Hacker News Reader

Comment by quacky_batak | Hacker News Reader

I’m keen to know how and where are you using Gemini.

Anthropic is clearly targeted to developers and OpenAI is general go to AI model. Who are the target demographic for Gemini models? ik that they are good and Flash is super impressive. but i’m curious

View on HN

I use it as my main platform right now both for work/swe stuff, and person stuff. It works pretty well, they have the full suite of tools I want from general LLM chat, to notebookLM, to antigravity.

My main use-cases outside of SWE generally involve the ability to compare detailed product specs and come up with answers/comparisons/etc... Gemini does really well for that, probably because of the deeper google search index integration.

Also I got a year of pro for free with my phone....so thats a big part.

I use it in Google Search. For example yesterday I typed in Google "postgres generate series 24 hour" and this morning "ffmpeg convert mp4 to wav". Previously I would have clicked on the first StackOverflow result (RIP), now I just take it from the Gemini summary (I'd say 95% of the time it's correct for basic programming language questions. I remember some hallucinations about psycopg3 and date-fns tho. As usual with AI, you need to already know the answer, at least partially, to detect the bs).

Also what's great about Gemini in Google Search is that the answer comes with several links, I use them sometimes to validate the correctness of the solution, or check how old the solution is (I've never used chatGPT so I don't know if chatGPT does it).

I use the Gemini web interface just as I would ChatGPT. They also have coding environment analogues of Claude-Code in Anti-gravity and Gemini-CLI.

When you sign up for the pro tier you also get 2TB of storage, Gemini for workspace and Nest Camera history.

If you're in the Google sphere it offers good value for money.

I find gemini to be the best at travel planning and for story telling of geographical places. For a road trip, I tried all three mainstream providers and I liked Gemini (also personal preference because Gemini took a verbose approach instead of bullet points from others) for it's responses, ways it discovered stories about places I wanted to explore, places it suggested for me and things it gave me to consider those places in the route.

Gemini has an obvious edge over its competitors in one specific area: Google Search. The other LLMs do have a Web Search tool but none of them are as effective.

I feel like Gemini 3 was incredible on non-software/coding research. I have learned so much systems biology the last two months it blows my mind.

I had only started using Opus 4.6 this week. Sonnet it seems like is much better at having a long conversation with. Gemini is good for knowledge retrieval but I think Opus 4.6 has caught up. The biggest thing that made Gemini worth it for me the last 3 months is I crushed it with questions. I wouldn't have even got 10% of the Opus use that I got from Gemini before being made to slow down.

I have a deep research going right now on 3.1 for the first time and I honestly have no idea how I am going to tell if it is better than 3.

It seems like agentic coding Gemini wasn't as good but just asking it to write a function, I think it only didn't one shot what I asked it twice. Then fixed the problem on the next prompt.

I haven't logged in to bother with chatGPT in about 3 months now.

I am a professional software developer who has been programming for 40 years (C, C++, Python, assembly, any number of other languages). I work in ML (infrastructure, not research) and spent a decade working at Google.

In short, I consider Gemini to be a highly capable intern (grad student level) who is smarter and more tenacious than me, but also needs significant guidance to reach a useful goal.

I used Gemini to completely replace the software stack I wrote for my self-built microscope. That includes:

writing a brand new ESP32 console application for controlling all the pins of my ESP32 that drives the LED illuminator. It wrote the entire ESP-IDF project and did not make any major errors. I had to guide with updated prompts a few times but otherwise it wrote the entire project from scratch and ran all the build commands, fixing errors along the way. It also easily made a Python shared library so I can just import this object in my Python code. It saved me ~2-3 days of working through all the ESP-IDF details, and did a better job than I would have.

writing a brand new C++-based Qt camera interface (I have a camera with a special SDK that allows controlling strobe and trigger and other details. It can do 500FPS). It handled all the concurrency and message passing details. I just gave it the SDK PDF documentation for the camera (in mixed english/chinese), and asked it to generate an entire project. I had to spend some time guiding it around making shared libraries but otherwise it wrote the entire project from scratch and I was able to use it to make a GUI to control the camera settings with no additional effort. It ran all the build commands and fixed errors along the way. Saved me another 2-3 days and did a better job than I could have.

