Are Googlers themselves happy using Gemini coding agent instead of Claude Code or Codex? (no snark, I'm really asking)
One thing that's interesting is a bunch of internal thought leaders who swear by the Flash models over the Pro models. Whether this is true or not doesn't really matter, the interesting bit to me is that we are at a point with the models where "better" models are not necessarily more useful, and that faster with more work on the harnesses may be a better trade-off.
I'm coming around on this too. deepseek-v4-flash is impressive.
I've seen people outside Google favoring flash Gemini models over the Pro.
There are also some benchmarks where flash models have higher scores, so yes, apparently speed does matter.
I see a lot of people swearing by one model, but without trying others. I see a lot of opinions based on a snapshot of tooling from ~January, when for example Claude Code was exceptional, but that don't appear to have been updated. In blind tests the models appear to be much closer than some folks would have you believe.
Also, for niche use-cases there are clear winners.
But as I said do reach out if you are actually a googler, as my points are really about the internal tech which I am pretty positive about.
As for actual solutions to problems ignoring the VS Code extension aspect, I find all three premiere models to be excellent coding agents for my purposes.
I'd say I'm surprised by it, but uh
Most of them were vibecoded in days, so what do you expect? And new versions just add features, they never fix the old cruft.
Probably there would be some money to be made if someone actually takes the time to write a good agent harness.
This is a bunch of gabagoo. Wrong on so many layers, it's not even worth reading further.
a) goog has agentic coding in both antigravity & cli forms. While it is not at the level of cc + opus, it's still decent.
b) goog has their own versions of models trained on internal code
c) goog has claude in vertex, and most definitely can set it up in secure zones (like they can for their clients) so they'd be able to use claude (at cost) within their own projects.
Hoping they can figure it out sooner rather than later.
Gemini CLI is an absolute joke. I dont know if its the harness, or the Gemini models' poor instruction following, but more than 50% of my sessions gemini turns insane and ends up in thought loops. In another 25% it does far more updating than I asked or is reasonable.
This is why next to no-one talks about either of them. Does Antigravity's agent manager even work yet without crashing and showing zero conversations? In typical google fashion they released AG and appear to have then set it on autopilot with a skeleton crew of less than 1 developer. Clear issues have not been fixed since day 1. Some settings just do not work. Permissions are not respected.
If internal staff aren't happy with the tools they build, typically that should drive improvements to their own tools
He made a follow up after the pushback by GDM.
Google’s businesses are very broad and durable. But Google being the only company in the world without access (except for GDM+labs) to a competent coding agent will take a toll.
We’ll see how long Google can hold out hoping for GDM to create something that is competitive.
I’m guess that within 6 months Google will give up on coding and finally let their devs use Claude/Codex.
This isn’t a security problem, this is a GDM issue with GDM’s promises being far beyond their ability.
I doubt it. I use Gemini CLI daily because Gemini is what work pays for, and I have a personal Claude account. The difference is not that great, especially if you're not doing full vibe-coding. It's unlikely to have the kind of effect you're describing.
Gemini will conduct seconds to minutes of work before requesting aid. And it will commonly fall over.
Claude/Codex will commonly do minutes to hours of work.
The difference is one to two orders of magnitude. It is immense.
If you're talking about the ability to churn out low-stakes systems like websites, or variations on existing widely available systems, then perhaps. But once you get to more complex systems, especially large already existing systems, all LLMs today need significant ongoing assistance to prevent them from going off the rails and down rabbit holes. At that point, the advantage you're claiming tends to evaporate.
My experience running Gemma 4 locally has been similar: after maybe one or two tool calls it starts making tool calls however it feels like. Just yesterday, I watched it redefine a tool like read_file(start, end) into read_file(start, number_of_bytes) and it refused to even consider that it was wrong.