Posted by bratao 19 hours ago
The reality is that if you optimise a harness for a family of tasks[1], then most of these models give successful output. And there, gemini flash's speed shines.
For general coding assistant, you want it to be well, general, and you use a harness without too much customisation to something specific. Here you need deeply post trained coding assistants and implementors like codex/sol or claude/opus. Gemini flash in its current form will be too happy-go-lucky if you try using it the way we all use codex and is better used in a constrained setting.
tl;dr gemini flash for "LLM-aided workflows in production" is super good today. Cheap as well.
[1] Stuff like this: https://antigravity.google/blog/teamwork-when-ai-becomes-a-r...
In all seriousness, gemini has the best interactive planning document/orchestration. Tell it to create a plan document and work through it with it and it will preform really well(in antigravity products). But this is the case with plan modes with every model, I just think the interactive document that antigravity uses is really well thought out.
Once the system prompt complexity goes up, Flash starts to write very dense english. it might be fine for tasks like coding, but not for user-facing text meant to be digested by the average person.
I haven't tested 3.8 on my workload yet.
As much as I like the speed and interactivity, I really don’t trust it
What's the simplest explanation?
It may be that these flash models are simply post trained larger older models.