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- simonwThe speed combined with the fact that this thing is really good at HTML JavaScript is pretty exciting.Here's what I got for 1.8 cents and 13 seconds from the prompt "make me a cool thing in html":https://gisthost.github.io/?6a77bc41a81718c6aaa10d4ab243c59fTranscript here (it was part of a chat): https://gist.github.com/simonw/b6149a49d327164d67d62c3d12992...
- jampaI've been using Gemini 3.7 for my personal trip planning app. Across multiple benchmarks, it ranks higher on everything I tried:- Real world knowledge (when a thing opens and closes, the geographic region, historical facts). It's also the best at taking a cluster of places and working out a visiting order.- Photo ranking (which photo should be the hero). Gemini can tell whether a photo is of the thing or of the view from it.- Document parsing (extracting the relevant trip info from PDFs).If you use LLMs for anything other than coding, I definitely recommend not discounting Gemini like I did just because other models are more popular.
- sreekanth850Dear Google, Kindly make you chat window on the right side of vscode in antigravity extension, There is a reason others kept it like that. I can see the code and inspect the files changed while Agents keep working. its critical for me personally.
- mattlondonCurrently top at https://deepswe.datacurve.ai - beating Opus 5!https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-8-flash shows an intelligence score of 59, the same as Opus 5 medium!Wow - for a flash model this seems to benchmark powerfully. Remains to be seen what it is like to use.
- simonwThe most interesting thing about the Gemini models is still their multi-modal support: they accept audio and video input, OpenAI and Anthropic's flagships are still image-only.Gemini Flash is also pretty cheap, so it's a great family for performing media analysis, like extracting structured data from images and video.
- EFLKumoSomething maybe unfamiliar with you: not about coding but writing. I've asked it to write an argumentative essay, which is a part of "gaokao" (China's university entrance exam), and its work is *extremely* impressive. speaks and writes like a real senior high school student, and the opinions unfold progressively with deep hierarchy. I don't know how the Gemini team reaches this because this kind of Chinese capability literally outperforms at least 2/3 Chinese students, no to mention those who speak Chinese. After all, the model speaks like a real humankind if you prompt it well. That's AGI guys
- simonwPelicans (thinking effort high, medium, low): https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... - high cost 8.9742 centsHere are the 3.7 pelicans for comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer.html?u... - high cost 8.4387 cents(I think thinking level low is a regression on 3.8 compared to 3.7.)
- mattlondonWow this comes after what - 3 or 4 weeks since 3.7 Flash, which was also 3 or 4 weeks after 3.6 Flash IIRC?I eagerly wait more info but sounds like Deepmind without Demis calling the shots has been unleashed and are operating at full speed? Shocker!At this point it is a meme of course, but where is 3.5 Pro :)
- andaiWait, I didn't realize 3.7 Flash was already beating Sol on a bunch of the benchmarks. Isn't it a way smaller models?
- a11rLooks like the strategy of regular updates with incremental improvements is working out well. Interestingly, the biggest jump in Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score is for reasoning level Medium ( 3.7 was 51, 53, 57 for Low, Medium and High, 3.8 is 52,57, 59 respectively). I think scores at lower reasoning levels are more indicative of model capability since higher reasoning levels are focussed on benchmaxxing. We use the lowest reasoning level in production with good results.
- aff-vasilevaThe model seems fast enough to solve your problem before Google finishes explaining which of its three products you need to open to access it.
- j-bu"The knowledge cutoff date for Gemini 3.8 Flash is March 2026 – users can expect updated information for some domains while in others they may experience the model’s knowledge is limited to January 2025 (in line with the Gemini 3 Model Family)."Kind of wild that they haven't (successfully) pretrained a base model since Jan-25.
- meh2frdfThe flash models, for coding are reckless in my experience. I have a Ultimate subscription, get good quota, but still use Opus 4.6 as it's much more reliable if you manage the context window carefully.
- xnxSeem like a great, no-compromise, upgrade over 3.7 which is already a bargain, fast, and doesn't have the brain-damaged writing style of Claude.
- raincoleI don't know if Google is having the worst marketing fumble or the most genius marketing one. Their "flash" models are very comparable to other companies' "pro" or "flagship" models. It seems to be a quite counterintuitive naming convention as it undersells the models.Unless they have an even more powerful Gemini Pro in the oven...?
- throwa356262"available to trusted defenders through our new Fairwind Program" Then why even bother announcing this? Ordinary people can use K3 and GLM 5.3 or whatever drops next and avoid all this hassle.
