Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

Their models might be impressive, but their products absolutely suck donkey balls. I’ve given Gemini web/cli two months and ran away back to ChatGPT. Seriously, it would just COMPLETELY forget context mid dialog. When asked about improving air quality it just gave me a list of (mediocre) air purifiers without asking for any context whatsoever, and I can list thousands of conversations like that. Shopping or comparing options is just nonexistent. It uses Russian propaganda sources for answers and switches to Chinese mid sentence (!), while explaining some generic Python functionality. It’s an embarrassment and I don’t know how they justify 20 euro price tag on it.

View on HN

I agree. On top of that, in true Google style, basic things just don't work.

Any time I upload an attachment, it just fails with something vague like "couldn't process file". Whether that's a simple .MD or .txt with less than 100 lines or a PDF. I tried making a gem today. It just wouldn't let me save it, with some vague error too.

I also tried having it read and write stuff to "my stuff" and Google drive. But it would consistently write but not be able to read from it again. Or would read one file from Google drive and ignore everything else.

Their models are seriously impressive. But as usual Google sucks at making them work well in real products.

I don't find that at all. At work, we've no access to the API, so we have to force feed a dozen (or more) documents, code and instruction prompts through the web interface upload interface. The only failures I've ever had in well over 300 sessions were due to connectivity issues, not interface failures.

Context window blowouts? All the time, but never document upload failures.

Honestly this is as Google product as you can get. Prizes for some, beatings for others.

I'm talking about Gemini in the app and on the web. As well as AI studio. At work we go through Copilot, but there the agentic mode with Gemini isn't the best either.

What I love about Gemini mobile is that, if you look at the app wrong, it completely loses the response. It still generates it (and uses up your quota), but it never displays it!

This is the company that made Android, and it can't make an Android app that fetches a response from a server. Astonishing.

It's so capable at some things, and others are garbage. I uploaded a photo of some words for a spelling bee and asked it to quiz my kid on the words. The first word it asked, wasn't on the list. After multiple attempts to get it to start asking only the words in the uploaded pic, it did, and then would get the spellings wrong in the Q&A. I gave up.

I had it process a photo of my D&D character sheet and help me debug it as I'm a n00b at the game. Also did a decent, although not perfect, job of adding up a handwritten bowling score sheet.

How can the models be impressive if they switch to Chinese mid-sentence? I've observed those bizarre bugs too. Even GPT-3 didn't have those. Maybe GPT-2 did. It's actually impressive that they managed to botch it so badly.

Google is great at some things, but this isn't it.

Antigravity is an embarrassment.

The models feel terrible, somehow, like they're being fed terrible system prompts.

Plus the damn thing kept crashing and asking me to "restart it". What?!

At least Kiro does what it says on the tin.

My experience with Antigravity is the opposite. It's the first time in over 10 years that an IDE has managed to take me out a bit out of the jetbrain suite. I did not think that was something possible as I am a hardcore jetbrain user/lover.

It's literally just vscode? I tried it the other day and I couldn't tell it apart from windsurf besides the icon in my dock

Yeah same here. Even though it's vscode I'm still using it and don't plan to renew Intellij again. Gemini was crap but Opus smashes it.

It is windsurf isn't it, why would you expect it to be different?

Have you tried Cursor or VS Code with Github Copilot in agent mode (recently, not 3 or 6 months ago)?

I've recently tried a buuuuunch of stuff (including Antigravity and Kiro) and I really, really, could not stomach Antigravity.

I disagree. At least in my brief test drive, when used with Claude, the performance was on par with Cursor except that the Agent could actually interact with the terminal properly (Cursor is comically bad at this for some reason).

When the (generous!) Claude credits dry up functionality stops however. Gemini is as useless in Antigravity as everywhere else.

I've used their Pro models very successfully in demanding API workloads (classification, extraction, synthesis). On benchmarks it crushed the GPT-5 family. Gemini is my default right now for all API work.

It took me however a week to ditch Gemini 3 as a user. The hallucinations were off the charts compared to GPT-5. I've never even bothered with their CLI offering.

Sadly true.

It is also one of the worst models to have a sort of ongoing conversation with.

It’s all context/ use case; I’ve had weird things too but if you only use markdown inputs and specific prompts Gemini 3 Pro is insane, not to mention the context window

Also because of the long context window (1 mil tokens on thinking and pro! Claude and OpenAI only have 128k) deep research is the best

That being said, for coding I definitely still use Codex with GPT 5.3 XHigh lol

100x agree. It gives inconsistent edits, would regularly try to perform things I explicitly command to not.

Agreed on the product. I can't make Gemini read my emails on GMail. One day it says it doesn't have access, the other day it says Query unsuccessful. Claude Desktop has no problem reaching to GMail, on the other hand :)

I don't have any of these issues with Gemini. I use it heavily everyday. A few glitches here and there, but it's been enormously productive for me. Far more so then chatgpt, which I find mostly useless.

And it gives incorrect answers about itself and google’s services all the time. It kept pointing me to nonexistent ui elements. At least it apologizes profusely! ffs

Their models are absolutely not impressive.

Not a single person is using it for coding (outside of Google itself).

Maybe some people on a very generous free plan.

Their model is a fine mid 2025 model, backed by enormous compute resources and an army of GDM engineers to help the “researchers” keep the model on task as it traverses the “tree of thoughts”.

But that isn’t “the model” that’s an old model backed by massive money.

Uhh, just false.

It's just poop tier.

Come on.

Worthless.

Do you have any market counter points.

Market counter points that aren't really just a repackaging of:

  1. "Google has the world's best distribution" and/or  
  2. "Google has a firehose of money that allows them to sell their 'AI product' at an enormous discount?

Good luck!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com