Gemini 2.5 Pro is also a great reasoning model, I still prefer it over GPT 5

Gemini is great, it's just incredibly clumsy at tool use and that's why it fails so often in practice. I'm looking forward to the next version, it will for sure address it, it's a big issue internally too (I'm a recent xoogler).

I'm excited for the next version!

Can you elaborate on “clumsy at tool use”?

have you ever witnessed how sometimes Gemini makes multiple attempts at writing a file only to give up and start chanting "I'm worthless...".

That's tool use failure :)

Yes it really is horrible at using tools. Codex is way better (even better than Claude code ). Gemini is great at doing audits and content (though I’ve switched to codex for everything all in one).

Personally been using GPT-OSS-120b locally with reasoning_effort set to `high` and it blows pretty much every other local model out of the water, but takes a lot of time for it to eventually do a proper content reply. But for fire-and-forget jobs like "Create a well-researched report on X from perspective Y" it works really well.

what machine are you running GPT-OSS-120B on? I'm currently only able to get GPT-OSS-20B working on my macbook using Ollama