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Comment by stephen_cagle | Hacker News Reader

I also worked at Google (on the original Gemini, when it was still Bard internally) and my experience largely mirrors this. My finding is that Gemini is pretty great for factual information and also it is the only one that I can reliably (even with the video camera) take a picture of a bird and have it tell me what the bird is. But it is just pretty bad as a model to help with development, myself and everyone I know uses Claude. The benchmarks are always really close, but my experience is that it does not translate to real world (mostly coding) task.

tldr; It is great at search, not so much action.

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Gemini interesting with Google software gives me the best feature of all LLMs. When I receive a invite for an event, I screenshot it, share with Gemini app and say: add to my Calendar.

It's not very complex, but a great time saver

Yeah, as evidenced by the birds (above), I think it is probably the best vision model at this time. That is a good idea, I should also use it for business cards as well I guess.

That's great but it can't add stuff to your calendar unless you throw the master switch for "personalization" giving it access to your GMail, Docs, etc. I tried that and it went off the rails immediately, started yapping in an unrelated context about the 2002 Dodge Ram that I own, which of course I do not own, but some imbecile who habitually uses my email address once ordered parts for one. I found that to be a pretty bad feature so I had to turn it off, and now it can't do the other stuff like make calendars or add my recipes to Keep.

Gemini is pretty hit-or-miss with tool calls. Even when I explicitly ask for a code block, it tends to break the formatting and spill the text everywhere.

I don't know ... as of now I am literally instructing it to solve the chained expression computation problem which incurs a lot of temporary variables, of which some can be elided by the compiler and some cannot. Think linear algebra expressions which yield a lot of intermediate computations for which you don't want to create a temporary. This is production code and not an easy problem.

And yet it happily told me what I exactly wanted it to tell me - rewrite the goddamn thing using the (C++) expression templates. And voila, it took "it" 10 minutes to spit out the high-quality code that works.

My biggest gripe for now with Gemini is that Antigravity seems to be written by the model and I am experiencing more hiccups than I would like to, sometimes it's just stuck.

People's objections are not the quality of code or analysis that Gemini produces. It's that it's inept at doing things like editing pieces of files or running various tools.

As an ex-Googler part of me wonders if this has to do with the very ... bespoke ... nature of the developer tooling inside Google. Though it would be crazy for them to be training on that.

Can't argue with that, I'll move my Bayesian's a little in your direction. With that said, are most other models able to do this? Also, did it write the solution itself or use a library like Eigen?

I have noticed that LLM's seem surprisingly good at translating from one (programming) language to another... I wonder if transforming a generic mathematical expression into an expression template is a similar sort of problem to them? No idea honestly.

It wrote a solution by itself, from the scratch, with dozens of little type traits, just as I would do. Really clean code. And the problem at hand is not the mathematical, linear algebra one. I gave that example just for easier understanding of the problem at hand. The problem is actually about the high-performance serialization. Finally, I instructed it to build complex test cases with multiple levels of nested computations to really check whether we are making any copies or not. Did it in a breeze.

Not sure about the other models. I'd guess that Claude would do equally good but I don't have the subscription for other models so I can't really compare. I for sure know that the ones from the free-tier are not worth spending time with for tasks like this. I use them mostly for one-shot questions.

So yeah, I think I have a pretty good experience. Not perfect definitely but still looks like a SF to me. Even to a highly trained C++ expert it would take probably like a day to build something like this. And most C++ folks wouldn't even know how to build this.

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