But have you tried any other interfaces for Gemini? Like the Gemini Code Assistant in VSCode? Or Gemini-backed Aider?

Have you tried them? Which one is fairly simple but just works?

I hate how I can copy paste long text into Claude (becomes a pasted text) and it is accepted, but in Gemini it is limited.

You can paste it in a text file and upload that. A little annoying compared to claude, but does work.

Thanks, will give it a try.

Uploading files on google is now great. I uploaded my python script and the text data files I was using the script to process. I asked it how best to optimize the code. It actually ran the python code on the data files. Then recommended changes then when prompted ran the script again to show the new results. At first I was like maybe hallucinating but no the data was correct.

Yeah "they" run Python code now quite well. They generate some output using Python "internally" (albeit shows you the code).

+1 on this. Improving Gemini apps and live mode will go such a long way for them. Google actually has the best model line-up now but the apps and APIs hold them back so much.