Finally, I had it rewrite the entire microscope stack (python with qt) using the two drivers I described above- along with complex functionality like compositing multiple images during scanning, video recording during scanning, mesaurement tools, computer vision support, and a number of other features. This involved a lot more testing on my part, and updating prompts to guide it towards my intended destination (fully functional replacement of my original self-written prototype). When I inspect the code, it definitely did a good job on some parts, while it came up with non-ideal solutions for some problems (for example, it does polling when it could use event-driven callbacks). This saved literally weeks worth of work that would have been a very tedious slog.

From my perspective, it's worked extremely well: doing what I wanted in less time than it would take me (I am a bit of a slow programmer, and I'm doing this in hobby time) and doing a better job (With appropriate guidance) than I could have (even if I'd had a lot of time to work on it). This greatly enhances my enjoyment of my hobby by doing tedious work, allowing me to spend more time on the interesting problems (tracking tardigrades across a petri dish for hours at a time). I used gemini pro 3 for this- it seems to do better than 2.5, and flash seemed to get stuck and loop more quickly.

I have only lightly used other tools, such as ChatGPT/Codex and have never used Claude. I tend to stick to the Google ecosystem for several reasons- but mainly, I think they will end up exceeding the capabilities of their competitors, due to their inherent engineering talent and huge computational resources. But they clearly need to catch up in a lot of areas- for example, the VS Code Gemini extension has serious problems (frequent API call errors, messed up formatting of code/text, infinite loops, etc).

Wow, you have to try claude code with Opus-4.6..

I agree, but I don't have a subscription.

The remaining technical challenge I have is related to stage positioning- in my system, it's important that all the image frames we collect are tagged with the correct positions. Due to some technical challenges, right now the stage positions are slightly out of sync with the frames, which will be a fairly tricky problem to solve. It's certainly worth trying all the major systems to see what they propose.

I personally use it as my general purpose and coding model. It's good enough for my coding tasks most of the time, has very good and rapid web search grounding that makes the Google index almost feel like part of its training set, and Google has a family sharing plan with individual quotas for Google AI Pro at $20/month for 5 users which also includes 2 TB in the cloud. Family sharing is a unique feature for Gemini 3 Flash Thinking (300 prompts per day and user) & Pro (100 prompts per day and user).

I use Gemini for personal stuff such as travel planning and research on how to fix something, which product to buy, etc. My company has as Pro subscription so I use that instead of ChatGPT.

Various friends of mine work in non-technology companies (banking, industries, legal, Italy) and in pretty much all of them there's Gemini enterprise + NotebookLM.

In all of them the approach is: this is the solution, now find problems you can apply it to.

I have swapped to using gemini over chatgpt for casual conversation and question answering. there are some lacking features in the app but i get faster and more intelligent responses.

I switched to it for my personal subscription because on discount it was less than half the price of ChatGPT Plus/Claude Pro

I'd use it for planning, knowledge, and anything visual.

I use gemini for everything because I trust google to keep the data I send them safe, because they know how to run prod at scale, and they are more environmentally friendly than everyone else (tpu,us-central1).

This includes my custom agent / copilot / cowork (which uses vertex ai and all models therein). This is where I do more searching now (with genAi grounding) I'm about to work on several micro projects that will hold Ai a little differently.

All that being said, google Ai products suck hard. I hate using every one of them. This is more a reflection on the continued degradation of PM/Design at Big G, from before Ai, but accellationally worse since. I support removing Logan from the head of this shit show

disclaimer: long time g-stan, not so stan any more

Reply on news.ycombinator.com