The eventual nerfing gives me pause. Flash is awesome. What we really want is gemini-3.1-flash :)
Gemini 3.1 Pro
71–80 of 951 posts
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#72Pretty 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.
Great pelican but what’s up with that fish in the basket?
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#73Pretty 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.
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 "helpful" drive-by-refactors, and it keeps adding code comments no matter what I say. Very frustrating experience overall.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#74I’m keen to know how and where are you using Gemini. Anthropic is clearly targeted to developers and OpenAI is general go to AI model. Who are the target demographic for Gemini models? ik that they are good and Flash is super impressive. but i’m curious
I use the Gemini web interface just as I would ChatGPT. They also have coding environment analogues of Claude-Code in Anti-gravity and Gemini-CLI.
When you sign up for the pro tier you also get 2TB of storage, Gemini for workspace and Nest Camera history.
If you're in the Google sphere it offers good value for money.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#75I’m keen to know how and where are you using Gemini. Anthropic is clearly targeted to developers and OpenAI is general go to AI model. Who are the target demographic for Gemini models? ik that they are good and Flash is super impressive. but i’m curious
I find gemini to be the best at travel planning and for story telling of geographical places. For a road trip, I tried all three mainstream providers and I liked Gemini (also personal preference because Gemini took a verbose approach instead of bullet points from others) for it's responses, ways it discovered stories about places I wanted to explore, places it suggested for me and things it gave me to consider those places in the route.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#76Great model until it gets nerfed. I wish they had a higher paid tier to use non nerfed model.
What are you talking about?
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#77I’m keen to know how and where are you using Gemini. Anthropic is clearly targeted to developers and OpenAI is general go to AI model. Who are the target demographic for Gemini models? ik that they are good and Flash is super impressive. but i’m curious
I'd use it for planning, knowledge, and anything visual.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#78Gemini 3 is pretty good, even Flash is very smart for certain things, and fast! BUT it is not good at all at tool calling and agentic workflows, especially compared to the recent two mini-generations of models (Codex 5.2/5.3, the last two versions of Anthropic models), and also fell behind a bit in reasoning. I hope they manage to improve things on that front, because then Flash would be great for many tasks.
yeah, it seems to me like Gemini is a little behind on the current RL patterns and also they dont seem interested in really creating a dedicated coding model. I think they have so much product surface (search, AI mode, gmail, youtube, chrome etc), they are prioritizing making the model very general. but who knows im just talking out of my ass.
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#79Every time I've used Gemini models for anything besides code or agentic work they lean so far into the RLHF induced bold lettering and bullet point list barf that everything they output reads as if the model was talking _at_ me and not _with_ me. In my Openclaw experiment(s) and in the Gemini web UI, I've specifically added instructions to avoid this type of behavior, but it only seemed to obey those rules when I rem…
I think they all output that bold lettering, point by point style output. I strongly suspect it's part of a synthetic data pipeline all these AI companies have, and it improves performance. Claude seems to be the least of them, but it will start writing code at the drop of a hat. What annoys me in Gemini is that it has a really strange tendency to come up with weird analogies, especially in Pro mode. You'll be asking it about something like red black trees and it'll say "Red Black Trees (The F1 of Tree Data Structures)".
Re: Gemini 3.1 Pro
#80Pretty 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.
Did you stop using the more detailed prompt? I think you described it here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/