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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

I found all the previous Gemini models somewhat inferior even compared to Claude 3.7 Sonnet (and much worse than 4) as my coding assistants. I'm keeping an open mind but also not rushing to try this one until some evaluations roll in. I'm actually baffled that the internet at large seems to be very pumped about Gemini but it's not reflective of my personal experience. Not to be that tinfoil hat guy but I smell at least a bit of astroturf activity around Gemini.

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> I'm actually baffled that the internet at large seems to be very pumped about Gemini but it's not reflective of my personal experience. Not to be that tinfoil hat guy but I smell at least a bit of astroturf activity around Gemini.

I haven't used Claude, but Gemini has always returned better answers to general questions relative to ChatGPT or Copilot. My impression, which could be wrong, is that Gemini is better in situations that are a substitute for search. How do I do this on the command line, tell me about this product, etc. all give better results, sometimes much better, on Gemini.

You should try Grok then. It's by far the best when searching is required, especially if you enable DeepSearch.

I don't really want to use the X platform. What's the best alternative? Claude?

I’ve honestly had consistently the opposite experiences for general questions. Also for images, Gemini just hallucinates crazily. ChatGPT even on free tier is giving perfectly correct answers, and I’m on Gemini pro. I canceled it yesterday because of this

I think it's just very dependent on what you're doing. Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet (thinking or not) were just absolutely terrible at almost anything I asked of it (C/C++/Make/CMake). Like constantly giving wrong facts, generating code that could never work, hallucinating syntax and APIs, thinking about something then concluding the opposite, etc. Gemini 2.5-pro and o3 (even old o1-preview, o1-mini) were miles better. I haven't used Claude 4 yet.

But everyone is using them for different things and it doesn't always generalize. Maybe Claude was great at typescript or ruby or something else I don't do. But for some of us, it definitely was not astroturf for Gemini. My whole team was talking about how much better it was.

I'm switching a lot between Sonnet and Gemini in Aider - for some reason some of my coding problems only one of models capable to solve and I don't see any pattern which cold give answer upfront which I should to use for specific need.

> I found all the previous Gemini models somewhat inferior even compared to Claude 3.7 Sonnet (and much worse than 4) as my coding assistants.

What are your usecases? Really not my experience, Claude disappoints in Data Science and complex ETL requests in python. O3 on the other hand really is phenomenal.

Backend python code, postgres database. Front end: Reeact/NextJS. Very common stack in 2025. Using LLMs in assist mode (not as agents) for enhancing the existing code base that weighs in under 1MM LoC. So not a greenfield project anymore but not a huge amount of legacy cruft either.

I still have the Claude subscription, so I will take a look again and see.

I think they are fairly interchangeable, In Roo Code, Claude uses the tools better, but I prefer gemini's coding style and brevity (except for comments, it loves to write comments) Sometimes I mix and match if one fails or pursues a path I don't like.

My experience has been that Gemini's code (and even conversation) is a little bit uglier in general - but that the code tends to solve the issue you asked with fewer hallucinations.

I can't speak to it now - have mostly been using Claude Code w/ Opus 4 recently.

As a lawyer, Claude 4 is the best writer, and usually, but not always, the leader in legal reasoning. That said, o3 often grinds out the best response, and Gemini seems to be the most exhaustive researcher.

Gemini sucks for its stupid comment verbosity like others have mentioned but wins on price to value.

I mean, they're cheaper models and they aren't as much if a pain about rate limiting as Claude was/they have a pretty solid depenresesrch without restrictive usage limits. IDK how it is for long running agentic stuff, would be surprised if it was anywhere near the other models, but for a general chatgpt competitor it doesn't matter if it's not as good as opus 4 if it's way cheaper and won't use up your usage limit

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