alt Hacker NewsComputer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash
Comments
So... has Google provided a Codex/Claude Code equivalent to Gemini yet? I would like to use Gemini for coding tasks, but that's kind of difficult to do as I don't even know how to get Gemini to even "clone this repo and read the code in it for static analysis", much less open PRs in repos.
ChatGPT/Codex can do it, Claude can do it, why can't Gemini?
And no, I don't mean going through Antigravity, and personally I'm wary about LLMs having unsupervised access on my computer without explicit policy, so I really think Google is putting the cart before the horse here.
There's still no MCP support in the Gemini app, which is very useful to get various pieces of info as a user just via chatting. For example I recently wanted to get an Airbnb and wanted to filter by specific criteria including house image analysis and Gemini couldn't do it so I had to do it in Codex.
It's funny how in their own graph, https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima... Gemini 3.5 Flash is beat hands down by both Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, and yet the graph is drawn as if Gemini wins ... :-D
Pretty doubtful about computer use/screenshotting based approaches.
With Retriever AI, we construct custom accessibility trees to represent web pages and just switched over to using DeepSeek v4 Flash and its nearing 100x cost decrease.
We also had great success just reverse engineering the underlying APIs of websites and then writing code to hit them. This approach of using screenshots to take actions on a webpage to trigger the underlying network calls the website is making seems too naive.
People using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?
I had the dubious pleasure of testing gemini of late and I kept running into refusals. How do I transfer a sim number from one provider to another? No. What should I consider when making backups on ntfs less prone to data loss and more bitrot resistant? No. Evaluate this piece of code? No.
I’m not sure if it’s cold feet from the mythos situation or what, but it reminds me of the dark days where you couldn’t use ai for much of anything. But then I go to chatgpt 5.5 and it does mostly everything I want outside of the usual cybersecurity boogeyman that you run into now and then.
Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive.
I guess if you're trying to get people to tokenmaxx it may look like a valid strategy, but ain't no way this will be delightful to users.
I think it's a symptom of just not understanding how LLMs should interface with the OS because we're still in their early days.
Eventually there'll be an iPhone moment for the ergonomics of LLM usage outside of coding
I wonder if it will be better at building TUI's. It has been absolutely abysmal at interacting with them and building them
No UI like their competitors Claude CoWork or Codex. This is vaporware
performance is quite impressive given that its 3x cheaper than 5.5
[flagged]
Who are these people talking about "agentic" stuff, and furthermore who are the people who can't stfu about "MCP"??
Literally 90%+ comments on HN personify their alleged use of AI in a way that is in NO WAY related to how the tool is really used.
Using LLMs for building software has NOTHING to do with those concepts. Nobody has "agents". That literally only exists in marketing. It's not even how it works.
AT ALL
Useless forum
Today I asked Gemini to extract a table from an PDF appendix and create C++ data table with its contents. After 15 or so iterations with corrections and new mistakes, it eventually gave up. I was floored when it said “I’m sorry, I cannot do this simple task, I’ve exceeded my error threshold and cannot do this task for you. My LLM prediction engine invents data instead of doing a simple data copy/reformat”.
Stunned to see that Gemini threw its digital arms in the air and gave up.