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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

I'd go long Google too if using Gemini CLI felt anything close to the experience I get with Codex or Claude. They might have great hardware but it's worthless if their flagship coding agent gets stuck in loops trying to find the end of turn token.

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Gemini CLI isn't a great product unfortunately. While it's unfortunately tied to a GUI, antigravity is a far superior agent harness. I suggest comparing that to Claude code instead.

Sadly, the "unfortunately tied to a GUI" is really a deal breaker (at least for me).

I wish it were otherwise but antigravity is also a distant third behind codex cli/app, and claude code.

3.1 pro is just fundamentally not on the same level. In any context I've tried it in, for code review it acts like a model from 1yr ago in that it's all hallucinated superficial bullshit.

Claude code is significantly less likely to produce the same (yet still does a decent amount). Gpt 5.4 high/xhigh is on another level altogether - truly not comparable to Gemini.

Bad software kills good hardware.

And the converse is true also. I mean, look at NVIDIA. For the longest time they were just a gaming card company, competing with AMD. I remember alternating between the two companies for my custom builds in the 90s and it basically came down to rendering speed and frame rate.

But Jensen bet on the "compute engine" horse and pushed CUDA out, which became the defacto standard for doing fast, parallel arithmetic on a GPU. He was able to ride the BitCoin wave and then the big one, DNNs. AMD still hasn't caught on yet (despite 15 years having gone by).

I make the mistake of thinking its 2020 as well. CUDA was announced 2006 and released Feb 2007. So its actually 20 years that AMD/RADEON hasn't caught on that they need a good software stack.

I use Claude Code all day and use Gemini CLI for personal projects and I don't see the huge gap that other people seem to talk about a lot. Truthfully there are parts of Gemini CLI I like better than Claude Code.

I don't use Gemini CLI- I use the extension in VSCode, and Gemini extension in VS Code is barely usable in comparison to Claude or GPT-5.4. My experience (consistent with a lot of other reports) is that it takes long time before answer, and frequently returns errors (after a long wait). But I think it's specific to the extension (and maynbe the CLI) because the web version of Gemini works quickly and rarely errors (for me).

There was still a big gap like, 6 months ago. Now, I'm not seeing it either. It's been working well the last couple weeks after I picked it up again.

I agree. I like using Antigravity for some of my frontend work, and I find it does a better job than Claude Code - Opus 4.6. I’ve also found the Gemini Flash models to be good at legal defense research—I use them to help New Yorkers fight parking tickets (https://nyceasyparking.com). That said, the Claude models are still amazing at agentic work.

Of the big three, Gemini gives me the worst responses for the type of tasks I give it. I haven’t really tried it for agentic coding, but the LLM itself often gives, long meandering answers and adds weird little bits of editorializing that are unnecessary at best and misleading at worst.

Same. The tone is really off. Here is a response I just got from Gemini 3.1: "Your simulation results are incredibly insightful, and they actually touch on one of the most notoriously difficult aspects of ..." It's pure bullshit, my simulation results are in fact broken, GPT spotted it immediately.

There is a news report saying that Google has assembled an "elite" team to make Gemini as good as Claude/Codex.

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