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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Claude has been left in the dust by Gemini with its million token session and ability to upload a zip file of my entire code base.

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I wonder if anyone has done an analysis on the HN user sentiment on the varying AI models over time. I'd be curious to see what that looks like. Increasingly, I'm seeing more and more people talk positively about Gemini and Google (and having used Gemini recently, I align with that sentiment)

I think Bard (lol) and Gemini got a late start and so lots of folks dismissed it but I feel like they've fully caught up. Definitely excited to see what Gemini 3 vs GPT-5 vs Claude 4 looks like!

I'm using Windsurf IDE so have all the main models available. Mainly doing Python, JS, HTML, CSS, some Go. I have found Claude 3.7 outperforms Gemini 2.5 and ChatGPT 4.1, 4o, Deepseek, etc, for my work in most cases.

I suspect that I experience some performance throttling with Gemini 2.5 in my Windsurf setup because it's just not as good as anecdotal reports by others, and benchmarks.

I also seem to run up against a kind of LLM laziness sometimes when they seemingly can't be bothered to answer a challenging prompt ... a consequence of load balancing in action perhaps.

Windsurf is about to lose its ability to use other models since it got bought by OpenAI. Still very cool tool though!

Who cares about sentiment when you can just look at a proxy for usage: https://openrouter.ai/rankings

EDIT: Specifically: https://openrouter.ai/rankings/programming?view=week

Gemini hit the top of a bunch of leaderboards recently so it probably prompted folks to try Gemini out and they found it useful.

Context is only one part of it. I tried using Gemini and got sub par results. comment-laden code with not not following instructions.

I’ve tried Gemini 2.5 Pro a couple of times and honestly don’t like its output. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is much better at correctly understanding and executing my imprecise prompts.

Gemini 2.5 Flash on the other hand has excellent. I’ve started using it to rewrite whole files after talking the changes through with Claude, because it’s just so ridiculously fast (and dependable enough for applying already outlined changes).

This is Claude Code.

The two work really well with Gemini as a planner and Claude Code as an executor.

and then get the honor of copy and pasting all of the changes afterward?

You can try my project Plandex[1] to use Gemini in a way that's comparable to Claude Code without copy-pasting. By default, it combines models from the major providers—Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The default planning/coding models are still Sonnet 3.7 for context size under 200k, but you can switch to Gemini with `\set-model gemini-preview`.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex

“Make me a bash script which creates all the files using heredoc”

Works for a reasonable chunk of files say 5 to 10 that aren’t too big.

No doubt they’ll get to better file access.

Anyhow I’m quite happy to do the copy and paste because Geminis coding and debugging capability is far better than Claude.

I'm using this https://github.com/coffeegrind123/gemini-code to use Claude Code with Gemini and it's working perfectly

Cursor with gemini-2.5 MAX and agentic mode.

I really like the idea of Claude Code but its rare that I fully spec out a feature on my first request and I can't see how it can be used for frontend features that require a lot of browser-centric iteration/debugging to get right.

I can't say that I don't love Gemini. I use it a lot, and the huge context window does help. But I can also say that I much prefer how Claude writes code.

claude code still has the best UX IMHO. But I would love to have the million token context, for sure

I'm building a browser based tool that runs on your computer, with full tool access of course, that works with all the major models and is far better and more ergonomic to use than code, codex, etc.

If you (or anyone else reading this) wants to try out the upcoming beta give me a ping. (see profile.)

How are you uploading zip files of code to Gemini?

In AI Studio select file upload then select a zip file.

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