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points by InsideOutSanta 15 hours ago | 0 comments

> For starters, the limits are dreadfully low.

That's the problem for me. Google can have the world's best model; it doesn't matter to me, because I effectively can't use it.

Both Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 are extremely good and provide a lot of inference on their $200 plans, and then there are the Chinese models - DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, MiMo, and StepFun all offer a lot of value per cost.

At the moment, I don't see a niche where it makes sense to use Google's models, regardless of how good they are.

[–] seanmcdirmid 13 hours ago

Google has a $99 plan that I’m using right now and I found flash to be reasonable for dev, but I spent my now past career at Google working around Gemini Flash limitations (when it was much worse than it is now) and leveraging subagents in antigravity. I want to dip my toes into anthropic or openAI models, but getting setup seems to require either another plan or expensive tokens, and I’ve found DeepSeek to be a reasonable back up/second model that I’m not eager to just go in and see what I can do over there.

[–] rickydroll 14 hours ago

In my experience, (using 3.8 flash) the Google models do a fairly good job at summary notes and simple documentation (do this, do that). It doesn't seem to be as bad as Claude for producing headache-inducing text.

[–] zobzu 13 hours ago

3.8 flash is pretty good. it's not expensive, works great for reasoning tasks and it's fast.

for coding .. it works ok but i prefer the openai or anthropic models, much better results.

[–] rickydroll 12 hours ago

Good to know. I figured I'd start with Gemini because if I used Claude, I'd probably get addicted to the results. Then I would have to commission a velvet painting of me dressed in Dickensian beggar clothes with big eyes and a quivering lower lip, holding my hands out, asking for tokens.