Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

It’s frankly embarrassing at this point. I’ve got free access through buying a Pixel phone and it’s not even worth using as it’s a waste of my time. Here’s my experience so far using it for basic sysadmin Linux type stuff.

Gemini 3.1 Pro just feels a generation behind, from when models would miss easy things and make bad assumptions. Its not actively detrimental in bad way but the opportunity cost vs using something like Opus to be productive is large.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is the most annoying model I have ever used. It loves to respond in ALL CAPS like “LOOK AT THAT” for no apparent reason. I realize it’s a flash model but I will give it a basic list of tasks and the output will simply vomit “Now I will X” “Now I will Y” “Now I will Z” over and over again filling my screen with garbage. It’s also no smarter than 3.1 Pro and consumes just as many tokens as 3.1 Pro, it’s really pointless without a newer Pro model in place.

I respectfully disagree, at least for most tasks.

3.1 Pro: while it's coding performance is mediocre, a lot of coding work requires minimum actual thinking. I use it often for light refactoring, boilerplate generation, testcase skeleton generation, code review, language questions ("is there a better way to write this code block?"). I don't have a corporation behind me so costs matter. Considering that I'm a Pro subscriber, it's quite cost effective.

3.5 Flash: excellent model for general (re)search. I use it for everyday tasks with Thinking instead of Flash-Lite. It's a much better version of Google Search for general queries like gaming tips, cooking, day-to-day first aid, tax and investment questions, etc.

Google is clearly aiming for cost-benefit here and considering that it gets bundled with YouTube Plus and Google One at $20/month, it's a killer deal IMHO.

PS: I don't work for Google and don't even like Google very much. But this is a good product.

It was a decent deal ~6-8 months ago. I had been using 3.1 pro almost since release, but it really is feeling old. After using other models more in the past two months though...I really can't go back to 3.1 pro, as I just have to explain my reasoning so damn much to get it on the right path, where as opus or fable just "get it" from the context of the project much better.

Sonnet is roughly the same level as 3.1 pro for me.

This would be more useful if you could compare to a local model like Qwen3.6 27B or 35B.

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