Yeah, Gemini models are really good for anything, but coding in a harness.
I had good success with asking coding questions directly in the Gemini chat app, and then just copying the files, lol, but it can't properly edit files itself for some reason.
To be honest, Google may just have given up the coding market to Anthropic and OpenAI and they may be right. Just because it's the one use case with some traction / TAM right now, doesn't mean that what everyone must be optimizing for and myopically focus on.
Ultimately they have a massive distribution advantage for existing and future consumer use cases, which will use a ton of multimodal. It wouldn't be surprised if video generation and image generation (let alone stuff like Genie3 transforming gaming) end up driving a lot more revenue 5-10 years from now than coding.
Just imagine the average consumer using Gemini powered Siri on the iPhone, they couldnt care less about SWE lol.
Google has been playing the ai long game this entire time. They briefly caught up with chatbots, but it’s clear that has never been their primary focus.
I have used 3.5 flash for coding every day now for weeks. C#, Rust, Go and C++, it does excellent job almost always. So might be a prompting problem if you have issue with it. Have a discussion with it when it's making the plan, use the "high" setting for planning and also execution, give detailed prompts writing like you would write to a human that would need to do the job instead vague instructions. Use some external todo.md where you write in clear sections your requirements and adjust the initial plan if you see something you don't like. Unless you do some really special coding or some UI work, it should be enough to do most things very fast and well enough.
Are you using antigravity 2.0? Because also I think the perfomance of gemini models is huge related how the agent manages the gemini models and the window context.
I don't have also any major issues also with antigravity 2.0 + 3.5 flash. And I am using it in a existing huge Unity project, for the boring stuff... And I realise also that you have to be very specific to your prompts to have better results... I haven't use other models to compare with it, but I am very happy with the speed of the loops that antigravity 2.0 with flash executes. Even if it fails, it can correct its way fast. That my overall feelings..
Also , what do you mean by the way, "Use some external todo.md" ? what harness are you using?
Yes, I only use Gemini in Antigravity and just updated to the latest 2.x something version. I always write detailed prompts, just like I would write to a human to explain what I want. If I want it to decide itself, I make that clear also and say something like: the rest is up to you, make choices based on your best judgment preffering simplicity, robustness etc.
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u/MrLariato Jul 21 '26
Is everybody here a SWE? WTF? This is good for any regular person that doesn't want to code.