Gemini 3.8 Flash is actually pretty good.

cheerleader hallucinating agent. That's Gemini.

I doubt you've tried it recently, or perhaps you confused the search engine version of Gemini for the frontier models.

I've been using Gemini on development of a DNN training pipeline, and there's no way you can describe it as "dumb as hell". That description just makes it clear that you're not talking about the technical capabilities of the models, but about some sort of fanboy comparison from a parallel hype universe.