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Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash
- beastman82 4mo agoNo UI like their competitors Claude CoWork or Codex. This is vaporware
- satvikpendem 4mo agoThere's still no MCP support in the Gemini app, which is very useful to get various pieces of info as a user just via chatting. For example I recently wanted to get an Airbnb and wanted to filter by specific criteria including house image analysis and Gemini couldn't do it so I had to do it in Codex.
- tonyrice 4mo agoThis is why I don't always use the official Gemini Web app. Lately I've found that it's more useful to utilize a CLI. I'm looking forward to the day they add MCP in the web.
- pregseahorses 4mo agoGemini CLi now requires antigravity subscription..
- tim-projects 4mo agoI tried antigravity. It absolutey sucks in comparison. Given up on Google
- singingtoday 4mo agoCLI doesn't work with my subscription..
- anticorporate 4mo agoYeah, it seems like this is the biggest missing feature from the Gemini ecosystem. If I can't connect MCP, there's really no selling point for me to use Gemini from my watch, car, smart speaker, etc. If I'm already bound to using my own front end, then I'm only evaluating Gemini as a model/API, at which point it has many competitors that may be cheaper or better fit for the task.
- thejaycampbell 4mo agoagreed... this is where they lost me too
- mitchell_h 4mo agoI'm fairly convinced Claude's strongest point is the app. AI users aren't anywhere near as mature or smart as youtube/hn would have folks believe. The claude app is amazing for bridging that gap.
- solarkraft 4mo agoThey only fixed stopping the model mid-generation losing the entire session pretty recently. The Gemini apps suck.
- lil-lugger 4mo agoI think native apps are critical infrastructure in AI development particularly around agents. The truth is there’s no good native interaction layer for custom agents. If you want to wire up and self host an agent that has access to anything ever your only option is a janky port to telegram or Slack. I’ve been building vessels.app because I think it’s the missing piece to agent interaction. I need testers if anyone is interested!
- ok123456 4mo agoUse gemini-cli for mcp support.
- kristjansson 4mo agodeprecated last month
- airstrike 4mo agoComputer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive. I guess if you're trying to get people to tokenmaxx it may look like a valid strategy, but ain't no way this will be delightful to users. I think it's a symptom of just not understanding how LLMs should interface with the OS because we're still in their early days. Eventually there'll be an iPhone moment for the ergonomics of LLM usage outside of coding
- nzach 4mo ago> Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive. And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful. Recently I gave a Nix OS vm to my hermes agent and it has been a good experience. I don't really care if destroy the machine I can just rollback to an earlier version, and for any meaningful data he creates for me I make sure he creates a repo, commit and pushes to my private Gitea instance.
- airstrike 4mo ago> And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful. It is, but there's no need for it to be viewing your screen, browsing websites and watching ads. That stuff is for humans, not for LLMs.
- nzach 4mo agoSure, I don't want an agent watching MY screen. That's why I gave him his own environment, and pretty quickly he discovered that you can open chrome and make it render to a framebuffer, this way he is able to 'view' the website. And apparently with this he is able to bypass a lot of 'anti-bot' measures.
- dbbk 4mo ago> And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful. I honestly cannot think of a single use case
- mlmonkey 4mo agoIt's funny how in their own graph, https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/images/gemini-3-5__benchmark-OSWorld-Ve.width-1000.format-webp.webp https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima... Gemini 3.5 Flash is beat hands down by both Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, and yet the graph is drawn as if Gemini wins ... :-D
- sheept 4mo agoIt highlights the Gemini models blue since that's what the article is about. The bar heights seem consistent with the values.
- mroche 4mo agoThe graph has Gemini 3.5 Flash matching Sonnet 4.6, losing to Opus 4.8, and slightly behind GPT-5.5 by 0.3 points... That's not that much of a hands-down loss for Gemini for this specific workload benchmark. The methodology used: https://deepmind.google/models/evals-methodology/gemini-3-5-flash https://deepmind.google/models/evals-methodology/gemini-3-5-... Methodology: All Gemini scores are pass @1 except where otherwise noted. "Single attempt" settings allow no majority voting or parallel test-time compute. All of the results are all run with the Gemini API for the model-id gemini-3.5-flash with default sampling settings unless indicated otherwise below. To reduce variance, we average over multiple trials for smaller benchmarks. All the results for non-Gemini models are sourced from providers' self reported numbers unless otherwise mentioned below. For Claude Opus 4.7 , Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.5 we default to reporting maximum thinking/reasoning settings available, but when reported results are not available we use best available reasoning results.
