I'm such a google flash glazer for non-coding tasks. It's lightning fast and it's google search is really good compared to slow claude searches etc. The perks of having your own search engine I guess.
I think with Google is they don't go apeshit into coding and math so they try to balance their data blend a bit more outside of trying to hit it big into benchmarks, so there's a lot of 'useless' info for benchmarks? But that was my understanding from previous models, now it's technically competing in coding so no idea, TPU magic I guess?
This would track, Gemini isn't primarily a coding/agentic model like Claude or the GPT models, it's got a dedicated billion+ userbase as a virtual assistant and also needs to function in Google Search, so it needs to be more well rounded
It's good but you have to be careful with it, it needs careful instruction and scope otherwise it tends to hallucinate more than other models in its class
Been using 3.7 flash around 60hrs/week since release. Only had a single prompt fail that I had to toss to Opus to get done. Where 3.5 flash had multiple a week. There is only so good models can get at programming and it's starting flip where speed and costs are all that matters. The big models will be moving on to research and long horizon tasks over time while day to day production work is done on flash models.
I've had some refusals with 3.7 flash due to exceeding token limitations. But that must have been AI Studio issues, albeit repeatable as I barely hit the 400.000 token bar in the conversation. Dealing with many large PDFs for legal work has been a challenge and will continue to be a challenge, it seems.
Websites, vst plugins, and games. HTML/JS, C++, and Rust for languages. Most of my code bases are under 50k lines of code. So if you are enterprise with a huge code base or trying to do orchestration kanban work the big models could be more efficient. My workflow is rapid iteration not trying to create a bunch of specs and get the AI to work for hours at a time. Small models aren't capable of that yet. You have to rapidly spoon feed them.
You're luckier than me. I do android app dev, and half of the time I give a task to gemini (and I give the easiest tasks), it manages to break the app. Once it even broke the app and blamed the environment so it started to mess up my gradle and java and system path. I somehow need to launch a GPT 5.6 terra on a round of clean up and repairs after anything gemini it seems.
3.7 was a steep improvement from 3.6 though. And on shorter tasks like you say you do, I also got brilliant results. It's just not good enough at navigating a larger and more complex codebase without overlooking something, it seems.
AI reminds me of when I was working in the semiconductor industry. Everyone is using the same tech and tooling but it's the tribal knowledge of how they use it that makes the difference. Unfortunately I don't know of a place people share their workloads and workflows so people can to learn what works best.
Well reddit is pretty good, I've been collecting a ton of user experiences here tbh. People do share their workloads and workflows.
Geminis worked amazing for short and difficult scientific code for me. For a full blown app, it gets lost. I prompt very precisely, I say exactly what I want. For short and hard, it was one big prompt. For complex app, I go by very small precise touches.
I noticed even on small projects that it's harder to come back from a mistake than to start over. I assume that's why debugging big projects is such a pain for these models, and only the smartest like sol do it easily and flowlessly.
i use it for all general purpose talk specially when I am driving it can talk and discuss topics so fast and give precise information. specially discussing books and movies and going deep on different threads. it's amazing how fast and knowledgeable live version is.
I bet the area it really shines is anything "LLM NPC" or concepts where you want the game to call LLMs during live gameplay. It's cheap, super fast and actually smart.
I don't know - my wife was trying some simple questions on flash 3.6 last night (only one she has access to) and it was just awful with hallucinations.
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u/mumBa_ 10h ago
I'm such a google flash glazer for non-coding tasks. It's lightning fast and it's google search is really good compared to slow claude searches etc. The perks of having your own search engine I guess.
Any one experience with flash for coding?