[dudeinhawaii]

After 2 days of giving it a go, I find that Gemini CLI is still considerably worse than both Codex and Claude Code.

The model itself also has strange behaviors that seem like it gets randomly replaced with Gemini-3-Flash or something else. I'll explain.

Once agentic coding was a bust, I gave it a run as a daily driver for AI assistant. It performed fairly well but then began behaving strangely. It would lose context mid conversation. For instance, I said "In san francisco I'm looking for XYZ". Two turns later I'm asking about food and it gives me suggestions all over the world.

Another time, I asked it about the likelihood of the pending east coast winter storm of affecting my flight. I gave it all the details (flight, stops, time, cities).

Both GPT-5.2 and Claude crunched and came back with high quality estimations and rationale. Gemini 3.1 Pro... 5 times, returned a weather forecast widget for either the layover or final destination. This was on "Pro" reasoning, the highest exposed on the Gemini App/WebApp. I've always suspected Google swaps out models randomly so this.. wasn't surprising.

I then asked Gemini 3.1 Pro via the API and it returned a response similar to Claude and GPT-5.2 -- carefully considering all factors.

This tells me that a Google AI Ultra subscription gives me a sub-par coding agent which often swaps in Flash models, a sub-par web/app AI experience that also isn't using the advertised SOTA models, and a bunch of preview apps for video gen, audio gen (crashed every time I attempted), and world gen (Genie was interesting but a toy).

This will be a quick cancel as soon as the intro rate is done.

It's like Google doesn't ACTUALLY want to be the leader in AI or serve people their best models. They want to generate hype around benchmarks and then nerf the model and go silent.

Gemini 3 Pro Preview went from exceptional in the first month to mediocre and then out of my rotation within a month.