My qualitative take to support this is that Gemini seems to have the strongest spatial reasoning that translates nicely into CAD and engineering domain challenges. Less clear, but I also suspect a better world understanding of materials and their interactions in an intuitive way. I have this sense that Claude can tell me everything there is to know about how to spec a gasket, but it’s like Gemini actually knows what a gasket feels like and can intuit what it’s going to do.

My partner runs an internal computational mechanics benchmark that hasn’t tracked progress with model advancements (flat/no progress since early 2026) until suddenly saturating from argon and carbon. My take is that it’s due to spatial reasoning (most of the challenges are programming that require a lot of shape rotation type thinking), but we don’t know just yet why Gemini is doing so much better.