just cheaper per token, but with the subscription, you also get e.g. a lot more Deep Research calls (IIRC it's something like 20 per day) compared to Anthropic offerings. Also, Gemini has that huge context window, which depending on the task can be a big boon.
- ttoinou 11mo ago
  Google deep research writes way too much useless fluff though, like introduction to the industry etc.

by lvl155 11mo ago

egeozcan 11mo ago

I'm completely the opposite. I find Gemini (even 2.5 Pro) much, much better than anything else. But I hate agentic flows, I upload the full context to it in aistudio and then it shines - anything agentic cannot even come close.

jiggawatts 11mo ago
I recently wrote a small CLI tool for scanning through legacy codebases. For each file, it does a light parse step to find every external identifier (function call, etc...), reads those into the context, and then asks questions about the main file in question. It's amazing for trawling through hundreds of thousands of lines of code looking for a complex pattern, a bug, bad style, or whatever that regex could never hope to find. For example, I recently went through tens of megabytes(!) of stored procedures looking for transaction patterns that would be incompatible with read committed snapshot isolation. I got an astonishing report out of Gemini Pro 3, it was absolutely spot on. Most other models barfed on this request, they got confused or started complaining about future maintainability issues, stylistic problems or whatever, no matter how carefully I prompted them to focus on the task at hand. (Gemini Pro 2.5 did okay too, but it missed a few issues and had a lot of false positives.) Fixing RCSI incompatibilities in a large codebase used to be a Herculean task, effectively a no-go for most of my customers, now... eminently possible in a month or less, at the cost of maybe $1K in tokens.
- mrtesthah 11mo ago
  If this is a common task for you, I'd suggest instead using an LLM to translate your search query into CodeQL[1], which is designed to scan for semantic patterns in a codebase. 1. https://codeql.github.com/ https://codeql.github.com/
- jammaloo 11mo ago
  Is there any chance you'd be willing to share that tool? :)
  - jiggawatts 11mo ago
    It's a mess vibe coding combined with my crude experiments with the new Microsoft Agent Framework. Not something that's worth sharing! Also, I found that I had to partially rewrite it for each "job", because requirements vary so wildly. For example, one customer had 200K lines of VBA code in an Access database, which is a non-trivial exercise to extract, parse, and cross-reference. Invoking AI turned out to be by far the simplest part of the whole process! It wasn't even worth the hassle of using the MS Agent Framework, I would have been better off with plain HTTPS REST API calls.
- baq 11mo ago
  +1 - Gemini is consistently great at SQL in my experience. I find GPT 5 is about as good as gemini 2.5 pro (please treat is as praise). Haven't had a chance to put Gemini 3 to a proper sql challenge yet.
skerit 11mo ago
I think you're both correct. Gemini is _still_ not that good at agentic tool usage. Gemini 3 has gotten A LOT better, but it still can do some insane stupid stuff like 2.5

jdgoesmarching 11mo ago

Personally my hype is for the price, especially for Flash. Before Sonnet 4.5 was competitive with Gemini 2.5 Pro, the latter was a much better value than Opus 4.1.

thousand_nights 11mo ago

with gemini you have to spend 30 minutes deleting hundreds of useless comments littered in the code that just describe what the code itself does

iamdelirium 11mo ago
I haven't had a comment generated for 3.0 pro at all unless specified.
energy123 11mo ago
The comments would improve code quality because it's a way for the LLM to use a scratchpad to perform locally specific reasoning before writing the proceeding code block, which would be more difficult for the LLM to just one shot. You could write a postprocessing script to strip the comments so you don't have to do it manually.

int_19h 11mo ago

Gemini is a lot more bang for the buck. It's not just cheaper per token, but with the subscription, you also get e.g. a lot more Deep Research calls (IIRC it's something like 20 per day) compared to Anthropic offerings. Also, Gemini has that huge context window, which depending on the task can be a big boon.

ttoinou 11mo ago
Google deep research writes way too much useless fluff though, like introduction to the industry etc.