I tried it the very first day it was available to Google employees, and it was not usable.

Then a few weeks back, I gave it another try and I was pleasantly surprised.

It was insanely good!

A colleague and I have been on-and-off trying to build a C++ binary against specific Google libraries for months without success. Then, Gemini CLI was able to build the binary after 2-3 days iterating and refining prompts

I'm using it in antigravity, and fint it quite good. I have not managed to run out of usage on Flash. You can run Pro out of quota almost instantly, they really don't want you to use it if you're not paying $200 a month.

I do not use super broad prompts, though. None of this "build me a webapp" stuff. It's more like, "adjust this part of this class to do Y instead of X."

As long as you force it to use the pro model and not flash, it is pretty usable. If you go with the default settings though, it will use flash aggressively which results in pretty bad code. I only use it with pro exclusively now.

Even with pro, I have caught it going off the rails a few times. The most frustrating was when I asked it to do translations, and it decided there were too many to do so it wrote a python script that ran locally and used some terrible library to do literal translations, and some of them were downright offensive and sexual in nature. For translations though, Gemini is the best but you have to have it do a sentence or two at a time. If you provide the context around the text, it really knocks it out of the park

It's definitely not as good as Codex or Claude Code but it is cheap. You just have to manage it a bit more. I got a year for free with my phone and I still pay for Codex, so take from that what you will.