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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Google could have been #1 for a little while, but they botched their release and squandered their temporary lead. (As usual.) If I worked there, I'd be so pissed.

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So is Google still in the race? Does anyone actually uses Aragon or Carbon or whatever model they released for coding?

Can you actually use it through some subscription, or only through the API?

Yes? I regularly use Argon in agy on my Google One subscription.

It's in Cursor

I tried using it as part of my Pro/One/whatever subscription (the one that comes with Youtube Lite). For code review, it was able to find some things that Sol 6.1 couldn't. I found it quite useful. But for code generation, it's pathetically slow and the code isn't impressive. It's at least one year behind.

I do. I prefer it to Opus 5.5 - just as good at coding for my needs, but so much more pleasant to work with.

I am not sure how people keep saying google are not in the race, or have lost it or whatever when just a few hours ago they had the #1 model? What more do people want?

I actually just think it's a meme to talk down on Gemini at any opportunity here. There's probably a fair number of people that wrote off antigravity at its (pretty rocky) launch. And Google also doesn't provide any kind of good sandbox-y experience to Just Try their models, which probably bites them here too.

But Gemini models are still neck and neck in the lead both in my experience and in benchmarks, and Gemini is far above the competitors (although Opus 5.5 closed much of the gap) when it comes to any kind of complex web dev. (I generally use Astra for anything 3D, Gemini for anything web/mobile, and Opus for everything else.)

> What more do people want?

well, releasing it would be nice

Gemini 4 Argon is available in both anti-gravity and the Gemini app for me on my Gmail account and I didn't do anything special (I have a modest drive storage subscription - not the largest nor smallest... Not sure if it is bundled with that or not).

So certainly released to the unwashed masses like me to use for free without any special extra work or API keys.

Their latest internal reshuffling and the strange amount of parallel releases with the same target, their kafkaesque barriers to entry, and a lack of clear vision is what makes people think they’re not in the race anymore. Obviously they still are. They develop new models and also are deep in the compute game too.

On both Gemini 4 releases, it said on the release page that I cannot use it. No timeline as given and I have not seen an announcement otherwise since.

So, what more do I want? It'd be a good start to actually tell me it's available and giving me a clear path to using it via plan & harness?

In my experience Google models have always been mediocre at best and dangerous to use at worst but I must admit that I didn’t try the latest Aragon/carbon crop.

I learned not to put too much trust into benchmarks. The best benchmark is to use the model on a codebase you know well.

I'll have to take your word for it, considering the latest model I'm able to use of theirs is 3.8 Flash for some reason.

I use Argon regularly.

Pretty big Gemini fan - but IMO Argon is universally worse for coding than Astra or Opus 5.5 (un-nerfed).

I strongly prefer Gemini's output compared to anything else. So I typically use Argon to either direct other agents or explain something without psychobabble.

Argon/Carbon have by far the lowest hallucination rates, so IMO it serves as the best bullshit shield from other models.

In terms of implementation (and especially design), it's far behind Astra and Opus, and I'm sure Fable will make that gap even larger.

Argon/Carbon may give you not-the-best advice, but they are far less likely to just flat-out-and-completely lie to you.

Yes, I have found Argon is good at explaining things, which is nice in root cause analysis and debugging / troubleshooting

For an open source project (CrowdGPT) I hit upon this workflow in a recent PR:

    DeepSeek v4 Flash 1017 made a draft plan
    Google Gemini 4 Argon corrected the plan
     DeepSeek v4 Flash 1017 did the first implementation
    Google Gemini 4 Argon debugged the problems in that implementation
    Kimi 2.7 Code did a code review and proposed minor fixes
    DeepSeek v4 Flash 1017 performed the fixes
    Google Gemini 4 Argon debugged one problem that I found in that fix.
    I reviewed the plans and the resulting code

Argon is much superior to Opus for graphic design and creative writing tasks.

It's not as smart for coding as Opus, but it's above the best open weights.

IME, YMMV, etc.

Gemini Flash was my daily driver until 1017 dropped. Not that 1017 is better, they both are dumb in their own ways, it’s just available at far higher tok/sec.

Gemini models also historically are the best writers. 3.1 was the first model I saw that made actually funny jokes regularly.

What Google lacks is a viral marketing team spamming the internet with vibe coded apps and videos.

Optics and incentives. Google will turn on the R&D the day after their Anthropic investment is realised, maybe $80-150bn on a 1.2tn valuation, plus >100bn in spending commitments.

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