They do a lot of weird things with the context in their user facing products like Gemini. Google seems to always have trouble with their harnesses

I strongly agree. I suspect it's people who have not yet used the paid models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is comparable to free models from other providers, but not in the same universe as paid models.

This is frustrating because when I discuss AI with laypeople they think it's still incapable of counting the number of Rs in "strawberry." They believe it to be essentially useless and incapable of basic tasks. Which, to be fair, is the case with the free models.

I love it as a variation from the others. 3.8 flash is the best back-and-forth model for iterating imo, but would not use for long horizon

Have you tried Gemini 3.8 Flash recently ?

I was like you before, Gemini was the worst model to me.

Then 3.8 came out. At first I was sceptical, but this model *is* able to do useful things ! Complex things.

Of course, it is NOT perfect. But for things like small/medium complex tasks subagents, it's perfect.

Now, is it worth the money vs Astra ? I don't think so. But still my point remain relevant.

I wonder how much life DeepMind has left in it, especially after Hassabis's departure. Google execs must be having discussions about simply throwing their weight behind Anthropic since they already own so much of the company.

I agree. Lot's of people really like it. For me it often just forgets all context and starts showing random slop. It's super clear as, when I ask it what happened to some element earlier in the conversation it tells me it does not have that. It might be good if it told me, but randomly lose the plot is quite frustrating.

Claude does it occasionally but it's a more a soft landing earlier context seems to be compacted, not completely lose the plot.

I just cancelled my pro subscription. I really wanted it to be good but not yet.

i have programmed a dozen scripts with google search AI lol

they'll live in my rc for decades