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Comment by moonu | Hacker News Reader

Curious why you use Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite instead of SAM/Moondream? Any specific workflows where it outperforms?

Using it as part of an agentic CAD workflow, where the model needs to be able to selectively segment from parts of a user's image as it works on a project. Using OpenSCAD so being a general purpose model is very useful to me.

If openscad is the thing Google models has consistently outpermormed the comparable competition in my experiences. Few other models has better physical spatial reasoning skills.

I've found OpenAI models the best (although I haven't tried Argon) for OpenSCAD.

I have found a couple of problems Opus could fix that Sol couldn't (smoothing a three way join between curved edges and a bezier curve face is one I can remember). But it's much slower than Sol and generally doesn't produce as nice results.

There's no reason that an agentic workflow has to use the primary agent model for every intuitive computing task; in fact, that would've sounded absurd before the singularity. Maybe an old flash model is the best in class for this, but A) I doubt it and B) it's still gonna be wildly more expensive.

Assuming I'm not just misunderstanding something critical (happens often!) and you haven't explored this already (very possible!), pointing your agent at this link and asking for some prototypes might be illuminating: https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=image-segmentatio...

Semantic segmentation is a lot different, he needs to segment one off things in CAD it sounds like.

I've had pretty good luck having Gemini or Claude use SAM as a tool. Gemini is really good at identifying things in images, but it doesn't do a great job doing segmentation per se, but SAM on its own can't really decide what you need to segment.

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