Gemini 3.7 is my workhorse - fast and good enough for most tasks. Occasionally I go to GPT Sol or Claude to improve Gemini's output or for more complex tasks, but more than of my work usage is Gemini 3.7. Quite happy to test 3.8 now.
Same here. I see so many people obsessing over the latest most state of the art bleeding edge models and yelling at Google for not being there, but I feel like the vast majority of people don't actually need those models. Flash has just been super useful and incredibly fast in my experience.
I prefer luna for most development, especially when I am guiding the process. Sometimes terra. I have had terrible results coding with sol. It is way over-tuned on RL to make something that completes the task, no matter what. I end up with way too much code that does a lot of things I didn't ask for.
IME you're supposed to have Sol drive Luna sub-agents to do 90% of the work. Sol should primarily be the verifier and goal setter. Use omp.sh with Task Delegation -> Always to strongly encourage Sol to drive Lunas. Also Luna prefers to be talked to with English in XML.
I love Luna too. An excellent model and still usually better value per dollar than Gemini if you pay for API tokens. Things may change with 3.8 - we'll know soon.
That is a very valid question. I happen to want to get Claude Code muscle memory under my belt for professional reasons in addition to get side projects advanced, could have settled for Codex else. Also OpenCode with eastern models gets part of the job done. In CC beyond using Luna for the cheap, I am using DeepSeek flash v4 for subagents, that is a further cost shaver. Not sure if in Codex I could do that.
When I read all the issues people have with Claude - the aggressive guardrails, the cost, how quickly it burns tokens - it seems almost masochistic to use it. Just seems like herd behavior - people use it because everyone else is using it, and because they believe it’s the “best”, whatever that means. (Benchmarks certainly don’t help define that.)
Google One plans are quite a good value actually - for a few bucks you get more Gemini plus space in Drive and other extras. Even through API, $3.75 for nearly Sol-level quality isn't that bad.
And let's not forget you can use it for free in AI Studio, and in the user app (even free accounts get tons of usage, though it's still 3.6 there), and in Antygravity.
That's the thing. I am completely lost because there are so many redundant paths to get the same thing and I'm trying to figure out which one is the best deal
Well are you looking for a subscription or pay-as-you-go API usage?
Subscription? -> Google One plan (http://one.google.com/)
API? -> AI Studio (https://aistudio.google.com/)
It's not really any different than the choice you'd make with OpenAI/Anthropic depending on how you plan to use it. Except as a hyperscalar, it's also offered first party from Google Cloud (like Claude via Amazon Bedrock or GPT via Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service):
Google Cloud -> Gemini Enterprise AI Platform (https://cloud.google.com/ai)
But if you're using models via OpenCode or Pi or whatever, the flow chart is basically just "Go To AI Studio" unless you or your employer is already used to Google Cloud, otherwise there's no need to subject yourself to all those enterprise-y IAM dashboards and stuff. You still get free usage from AI Studio when you generate the API key without needing to add billing details so very easy to try.
good summary, thanks. I used to use Google Cloud for consulting and projects (I worked at Google for a while, and there is some nostalgia) so I have Gemini API via Google Cloud, but I am retired now. Your post reminded me that I need to shut that all down and switch to getting an API key using AI Studio.
I have spent two months experimenting with a wide range of US and Chinese models, and I had a lot of fun doing that, but I am in the process of switching to just using local models, using Gemini on an API if I need it, and once or twice a month when I really need help on something difficult, I use something top-tier like Kimi K3.
This is what killed Gemini for me. The model might well be great, but the ecosystem Google has built around them is a confusing maze of not-quite-there products.
I used to not be excited about the next consumer tech gadget or the next JS framework, but I am now pretty excited about transforming new tech now (AI, energy, space, etc).
IMO they are being pretty smart about this - the conventional wisdom is to cannibalize your own products before someone else does, and LLMs are obviously a major threat to search, with ChatGPT probably the biggest threat.
Google's "AI Overview" search results, which started out awful, are now much improved - can be actually useful - as long as you are not asking specialist questions, and the Gemini chat and voice apps are also great for everyday use, although not sure if they are yet monetizing this (volume probably a lot less than search I'd guess).
The Apple Siri-Gemini deal is also a significant way for Google to not get sidelined.
In the bigger picture, people were starting to catch on to the fact that Google's search product was becoming increasingly useless.
Around here we'd come to that conclusion at least a couple of years ago, due to abusive SEO and so forth. And that understanding was becoming even more widespread.
I don't know if Google's got the later parts of the game figured out yet, but I have to think that they'd realized that Search was dying. While there's still some value there, may as well use it as a hook to pull people into what they expect to be the next era.
It's a very good model for this size and price. I tried it with a couple of small tasks - just an year ago this would be the level of the leading models.
"Existing server contracts will keep their terms and conditions and remain active. The changes apply exclusively to new orders and rescales of existing servers, as well as the future products that we will introduct using the new product structure."
I agree with a lot that you say and notice similar trends in our work.
I am a little skeptical about this one though:
"You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things, so it's not like you need to rely on anyone else."
One of the reasons for devs to work in company is not that they can't deliver the work themselves. It's that they don't have the connections to land customers. Most devs need a company at least to handle the marketing so they can focus on what they are good at.
Not only that, but do you really want to be handling the contract negotiations, sales, business taxes, insurance, and everything else?
Being a sole-proprietorship means doing things you aren't skilled in and, most likely, not interested in doing. When I did it, I had a horrid work-life balance and I would not recommend it.
Also, I don't think LLMs have invented a way to make our applications maintenance-free. At some point outages become very costly, and a 24/7 support schedule for 1 dev is going to have trouble scaling. When production is down, we generally don't have some frontline staff vibecode it back up.
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