Agreed.

I pretty much stopped shopping around once Gemini 2.0 Flash came out.

For general, cloud-centric software development help, it does the job just fine.

I'm honestly quite fond of this Gemini model. I feel silly saying that, but it's true.

Yes, this one is addictive for its speed and I like how Google was clever and also offered it in a powerful reasoning edition. This helps offset deficiencies from being smaller while still being cheap. I also find it quite sufficient for my kind of coding. I only pull out 2.5 Pro on larger and complex code bases that I think might need deeper domain specific knowledge beyond the coding itself.

I'm a World of Warcraft & Dota 2 player, using "the meta" in that way is pretty common in gaming these days I think. The "meta" is still the 'metagame' in the competitive ecosystem sense, but it also refers to strategies that are considered flavor of the month (FOTM) or just generally safe bets.

So there's "the meta", and there's "that strategy is meta", or "that strategy is the meta."

gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25 is the paid version which doesn't use your data

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#data-use-paid

Personally, I frankly do not care for most things. But for more sensitive things which might land me in trouble, local models are the way to go.