alt Hacker NewsI've been using Gemini 3.7 for my personal trip planning app. Across multiple benchmarks, it ranks higher on everything I tried:
- Real world knowledge (when a thing opens and closes, the geographic region, historical facts). It's also the best at taking a cluster of places and working out a visiting order.
- Photo ranking (which photo should be the hero). Gemini can tell whether a photo is of the thing or of the view from it.
- Document parsing (extracting the relevant trip info from PDFs).
If you use LLMs for anything other than coding, I definitely recommend not discounting Gemini like I did just because other models are more popular.
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Gemini 3.7 is my workhorse - fast and good enough for most tasks. Occasionally I go to GPT Sol or Claude to improve Gemini's output or for more complex tasks, but more than of my work usage is Gemini 3.7. Quite happy to test 3.8 now.
One thing in your comment surprised me: "when a thing opens and closes"
Why you would rely on the model's weights to know opening hours, instead of having the model call a web search tool to verify it on the official site?
I stopped using Gemini a few months ago because it would often just (partially) reply literal nonsense to me.
Think 2023 style ChatGPT. Something like “to open a document on your Mac click File > Open docurrrar” - like it suddenly forgot it had to produce actual words.
Overall I enjoyed its speed and comprehensiveness. But those occurrences of nonsense just made it feel like a great car that once a month just stops in the middle of the highway.
I've swapped over to it in the past two weeks, it's been really good. It does what I ask and doesn't think it knows better than me, which so far has made it the most pleasing experience I've had when slop-coding.
My only wish is it were somewhat cheaper, as it tends to balloon pretty quickly when I'm using it in Opencode. I'm currently trying to offload a lot of work to subagents to stop the context expanding so rapidly. But on the upside, I rarely have to correct it - I've spent far less time arguing with this than with anything else so far.
> Real world knowledge
For awhile now I've found Gemini will use Google search for pretty much any real world knowledge, which is a huge plus IMO. It's basically Google with a much better frontend and no ads/seo nonsense.
I started trying out 3.7 Flash this week and it is competitive with opus/fable and also FAST. It is getting work done that anthropic models were struggling with and the speed with which it does is quite a bit noticeably faster.
Beginning to think Google is a dark horse in this race and some of Anthropic's "everything feels janky and rushed" karma is going to catch up.
thanks! this is a very helpful one. I am going to try.
> trip planning app.
this has to be stong suit of ai agents any model
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I've been benchmarking[1] models for trip planning and world knowledge specifically (to decide on which model to use with my travel app), and the Gemini models consistently come out on top.
[1]: https://tripstitch.app/benchmarks/