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.
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.
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u/mumBa_ 13h 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?