Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience

- Gemini 3.8 has a beautiful answer. Typography, use of lists, brevity, style, even the font choice on the web harness -- all of it is A tier or even S tier. Notice I didn't say answer quality. The answer is always extremely mid, and the harder the question (or more effort needed to answer it), Google just quits. I give it a "C" on answer quality

- ChatGPT (Chat, pre 6, I assume 5.6 although they commonly hide the model picker): Ugly answer. Runs on printing page after page of unnecessary side notes. Mostly just walls of texts in paragraphs with little thought to information design. However, inside of that mess of text is almost always the answer I'm looking for, and it's almost always incredibly better than the truncated, desgined Gemini answer.

For a while I ran all of my question queries on Gemini and ChatGPT, but I noticed that I basically always picked ChatGPT's answer head to head.

Interesting that this hasn’t been my experience. ChatGPT has often gave me with pages of text dripping with confidence about a solution for my problem. Diving very quickly into implementation details. Even if I tell it to stay in the problem and product fit level. Gemini on the other hand somehow always outputs at the level that I am expecting and reasoning.

I even found it was capable of stepping back from code implementation and bug hunting to “hang on, it’s not the algorithm that is incorrectly implemented, it is the wrong algorithm for the goal.” GPT Sol (5.6,6 and 6.1) just kept hammering in the problem.

To be clear, I'm discussing non-technical use of Gemini and ChatGPT through the web harness.

While I do rarely use the web harnesses for technical research, nearly all of my technical questions are going through coding harnesses and layers of my local context, skills, etc, so what I produce from codex/claude code is not comparable to what others produce.

So my comparison of the web harnesses is me asking questions about caring for my baby, or product comparisons of new televisions, or visualizing a room organized differently (google sucked at this so bad, chatgpt did great), or asking for help in a video game, or other normie AI uses lol

I will say, Gemini is the best for asking about google services, such as Flights or Youtube.

Head to tail?

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/head+to+head

I think they edited their post

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