I’m finding it very bad at instruction following vs 3.1. It calls tools it is told shouldn’t, and it loves calling tools. There’s a pretty strong bias towards its training vs system prompt instructions.
Google’s release notes say to reduce unnecessary tool calls by reducing thinking, but that feels like it should be orthogonal to me.
It definitely has improved a few logic things, like in data visualizations it’s better at labelling data, but it’s much worse at preparing data out of the box.