I’ll be honest — I’m done with Gemini models.
I don’t understand how a company with that much user data and nearly the entire surface web at its disposal still can’t ship a genuinely intelligent model.
I’m a Google Pro annual subscriber, mainly for the AI Studio credits and quota. First they killed the credits. Then they gutted the quota for the only models worth using — Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Opus 4.6. Those were the two reasons I stayed.
But my bigger issue is: why is Google even making these models? If you only care about speed, build that for your search engine. Some of us want intelligence. Having Gemini in my IDE and watching it fail at basic tasks is painful. I don’t fully vibe-code, thank god — with 5 years of programming experience, I can catch its mistakes. Otherwise I’d be suffering.
Honestly, Google should either get serious or step out of AI. It feels like they’re just releasing models to stay in the race. Meanwhile they’re scraping data from small creators, paying giants like Reddit for theirs, and still shipping underwhelming products.
And Gemini 3.6 Flash? Benchmarks look fine, but real-world capability tells a different story. It’s just a slightly more efficient version of 3.5 Flash, which was already underwhelming for the price. At this point, Google could learn a thing or two from Chinese open-source models.
Since I’ve gone through pretty much everything possible, having used almost every model and environment, I’ll share my thoughts a bit.
Gemini models suffer from a flawed default persona, hyperactivity, and a lack of steerability, which means that if a user wants to work with this model every day, the number of errors and dead ends will be astronomical. Because the Gemini model has trouble reading user intent and on top of that acts very randomly. This causes frustration, because benchmarks are just numbers, and at the end of the day in real life, the gap between Opus and PRO is huge, even to the point where I’ve always preferred Sonnet, it was always better for me than the PRO model. Why? Because it did exactly what I wanted! Not its own inventions, but mine. If there were errors, oh well, those were ‘my’ errors back then. But when the model does something other than what I want, those are its errors.
Another issue is ‘system instructions’ and how Antigravity looks right now. Today I extracted the built-in instructions from this tool, a complete disaster, unfortunately I couldn’t manage to effectively strip that out of Antigravity, and on top of that I was afraid it might violate the TOS if I started editing the application files.
Summary to understand the current situation.
Anthropic: The best model, the user can override their system instructions. They don’t pretend to know better; if the user wants to, they throw them out and apply only their own. Fable/Opus run like a dream in claude-code. Mine and only mine, I don’t want any trash like “I am Claude”.
Google: Weak model, and on top of that Google believes the user has no right to and will not have their own system instructions and rules for how the model should operate. They decided they know better, they’ll set the hierarchy the model should have themselves, and the user is supposed to adapt and be happy when hearing “I am Antigravityyyyy”.