- villgax 4mo agoWill it skip Ads lol
- humblyCrazy 4mo agoI looked at their demo and it does not
- knollimar 4mo agoWhere is 3.5 pro?
- squidbeak 4mo agoGoogle said June, and all its model updates seem to be on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays. So unless the release is slipping, either tomorrow or Tuesday.
- WarmWash 4mo agoRumor is now July, although preliminary A/B tests people are getting show promise with whatever they have right now.
- zuzululu 4mo agoperformance is quite impressive given that its 3x cheaper than 5.5
- SoMomentary 4mo agoThe speed was impressive when I tested it but unfortunately the accuracy left a lot to be desired. Be interesting to do the math on some of my normal workflows to see where the break even is between them, assuming the tasks you have can tolerate a couple of failures.
- zuzululu 4mo agowe are talking about computer use here gemini 3.5 flash isn't meant to compete head to head with frontier models on tough problems
- fridder 4mo agoI wonder if it will be better at building TUI's. It has been absolutely abysmal at interacting with them and building them
- chatmasta 4mo agoClaude can build UI but it sucks at testing it and iterating on it. Fable showed some improvements in this regard but alas.
- Chu4eeno 4mo agoIt seems to do it just fine when in desktop applications using Qt, fwiw., it leverages all the standard Qt GUI testing stuff (and if you have the money you can just integrate Squish which has LLM support now).
- IncreasePosts 4mo agoThat's my experience too. I've had increased luck encouraging the LLM to structure the code in "functional core, imperative shell" style, and telling it stupid things like "make sure you can test the code you're writing".
- revolvingthrow 4mo agoPeople using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned? I had the dubious pleasure of testing gemini of late and I kept running into refusals. How do I transfer a sim number from one provider to another? No. What should I consider when making backups on ntfs less prone to data loss and more bitrot resistant? No. Evaluate this piece of code? No. I’m not sure if it’s cold feet from the mythos situation or what, but it reminds me of the dark days where you couldn’t use ai for much of anything. But then I go to chatgpt 5.5 and it does mostly everything I want outside of the usual cybersecurity boogeyman that you run into now and then.
- kordlessagain 4mo agoI love antigravity. I’ve had zero issues with it.
- nout 4mo agoI just asked gemini the question with sim number and it gives me full step by step guide.
- k8sToGo 4mo agoThe context window size is also very small if you use Gemini in the app. It starts forget quite fast. In my opinion Gemini on app is useless additionally to the guardrails.
- Chu4eeno 4mo agoI've always found all versions of gemini to be (for a lack of a better word) lazy. I guess it's economic wrt. token use, but it often either refused for absurd safety reasons, or other weird stuff like responding that an LLM like itself wasn't a suitable tool for the job, and very quickly gives up. Claude is on the other end of the spectrum, which makes it more noticeable when switching between them.
- WarmWash 4mo agoAre you outside the US?
- 4mo ago
- smallstepforman 4mo agoToday I asked Gemini to extract a table from an PDF appendix and create C++ data table with its contents. After 15 or so iterations with corrections and new mistakes, it eventually gave up. I was floored when it said “I’m sorry, I cannot do this simple task, I’ve exceeded my error threshold and cannot do this task for you. My LLM prediction engine invents data instead of doing a simple data copy/reformat”. Stunned to see that Gemini threw its digital arms in the air and gave up.
- jjice 4mo agoI haven't heard any accounts of it doing that since Gemini 2.5, but it was pretty easy to get it to do it with a programming task back then after a few failed attempts. Very interesting to hear it'll still do it.
- base698 4mo agoThat's better than the loop grok got stuck in trying to use git and push the work it did leading to a $15 api credit deduction.
- whh 4mo agoGetting AI/ML to acknowledge "I don't know" is such a challenge.
- cws_ai_buddy 4mo ago[flagged]
- paganartifact 4mo ago[flagged]
- arjunchint 4mo agoPretty doubtful about computer use/screenshotting based approaches. With Retriever AI, we construct custom accessibility trees to represent web pages and just switched over to using DeepSeek v4 Flash and its nearing 100x cost decrease. We also had great success just reverse engineering the underlying APIs of websites and then writing code to hit them. This approach of using screenshots to take actions on a webpage to trigger the underlying network calls the website is making seems too naive.