- therealmarvOn my short tests: This model is amazing and the speed makes it feel like another sort of AI.But it's bad at code reviews (maybe it's the harness agy cli?). Could not get it to same quality level on reviews like Opus, GPT 5.6, Grok. Even tried special code review skills but no luck.
- leopoldj
- adbachmanStill zero on the felony bench.Is this weakness in their training regimen the impact of operating under regulatory frameworks for too long?
- gereI have mixed feelings about Gemini 3.7 Flash. I used it for a personal project in Java and it was ok: it was crazy fast and it reached the correct result, but the code quality was barely passable.I also used it for a an app for my Garmin watch, and it wasn't good. The code was compiling, but functionality was totally broken and even with a lot of steering it wasn't able to make it work. GLM 5.3-flash instead was up for it and the code wasn't bad at all. I am curious to see if 3.8 is an improvement in this use case.
- sfinkFor my application, I'm still happily using gemini-2.5-flash and the only problem is when it reports being overloaded. It's for interpreting a downscaled phone camera photo of a hand-written shopping list on a whiteboard, and it works stunningly well. My handwriting sucks, too.(I guess the only relevance here is that if your problem matches a model's strengths, then you can do fine with a model that is several generations out of date.)
- andreygrehovI don't use Gemini, but I thought `cool, let's give this new model a try`. Opened gemini.google.com, and I'm not even surprised. The drop down gives me the following options:- Flash-Lite- 3.6 Flash [new]- 3.1 ProThe above is why i don't use LLM products from Google. If the model is not available right this minute (heck, hours before the release!), then I'm not gonna bother getting back to it tomorrow, because tomorrow I'll be playing with the new model from OAI/Anthropic.
- jerkstate3.7 flash was by far the best model for image recognition tasks according to my benchmarks. 3.8 flash didn't regress any candidates and improved some specificity (positive ID of common name vs species name of exotic fruit, correct identification of cast/replica of artifact and statue) but is still relatively weaker (26/30) on esoteric public figures (Korean beatboxers). I'm going to have to make my benchmark harder.
- buntpIt seems like this is one of the most powerful models for the price, really didn't see that coming from Google
- f311aIs the google infra stable enough right now? At the start of the year, the flash model was unusable for a whole month via gemini CLI. They could not fix it for a whole month and I was a paid customer.
- mowmiatlasWow fable5.1 was the first model to do what I actually told it and I couldn’t find any problems with it, excited to try this just a day later lol
- lpolovetsI'm surprised the introductory 50% discount is good for 4 months. It seems like frontier models release new versions every 2-3 months, so raising prices in 4 months seems like a bad plan: you're effectively planning to charge users twice as much for a model that is no longer frontier.
- hmate9It is more expensive per task than 5.6-sol high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-8-flash#price-...
- AM1010101Seems to do reasonably well in opencode according to artificial analysis. https://artificialanalysis.ai/agents/coding-agentsIf I had to pay per token I would probably consider using this (they seem to be on the pareto of performance) but not being able to use opencode with a subscription is not really something I'm realistically going to do when claude and codex are around. Also never gotten along well with gemini-cli / antigravity-cli.
- speak_plainlyAfter struggling with Gemini for months, I think the trick to getting the most out of the model is writing a really solid personal intelligence/instructions prompt. The results are night and day in terms of performance.
- _aavaa_Do they officially support you use their AI Pro subscription (or whatever the heck it's called this month, the one that gives you models in antigravity) in a 3rd party harness?
- wjellyzbeen absolutely loving 3.7 flash for coding. it feels very fast and quality is decent for implementing product features. usually use opus or sol for hardcore debugging.
- pimeysIt's interesting that Deepseek models were missing in the comparison. I see Deepseek v4 Flash a direct competitor to Gemini Flash for text-based agentic work.
- koalamanI use Gemini to make sense of things Claude says to me.
- kelvinjps10I see benchmarks beating sol terra and sonnet. But is actually better? Has someone used it? I don't see actually much people that use Gemini for coding.
- satvikpendemIs the Gemini CLI still terrible compared to Claude Code and Codex? The harness the main thing holding back Google models as they could've been the best given all the advantages in compute capacity and training data they initially had, where now even the Google CEO said they're falling behind in agentic tasks, which is sort of a vicious cycle because RLHF relies on human usage.
- pwythonIs there any reason to even use 3.1 Pro now?
- hmokiguess
- leumonSo 89.4% on Terminal Bench 2 but only 19.1% on Tbench 4. Opus 5 is 89.1%/51.8%.
- ASinclairFrom personal experience it feels much more capable than 3.7 Flash.
