Gemini 3.1 Pro - Hacker News

Posted by MallocVoidstar 12 hours ago

Preview: https://console.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/publishers/google...

Card: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-1-pro/

531 points | 699 commentspage 4

dxbednarczyk 10 hours ago|

Every time I've used Gemini models for anything besides code or agentic work they lean so far into the RLHF induced bold lettering and bullet point list barf that everything they output reads as if the model was talking _at_ me and not _with_ me. In my Openclaw experiment(s) and in the Gemini web UI, I've specifically added instructions to avoid this type of behavior, but it only seemed to obey those rules when I reminded the model of them.

For conversational contexts, I don't think the (in some cases significantly) better benchmark results compared to a model like Sonnet 4.6 can convince me to switch to Gemini 3.1. Has anyone else had a similar experience, or is this just a me issue?

augusto-moura 10 hours ago||

Gemini sounds less personal, but I think that is good. From my experience, the quality of response is much higher than ChatGPT or Grok, and it cites real sources. I want to have a mini-wikipedia response for my questions, not a friend's group chat response

gavinray 10 hours ago|||

I have the opposite viewpoint:

If a model doesn't optimize the formatting of its output display for readability, I don't want to read it.

Tables, embedded images, use of bulleted lists and bold/italicizing etc.

staticman2 10 hours ago|||

I'm not familiar with Openclaw and but the trick to solve this would be to embed a style reminder at the bottom of each user message and ideally hide that from the user with the UI.

This is how roleplay apps like Sillytavern customize the experience for power users by allowing hidden style reminders as part of the user message that accompany each chat message.

InkCanon 10 hours ago|||

I think they all output that bold lettering, point by point style output. I strongly suspect it's part of a synthetic data pipeline all these AI companies have, and it improves performance. Claude seems to be the least of them, but it will start writing code at the drop of a hat. What annoys me in Gemini is that it has a really strange tendency to come up with weird analogies, especially in Pro mode. You'll be asking it about something like red black trees and it'll say "Red Black Trees (The F1 of Tree Data Structures)".

hydrolox 9 hours ago||

Yes, the analogy habit is the most annoying of all. Overall formatting for me is doable, if it didn't divide up an answer into these silly arbitrary categories with useless analogies. I've tried adding in my user preferences to never use analogies but it inevitably falls back into that habit.

losvedir 8 hours ago|||

It definitely has the worst "voice" in my opinion. Feels very overachieving McKinsey intern to me.

markab21 10 hours ago|||

You just articulated why I struggle to personally connect with Gemini. It feels so unrelatable and exhausting to read its output. I prefer to read Opus/Deepseek/GLM over Gemini, Qwen and the open source GPT models. Maybe it is RLHF that is creating my distaste from using it. (I pay for Gemini; I should be using it more... but the outputs just bug me and feel more work to get actionable insight.)

verdverm 10 hours ago||

I have no issues adjusting gemini tone & style with system prompt content

ArmandoAP 10 hours ago||

Model Card https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...

WarmWash 11 hours ago||

It seems google is having a disjointed roll out, and there will likely be an official announcement in a few hours. Apparently 3.1 showed up unannounced in vertex at 2am or something equally odd.

Either way early user tests look promising.

datakazkn 4 hours ago||

One underappreciated reason for the agentic gap: Gemini tends to over-explain its reasoning mid-tool-call in a way that breaks structured output expectations. Claude and GPT-4o have both gotten better at treating tool calls as first-class operations. Gemini still feels like it's narrating its way through them rather than just executing.

carbocation 4 hours ago|

I agree with this; it feels like the most likely tool to drop its high-level comments in code comments.

veselin 9 hours ago||

I am actually going to complain about this: that neither of the Gemini models are not preview ones.

Anthropic seems the best in this. Everything is in the API on day one. OpenAI tend to want to ask you for subscription, but the API gets there a week or a few later. Now, Gemini 3 is not for production use and this is already the previous iteration. So, does Google even intent to release this model?

agentifysh 7 hours ago||

My enthusiasm is a bit muted this cycle because I've been burned by Gemini CLI. These models are very capable but Gemini CLI just doesn't seem to be able to work for one it never follows instructions strictly like its competitors do, and it hallucinates even which is a rarity.

More importantly feels like Google is stretched thin across different Gemini products and pricing reflects this, I still have no idea how to pay for Gemini CLI, in codex/claude its very simple $20/month for entry and $200/month for ton of weekly usage.

I hope whoever is reading this from Google they can redeem Gemini CLI by focusing on being competitive instead of making it look pretty (that seems to be the impression I got from the updates on X)

cheema33 5 hours ago|

> I still have no idea how to pay for Gemini CLI, in codex/claude its very simple $20/month for entry and $200/month for ton of weekly usage.

This!

I would like to sign up for a paid plan for Gemini CLI. But I have not been able to figure out how. I already have Codex and Claude plans. Those were super easy to sign up for.

jiggawatts 4 hours ago||

What’s your difficulty? Google has published easy to follow 27-step instructions for how to sign up for the half a dozen services you need to chain together to enable this common usecase!

knollimar 3 hours ago||

On the 3.0 rollout I signed up for billing and it just silently failed. Solution was to remake billing account and then wait a day

alwinaugustin 3 hours ago||

I use gemini if i need to write something in my native language- Malayalam or translation. it works very well in writing in Indian regional languages.

attentive 4 hours ago||

A lot of gemini bashing. But flash 3.0 with opencode is reasonably good and reliable coder.

I'd rate it between haiku 4.5 (also pretty good for a price) and sonnet. Closer to sonnet.

Sure, if I am not cost-sensitive I'd run everything in opus 4.6 but alas.

pawelduda 10 hours ago||

It's safe to assume they'll be releasing improved Gemini Flash soon? The current one is so good & fast I rarely switch to pro anymore

derac 9 hours ago||

When 3 came out they mentioned that flash included many improvements that didn't make it into pro (via an hn comment). I imagine this release includes those.

tucnak 9 hours ago||

Gemini 3 Pro (high) is a joke compared to Gemini 3 Flash in Antigravity, except it's not even funny. Flash is insane value, and super capable, too. I've had it implement a decompiler for very obscure bytecode, and it was passing all tests in no time. PITA to refactor later, but not insurmountable. Gemini 3 Pro (high) choked on this problem in the early stages... I'm looking forward to comparing 3.1 Pro vs 3.0 Flash, hopefully they have improved on it enough to finally switch over.

n4pw01f 4 hours ago|

I created a nice harness and visual workflow builder for my Gemini agent chains, works very well. I did this so it would create code the way I do, that is very editable.

In contrast, the vs code plugin was pretty bad, and did crazy things like mix languages

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