The GCP team wants their slice, the other team wants some otjer slice, and so on. Everyone wants some crap for their promotion package.
It's no wonder Meta has shit the bed even worse.
It's also why Google still releases actually decent, useful models despite the product being such a hilarious mess. A lot of the time Gemini models have actually been better as production LLMs as part of LLM-based production applications than OpenAI and Anthropic models when it comes to the complete cost:quality:latency:adherence picture. And they still are. We have products in prod that use Gemini because they're better than any other model at the specific task. But we wouldn't dare use it for anything coding related, or even just as productivity tool to rely on, because as a consumer product it's a joke.
I got a Google One plan for Gemini, but it came bundled with YT Premium lite, and that somehow made it impossible to renew YT Premium for 30 days. I suspect different teams stealing customers from each other.
Like when you try to give Google money they try to squeeze you as much as possible.
At the same time you can get 5 time more limits for free just by registering 10 free Google accounts.
Google subscriptions are one big mess.
Haven't done any serious coding work with the flash models though — but I'm seeing more and more HN comments from people who seem to have picked it up for that in the last couple of months.
When they swapped Google Assistant for Gemini as the default voice provider in Android Auto it was so annoying. My wife's non-work space account can get Gemini to do the normal things like play music and what not, but my Workspace one can't do much of anything at all. I can talk about nearly any random topic with it, but getting it to change the playlist, nah, can't help you there.
It's no surprise to me to see them fumble actually supporting a lot of the consumer features of Gemini into Workspace.
If it weren't for the $10 GCP credit, I'd straight away cancel it. I don't see enough value in Gemini to justify the $20 subscription.
Build a whole new management tree - the current people all do a terrible job.
I have multiple anthropic and OpenAI max plans. For Gemini I just use my Cursor $200 a month plan (which also gives me the ability to try grok, conductor, etc)
They're not even benchmarking against other models now, just against themselves - which tells you everything you need to know.
There is absolutely no loyalty when it comes to coding. Nothing could be more common than people threating to jump ship whenever another frontier or open source model comes.
Google is clearly able to keep growing their free and consumer and small business use cases. Unlike corporate coding, we actually have evidence that solo and small businesses can actually see productivity gains.
Anthropic and OpenAI need to stay dancing like mad, because it's their source revenue which underpins their investments.
Why does Google need to shove something at the top at the same desperate cadence? Other than "recursive self improvement leads to AGI" it seems perfectly fine if they push out something dramatically better every year and half.
You should be happy for them.
This is still very early days. Who is "on top" has flipped back and forth many times already. The next frontier model release (from whomever) will change things again.
Claude Code has largely won individual developer mindshare and has been on top ever since it came out. The benchmarks change, but almost nobody opts to use anything other than Claude IME when I ask them. Enterprise is more competitive since they care about costs and other things, but developers leaning towards Claude puts a thumb on the scales there.
The product doesn't have much lock in, so it is possible to dislodge Claude, and Anthropic could (and some may argue is likely to) just shoot themselves in the foot again and again and again, but Google has never been particularly good at enterprise sales, and they have never actually been at the frontier of intelligence.
I think Google's incentives have mostly about building models for their products, which makes them focus more on the cheap end, and while they need that, it feels like the Innovator's Dilemma is biting them here.
I own a lot of Google stock from working there in the past and have been quite happy about their trajectory up until the last 6 months, but I am getting pretty antsy about their AI story these days.
Claude Code's success is not due to the agent but because the model is considered the best for programming and is very heavily subsidized, compared to pay as you go API prices. Consumers and Enterprise are not really locked in and will go where it makes the most sense.
I think they have almost no loyalty by actual developers.
Basically you may choose to drink brand A water bottle, brand B water bottle or tap water. Oh and you might choose the glass water bottle if you use API/Fable.
When we work trial people, 100% of people ask for Claude rather than Codex or anything else.
When I talk to people at non-AI tech events everyone basically says they use Claude and have not tried an alternative.
Developers writ large are actually not that interested in trying multiple tools, they like customizing their chosen tool and tweaking it forever.
I think developers are as susceptible to brand marketing as everyone else. It's why almost everyone has a Macbook.
It's not true, it's just a play for margin.
Where does that 90% figure come from?
At this rate, if Google has a flagship model, you're better off plugging it into a competitor's tooling than hope Google figures out how to use it.
And the real numbers could be better for Anthropic. It's feasible Opus models are actually cheaper to serve than GLM 5.2 because Anthropic have optimized the hell out of inference.
I guess that’s the big question, will people pay a big margin long term to use their end products / models or will AI tokens be commoditized by many competing players. For coding if I had to pay API costs I’d switch in a heartbeat, enterprise maybe more reluctant?
anthropic probably has more customers that use more of their sub, but for open ai where a lot of their subs are consumers through chatgpt.com, they have a lot of free money to work with there
Likewise. This seems like a common feel. I have at least spent $4000 and likely a lot more on Gemini API because I really wanted them to win. I gave up.
Why do you care? Why would you spend your own money to a multi trillion dollar company so that they win their own "war" against another multi trillion dollar company?
Please don't get me wrong, I know the question can seem a bit negative, I am really just curious.
Although, I think saying 'wanted them to win' was not accurate. More like, I stuck with them hoping it will get better, and it did get better in many ways, coding was not one of them.
That being said, controlling android and apple mobile devices is kind of a big deal. And their video models are still top notch.
They are not allowing me to hit their endpoints which agy hits - it's frustrating . i tried to hack it with gemini itself. what i love about gemini is it's so encouraging and ready to help you - even against the agy client : ) .
Even though im so frustrated with this - i still love Gemini for some reason ! Most encouraging model in the world!
Google's biggest and most important customer for all this AI stuff is google. Do they actually want other customers, or is having other people use their AI just an annoyance at this point, where we use up compute that they'd rather use internally...
* Abruptly ban me and all users from a Google Workspace for no reason whatsoever.
* Abruptly shut down a service.
I'll never give Google my direct money.
It’s so silly that individual people still use their shit. Corporations, I understand - they always choose the most mediocre stacks and tools by default. But why people choose to bring the mediocrity of Google into their lives is beyond me.
This is what happens when you put a McKinsey consultant in the role of CEO of an organization where product managers run the asylum instead of engineers.
Needless to say 3.5 was a disappointment. Curious to see 3.6.
HN lives in a bubble.
I have German/Italian/Polish clients virtually all use Gemini and NotebookLM. Talking insurance, banking, consulting, legal.
The real world doesn't look at pointless benchmarks on writing react tailwind crap, they are already google suite users, get the tools, test them and adopt them, end of story.
It's going to be like with angular, never mentioned on the net, widely used in the real world.
That sounds awful.
For those of us who don't follow the AI hype cycle, what does that have to do with the topic of this thread: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber?
What is Google's recently released AI coding product?
That is, given a lot of users' contexts, the way they can and the way they want to use these models are increasingly disjoint.