- anonundefined
- sva_model card https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537354 (doesn't 404)
- lglAm I the only only one thinking that Google might still "win" the AI race, despite the apparent gap?They're apparently evolving slower than most SOTA models but "slow and steady wins the race" is probably still a thing.And since Google doesn't depend exclusively on AI models, they can probably afford to "wait and see" where all this craze is heading.
- prometheus1992Google keeps flashing everyone where everyone is expecting to get PRO'bed.
- eis3.8 uses nearly twice as many tokens as 3.7. One might be inclined to think that they just increased the thinking budgets...3.7 used 64M on high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-7-flash 3.8 used 120M on high: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-8-flashEven their own chart showed more than 2x higher cost compared to 3.7: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...
- alex1138It's a shame Google crams it ham-fistedly into search results and that Google has some of the reputation it has because I actually really enjoy Gemini and I don't even use it for the reason people often list which is that you can cross-reference it to stuff in your Google account
- fitsumbelayshows up in /models though and encourages you to use it over 3.7 Flash I prefer this over reading specs: the "just show me" way
- amazingamazingCould someone explain to me why it matters if google has the best model? Isnt the real metric cost per task?
- dcchambersI would really love to be able to use these Gemini models in Opencode or Pi with my existing Google AI Pro subscription.
- realist_notAnyone has a cached page / mirror ? 404
- advennBut where is Gemini 3.5 pro?
- anonundefined
- dismalafNice surprise. In a few of my own tests it seems maybe a tad slower than 3.7 (but still way faster than any other LLM I've used) and even smarter. With 3.7 I felt I could just not use 3.1 Pro at all and 3.8 seems even better.
- dyauspitrWhatever they’re using within the Maps app is not good at all. I cannot just ask it for things conversationally like I do with ChatGPT. They really need to put a better model in there. I don’t even think it maintains context across two different queries within the same session. It’s not seamless and doesn’t just “get it” like ChatGPT does.Yesterday I asked for food stop on my road trip 45 minutes from the current time and it gave me some options, but then I changed my mind and specifically asked for Asian restaurants and it completely forgot about the 45 minutes and gave me the closest Asian restaurant to me.
- FpUser>"safety performance" - this starting to get long in the tooth. Gemini cut programming session 3 times for "safety reasons" yesterday for mentioning image generation (I need to generate bunch of those for infinite zoom virtual training app experience). After I got creative and managed to trick it to answer t was of course because "think of a children"And in my other app I was debugging and using OpenAI to optimize some path it cut me off numerous times because it did not like JIT functionality (this is my commercial business rule evaluation engine that compiles rules to executable code inside the app to increase performance using asmjit library)I am basically paying for them to waste my tokens and time on these 2 tasks
- OG_BMEWhat did it say?
- barapalove these flash models
- yipinwong"Page not found"...
- jdw64The biggest problem with Gemini is that its performance degrades the longer you use it for coding. Is it just me?
- MashimoIt's 404 now.
- deancAnd yet again another failed launch from Google. I pay for their AI plus Google one package to get more cloud storage (have no interest in their AI bundle but you have to pay). and all I see in the Gemini app is 3.6-flash
- mythzI'm trying it now for token heavy coding tasks, it's capable for many tasks but in noway compares to Claude/Sol - requires more prompts and the output isn't as good.So just another mid-tier flash model, nothing exciting, but Antigravity has very generous quotas so it's a good workhorse model when your Claude/OpenAI subs run out.And whilst it's a fast model, having to baby sit through and approve prompts every few seconds ends up making it slower than the Auto approve modes of Claude/ChatGPT - they definitely need an auto approve mode.
- tacomonstrousLooks like Google's given up on frontier models for external consumption?
- anonundefined
- anonundefined
- shuvrojitGemini is getting less useful with each update. I could edit a pdf with the 3-pro model before but 3.1-pro couldn't edit the given pdf nor it could generate one for me.
- coffeecodersOne place where I find the Flash models surprisingly bad is Google Search's "AI Mode".A recent example - I searched for how to unsubscribe from Pearson emails. Google Search "AI Mode" confidently gave me a sequence of steps along the lines of Settings > Profile > Email preferences > Unsubscribe.Of course, I looked for an unsubscribe link before asking Google. None of those options existed. The correct answer was there is no way to unsubscribe through the account, so I just blockthe emails instead.I've run into this pattern quite a few times. AI Mode seems to make up things all the time.
- greenowlNot to rain on anyone's parade but I find it strange how excited and giddy people on HN get for any new X.X model releases. Pumping it straight to the top, clamoring to use it, check and compare benchmarks, bragging about it being your "daily driver"?Are you people truly this excited about this crap? I mean I guess if you work for Google or Anthropic or whatever I could see it??? Otherwise, are these just bot comments?