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Gemini 3.1 Pro

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Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#621
post #222
post #118

Pelican on a bicycle in drawio - https://imgur.com/a/tNgITTR (FWIW I'm finding a lot of utility in LLMs doing diagrams in tools like drawio)

How are you prompting it to draw diagrams in drawio

Here's the chat I used for the drawing - https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...

Save the xml, import to drawio

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the agentic benchmarks for 3.1 indicate Gemini has caught up. the gains are big from 3.0 to 3.1. For example the APEX-Agents benchmark for long time horizon investment banking, consulting and legal work: 1. Gemini 3.1 Pro - 33.2% 2. Opus 4.6 - 29.8% 3. GPT 5.2 Codex - 27.6% 4. Gemini Flash 3.0 - 24.0% 5. GPT 5.2 - 23.0% 6. Gemini 3.0 Pro - 18.0%

Ranking Codex 5.2 ahead of plain 5.2 doesn't make sense. Codex is expressly designed for coding tasks. Not systems design, not problem analysis, and definitely not banking, but actually solving specific programming tasks (and it's very, very good at this). GPT 5.2 (non-codex) is better in every other way.

Swapped sonnet and opus on my last reply, oops

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#623
post #59
post #52

Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.

What is that, a snack in the basket?

The number of snacks in the basket is a random variable with a Poisson distribution.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand. But isn't it a sign of "smarts" that one can generalize from analoguous tasks?

Sure it is, but it's a different set of smarts than the kind of gotcha logic puzzle trying to be tested with the car wash question.

My gut says you’re right, but I don’t know if this is indeed true. It might be the same thing.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#625
One underappreciated reason for the agentic gap: Gemini tends to over-explain its reasoning mid-tool-call in a way that breaks structured output expectations. Claude and GPT-4o have both gotten better at treating tool calls as first-class operations. Gemini still feels like it's narrating its way through them rather than just executing.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#626

People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF. Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price. Yet people here act like Gemini is dead weight ____ Update: 3.1 was 40% of the cost to run AA index vs Opus Thinking AND SONNET, beat Opus, and still 30% faster for output speed. https://artificialanalysis.ai/?speed=intelligence-vs-speed&m...

Gemini is the most paradoxical model because it benchmarks great even in private benchmarks done by regular people, Deep Mind is unquestionably full of capable engineers with incredible skill, and personally Gemini has been great for my day job and my coding for fun (not for profit) endeavors. Switching between it and 4.6 in antigravity and I don't see much of a difference, they both do what I ask.

But man, people are really avid about it being an awful model.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#627

I hope this works better than 3.0 Pro I'm a former Googler and know some people near the team, so I mildly root for them to at least do well, but Gemini is consistently the most frustrating model I've used for development. It's stunningly good at reasoning, design, and generating the raw code, but it just falls over a lot when actually trying to get things done, especially compared to Claude Opus. Within VS Code Copi…

Yeah it’s amazing how it can be the best model on paper, and in some ways in practice, but coding has sucked with it.

Makes you wonder though how much of the difference is the model itself vs Claude Code being a superior agent.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#628
post #602

I hope this works better than 3.0 Pro I'm a former Googler and know some people near the team, so I mildly root for them to at least do well, but Gemini is consistently the most frustrating model I've used for development. It's stunningly good at reasoning, design, and generating the raw code, but it just falls over a lot when actually trying to get things done, especially compared to Claude Opus. Within VS Code Copi…

> Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress. Yes, gemini loops but I've found almost always it's just a matter of interrupting and telling it to continue. Claude is very good until it tries something 2-3 times, can't figure it out and then tries to trick you by changing your tests instead of your code (if you explicitly tell it not to, maybe it will decide to ask)…

I haven't used 3.1 yet, but 3.0 Pro has been frustrating for two reasons:

- it is "lazy": I keep having to tell it to finish, or continue, it wants to stop the task early.

- it hallucinates: I have arguments with it about making up API functions to well known libraries which just do not exist.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#629
post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also worked at Google (on the original Gemini, when it was still Bard internally) and my experience largely mirrors this. My finding is that Gemini is pretty great for factual information and also it is the only one that I can reliably (even with the video camera) take a picture of a bird and have it tell me what the bird is. But it is just pretty bad as a model to help with development, myself and everyone I know…

Gemini interesting with Google software gives me the best feature of all LLMs. When I receive a invite for an event, I screenshot it, share with Gemini app and say: add to my Calendar. It's not very complex, but a great time saver

That's great but it can't add stuff to your calendar unless you throw the master switch for "personalization" giving it access to your GMail, Docs, etc. I tried that and it went off the rails immediately, started yapping in an unrelated context about the 2002 Dodge Ram that I own, which of course I do not own, but some imbecile who habitually uses my email address once ordered parts for one. I found that to be a pretty bad feature so I had to turn it off, and now it can't do the other stuff like make calendars or add my recipes to Keep.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#630

One underappreciated reason for the agentic gap: Gemini tends to over-explain its reasoning mid-tool-call in a way that breaks structured output expectations. Claude and GPT-4o have both gotten better at treating tool calls as first-class operations. Gemini still feels like it's narrating its way through them rather than just executing.

I agree with this; it feels like the most likely tool to drop its high-level comments in code comments.
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