I would be really curious to know what tools you've tried and are using where gemini feels better to use
Last night I was happily coding away with Codex after writing off Gemini CLI yet again due to weirdness in the CLI tooling.
I ran into a very tedious problem that all of the agents failed to diagnose and were confidently patching random things as solutions back and forth (Claude Code - Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3 Codex, Gemini 3 Pro CLI).
I took a step back, used python script to extract all of the relevant codebase, and popped open the browser and had Gemini-3-Pro set to Pro (highest) reasoning, and GPT-5.2 Pro crunch on it.
They took a good while thinking.
But, they narrowed the problem down to a complex interaction between texture origins, polygon rotations, and a mirroring implementation that was causing issues for one single "player model" running through a scene and not every other model in the scene. You'd think the "spot the difference" would make the problem easier. It did not.
I then took Gemini's proposal and passed it to GPT-5.3-Codex to implement. It actually pushed back and said "I want to do some research because I think there's a better code solution to this". Wait a bit. It solved the problem in the most elegant and compatible way possible.
So, that's a long winded way to say that there _is_ a use for a very smart model that only works in the browser or via API tooling, so long as it has a large context and can think for ages.
In a lot of industries, you can't afford this anyway, since all code has to be carefully reviewed. A lot of models are great when you do isolated changes with 100-1000 lines.
Sometimes it's okay to ship a lot of code from LLMs, especially for the frontend. But, there are a lot of companies and tasks where backend bugs cost a lot, either in big customers or direct money. No model will allow you to go wild in this case.
Coding has been vastly improved in 3.0 and 3.1, but Google won't give us the full juice as Google usually does.
Google has the datasets, the expertise, and the motivation.
- yes
- yes (not quite as good as CC/Codex but you can swap the API instead of using gemini-cli)
- same stuff as them
- better than others, google got long (1mm) context right before anyone else and doesn't charge two kidneys, an arm, and a leg like anthropic
but claude and claude code are different things
Gemini 3.1 (and Gemini 3) are a lot smarter than Claude Opus 4.6
But...
Gemini 3 series are both mediocre at best in agentic coding.
Single shot question(s) about a code problem vs "build this feature autonomously".
Gemini's CLI harness is just not very good and Gemini's approach to agentic coding leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn't perform the double-checking that Codex does, it's slower than Claude, it runs off and does things without asking and not clearly explaining why.
>it's [Gemini] nowhere near claude opus
Could you be a bit more specific, because your sibling reply says "pretty close to opus performance" so it would help if you gave additional information about how you use it and how you feel the two compare. Thanks.
On top of every version of Gemini, you also get both Claude models and GPT-OSS 120B. If you're doing webdev, it'll even launch a (self-contained) Chrome to "see" the result of its changes.
I haven't played around Codex, but it blows Claude Code's finicky terminal interface out of the water in my experience.