Opus 5.5 has been noticeably better than other models at coding, is Gemini’s (public) AI that close? And is it cheaper?
I use Paseo and there is a noticeable difference when GPT-6.1 Sol is driving the orchestrator vs Opus/Sonnet 5.5 driving the orchestrator. Anthropic models ignore the shared system prompt to use the Paseo tools for sub-agents and prefer to use its own native sub-agents. It ignores the skills mentioned in the system prompt, but will use them if I explicitly tell it to in a user prompt or I extra emphasize the instruction in an XML fenced block in the system prompt or CLAUDE.md like <BOOTSTRAP_MUST_EXECUTE_AT_START>
Sometimes, I feel like I have to explicitly prompt Anthropic models to behave the way I want it to (even with system prompts in place with the EXACT instruction). Sometimes it even feels like it's disregarding CLAUDE.md. To me, this makes me feel like it is the less compliant of the two because I constantly have to steer it manually. Anthropic models also feels like they prefer to go lone-wolf. I want my orchestrator to use the other subs (configured with different platforms and models) to evaluate a design; Opus really wants to lone-wolf and solo everything.
That said, I prefer Anthropic models generally only when the task is more open ended and exploratory. The Anthropic models' "mind of their own" benefits here; GPT models tend to be too agreeable; and too eager to agree with any change in direction. But for actual coding once a direction/plan is in place, I would much rather delegate it to GPT (more likely to draw on the harness for context, skills, instructions, and tools -> more consistency).
Anthropic's 1m context window default and shorter cache TTL are also not great in agentic flows where an agent could become idle and then re-activated. Burns tokens very quickly. I have it tuned down to 300k across all models (recommend doing this for multi-agent coding).
For sure it's annoying building up so much knowledge about a single product that changes every 6m anyway, but what can you do.
> For sure it's annoying building up so much knowledge about a single product that changes every 6m anyway, but what can you do.
I use Paseo which can use both CC and Codex (and Pi, OpenCode, etc) and spread ownership of roles around. I find I get more autonomy from a team this way.
More detailed write up here: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2026/10/larping-with-agents-and-wh...
Re: changes: Paseo's plugin system is very, very good. Some limitations since not all of the internals are accessible via plugin system, but allows building very custom UIs. So this may be a point of delta with T3. But I have some coworkers that have gone absolutely HAM with the plugins and built entirely custom workspaces (wild).
For me, what I have found most useful about Paseo is the multi-platform, multi-agent setup because this has given my agent teams much, much more autonomy that I feel like I can trust (after weeks of watching them work). The agent profile system looks too simple at first blush, but actually, that simplicity and semi-structured dynamic nature of the sub-agents is what makes it powerful.
Might try T3 for a week and see; thanks for sharing!
EDIT: T3 has no docs site yet, but sifting through docs, this was interesting: https://github.com/pingdotgg/t3code/blob/main/docs/user/remo...
> Each T3 Connect account can link up to 3 machines. Phones and browsers do not count. A paid T3 Chat plan raises the limit to 10 machines with Pro, or 100 with Premier.
4-Carbon is, per benchmarks, said to be superior to Opus 5.5 at coding.
At general tasks -- search, medical, interfacing with maps and mail, planning, etc. -- the Google models are already superior.