- infecto 4mo agoReverse engineering APIs is just a recipe to get blocked sooner. Good luck!
- arjunchint 4mo agoits been working fine on LinkedIn/IG, the trick is to make the requests from the main world of the website itself.
- infecto 4mo agoLike I said. Good luck with it. You’re most likely violating ToS and it’s always a game of cat and mouse.
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo agoWhat happens when you need to control something that isn't a web page?
- arjunchint 4mo agoHonestly with Fable I think anyone is going to be able to reverse engineer a desktop app and get the coding agent to automate it. The Codex computer use functionality actually uses OS level accessibility trees, so thats also possible without screenshots.
- 4mo ago
- YuechenLi 4mo agoSo... has Google provided a Codex/Claude Code equivalent to Gemini yet? I would like to use Gemini for coding tasks, but that's kind of difficult to do as I don't even know how to get Gemini to even "clone this repo and read the code in it for static analysis", much less open PRs in repos. ChatGPT/Codex can do it, Claude can do it, why can't Gemini? And no, I don't mean going through Antigravity, and personally I'm wary about LLMs having unsupervised access on my computer without explicit policy, so I really think Google is putting the cart before the horse here.
- jatora 4mo agono. gemini's instruction following is currently abysmal. Gemini CLI could be a great scaffold for all we know, but we cant know because the models it uses are so horribly bad at being driven in that way. no clue why google has dropped the ball this hard on IF.
- polski-g 4mo agoThey have a 3.1-pro-customtools model which they allege its better at using custom tools/MCPs/etc. It is not better.
- nl 4mo agoI think 3.5 Flash is supposed to improve the long-range instruction following. I haven't tried it at that because for the short range tasks I gave it I found it around Sonnet level, but slower (because it takes more tries!) which makes it more expensive. The old Flash models were great because they were fast. 3.5 Flash shows Google can work around the old "Good, Fast or Cheap: Pick any two" thing by picking none of them.
- antonvs 4mo ago> Gemini CLI could be a great scaffold Gemini CLI has been terminated, replaced by Antigravity CLI. Gemini CLI was supposed to have actually stopped working on June 18. Antigravity works fine for software development tasks though, even pretty complex ones. I used it to optimize an ML training process recently, it did a good job. Antigravity is supposed to be usable for more general tasks as well, but I haven’t tried it for anything else.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoI have basically unlimited access to every SOTA model and I opt for gemini flash 3.5 9/10 times I use an LLM. Llms are mostly useless but when I do use them its with gemini. If they're going to waste my time 95% of the time, I might as well get it over with fast.
- jorjon 4mo agoGemini Flash 3.5 (through agy) ran `git reset --hard` when I asked it to commit my changes, apparently it thought it was better to have a clean repo before `git add`. Of course I'm not trusting my computer to it. When will we have 3.5 Pro?
- Synthetic7346 4mo agoI want a lightweight sandbox with all my dev stuff that LLMs can't escape before I turn on computer use
- londons_explore 4mo agoVSCode dev containers work well.
- killerstorm 4mo agoFun fact: no dev containers in Cursor.
- NortySpock 4mo agoI have been looking at this sandbox tool, but haven't quite figured out how I want to deploy it, and anyways I haven't found an agent I like yet. https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai
- vulcan1964 4mo agoHot take: "computer use" is a dumb term for this concept; almost as if it was named by AI models... Case in point: "We are already seeing customers drive value with computer use." Yes... since the early 1980s, most companies and businesses have driven their value with computer use... smdh. I'm no AI dev, but dare I suggest a better possible name for this: "agentic computer software interaction" which can be shortened to agent_actor I swear, the direction we are headed with Big Tech leading the way will surely spell long term disaster
- shafiemoji 4mo agoMy work requires me to use `agy cli` (Google AI Ultra) for development, and it's been incredibly frustrating. I strongly dislike the Gemini models because they consistently fail to grasp basic instructions. I also can't use the Claude models included in the AI Ultra plan because the agy cli wrapper makes the experience completely unusable. I'd rather use the free plan on OpenCode than deal with this Gemini setup.
- perbu 4mo agoThey can’t follow instructions at all. They are a year behind Claude.
- jkwang 4mo ago[dead]
- s_kazmi 4mo agostopped using gemini a couple months ago when they ruined their rate limits. Not sure why people still use em. They were good with the generous rate limits in antigravity. but done after that.
- AbuAssar 4mo agoGoogle should drop the flash moniker, as it implies a small model