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Gemini 3.1 Pro

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431–440 of 951 posts

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini just doesn’t do even mildly well in agentic stuff and I don’t know why. OpenAI has mostly caught up with Claude in agentic stuff, but Google needs to be there and be there quickly

Because Search is not agentic. Most of Gemini's users are Search converts doing extended-Search-like behaviors. Agentic workflows are a VERY small percentage of all LLM usage at the moment. As that market becomes more important, Google will pour more resources into it.

> Agentic workflows are a VERY small percentage of all LLM usage at the moment. As that market becomes more important, Google will pour more resources into it.

I do wonder what percentage of revenue they are. I expect it's very outsized relative to usage (e.g. approximately nobody who is receiving them is paying for those summaries at the top of search results)

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#432
post #332
post #306

These models are so powerful. It's totally possible to build entire software products in the fraction of the time it took before. But, reading the comments here, the behaviors from one version to another point version (not major version mind you) seem very divergent. It feels like we are now able to manage incredibly smart engineers for a month at the price of a good sushi dinner. But it also feels like you have to b…

I had an interesting experience recently where I ran Opus 4.6 against a problem that o4-mini had previously convinced me wasn't tractable... and Opus 4.6 found me a great solution. https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-chronicle/issues/20 This inspired me to point the latest models at a bunch of my older projects, resulting in a flurry of fixes and unblocks.

From the project description here for your sqlite-chronicle project:

> Use triggers to track when rows in a SQLite table were updated or deleted

Just a note in case its interesting to anyone, sqlite compatible Turso database has CDC, a changes table! https://turso.tech/blog/introducing-change-data-capture-in-t...

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this sentiment. It may hold true for other LLM use cases (image generation, creative writing, summarizing large texts), but when it comes to coding specifically, Google is *always* behind OpenAI and Anthropic, despite having virtually infinite processing power, money, and being the ones who started this race in the first place. Until now, I've only ever used Gemini for coding tests. As long as I ha…

> despite having virtually infinite processing power, money Just because they have the money doesn't mean that they spend it excessively. OpenAI and Anthropic are both offering coding plans that are possibly severely subsidized, as they are more concerned with growth at all cost, while Google is more concerned with profitability. Google has the bigger warchest and could just wait until the other two run out of money…

Agreed, also worth pointing out that Google still owns 14% of Anthropic + Anthropic is signing billion dollar scale deals with Google Cloud to train their models on their TPUs. So Claude success indirectly contributes to Google success. The AI race is not only about the frontier models.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors Just asking "Explain what this service does?" turns into [No response for three minutes...] +729 -522

What. You don't have yours ask for edit approval?

Ask mode exists, I think the models work on the assumption that if you're allowing edits then of course you must want edits.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#435
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.

At this point, the pelican benchmark became so widely used that there must be high quality pelicans in the dataset, I presume. What about generating an okapi on a bicycle instead?

Loads of examples here https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simons been doing this exact test for nearly 18 months now, if vendors want to benchmaxx it then they've had more than enough time to do so already.

Exactly. As far as I'm concerned, the benchmark is useless. It's way too easy and rewarding to train on it.

It's just an in-joke, he doesn't intend it as a serious benchmark anymore. I think it's funny.

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#437

Does well on SVGs outside of "pelican riding on a bicycle" test. Like this prompt: "create a svg of a unicorn playing xbox" https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/NeKACuHj Still some tweaks to the final result, but I am guessing with the ARC-AGI benchmark jumping so much, the model's visual abilities are allowing it to do this well.

can we move on from SVG to 3D models at some point?

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#438
post #65

Does well on SVGs outside of "pelican riding on a bicycle" test. Like this prompt: "create a svg of a unicorn playing xbox" https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/NeKACuHj Still some tweaks to the final result, but I am guessing with the ARC-AGI benchmark jumping so much, the model's visual abilities are allowing it to do this well.

I'm thinking now that as models get better and better at generating SVGs, there could be a point where we can use them to just make arbitrary UIs and interactive media with raw SVGs in realtime (like flash games).

> there could be a point where we can use them to just make arbitrary UIs and interactive media with raw SVGs

So render ui elements using xml-like code in a web browser? You’re not going to believe me when I tell you this…

Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an excellent demonstration of the main issue I have with the Gemini family of models, they always go "above and beyond" to do a lot of stuff, even if I explicitly prompt against it. In this case, most of the SVG ends up consisting not just of a bike and a pelican, but clouds, a sun, a hat on the pelican and so much more. Exactly the same thing happens when you code, it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do…

> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors Not like human programmers. I would never do this and have never struggled with it in the past, no...

Fairer comparison would be against other models, which are typically better at instruction following. You say "don't change anything not explicitly mentioned" or "Don't add any new code comments" and they tend to follow that.
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