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I'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
by jampa 14d ago
I'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.
- tziki 14d ago"Claude 3.7"?
- jampa 14d agoI asked Claude to fix the grammar of my comment, and it changed "I am using 3.7 for" to "I've been using Claude 3.7", so they sneaked their own name on it.
- trial3 14d agoincredible. further evidence supporting my personal stance to never ever let an LLM write or edit my writing intended for another human being to read. this is all me, baby
- dymk 14d agoyou didn’t even read your comment before you posted it?
- jampa 14d agoEh that one is on me, if I think too much about my HN comment I end up deleting before posting it. I rely on the 1 min `delay` set in the profile page to fix before it goes live, but for some reason this time it was set to 0.
- BeetleB 14d ago1. That's a wild conclusion from his comment! Understand that it's not an "either/or". 2. I'd wager the majority of HN commenters don't read their own comment before posting (pre-LLM days).
- fc417fc802 14d agoI can read my own comment twice over and still somehow miss seemingly obvious wording errors.
- BeetleB 14d agoAnd if you do a 3rd pass with an LLM, people will accuse of you not reading your own comment...
- drusepth 14d agoOnce you've written something, it's incredibly easy to overlook minute changes to the text. See: why authors wait days, weeks, or even months before editing what they've written (or, if you're more interested: cognitive regression, inattentional blindness, and the effects of misdirected saccades).
- dymk 14d agoHe didn’t write it.
- drusepth 14d ago> I asked Claude to fix the grammar of my comment I read this to mean he wrote the comment, then asked Claude to fix the grammar (as many ESL speakers do). Sounds to me like he did write it.
- dymk 14d agoThen I think you read it wrong, because you don't make that mistake unless you copy-paste your comment out of a Claude window and into the comment box.
- jamiek88 14d agoA two paragraph hacker comment? You burned carbon for that?
- handzhiev 14d agoGemini 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.
- owlninja 14d agoSame here. I see so many people obsessing over the latest most state of the art bleeding edge models and yelling at Google for not being there, but I feel like the vast majority of people don't actually need those models. Flash has just been super useful and incredibly fast in my experience.
- aero142 14d agoI prefer luna for most development, especially when I am guiding the process. Sometimes terra. I have had terrible results coding with sol. It is way over-tuned on RL to make something that completes the task, no matter what. I end up with way too much code that does a lot of things I didn't ask for.
- greenavocado 14d agoIME you're supposed to have Sol drive Luna sub-agents to do 90% of the work. Sol should primarily be the verifier and goal setter. Use omp.sh with Task Delegation -> Always to strongly encourage Sol to drive Lunas. Also Luna prefers to be talked to with English in XML.
- sneezychl 14d agoTry planning with Luna, implementing with Sol with guidelines to not exceed the given scope. Sounds counter-intuitive at first, but Luna is overall better at sticking with what works. Sol is wicked smart but needs constraints.
- handzhiev 14d agoI love Luna too. An excellent model and still usually better value per dollar than Gemini if you pay for API tokens. Things may change with 3.8 - we'll know soon.
- rahimnathwani 14d agoOne 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?
- mlmonkey 14d agoMaybe the model does some tool calling on its own to figure out the times?
- rahimnathwani 14d agoYou can opt in on a per-request basis.
- plaidfuji 14d agoI believe Gemini Flash is smart enough to know when to ground with web search. Their app has been saying it’s running a web search on almost all of my queries since 3.6. And given that Google … is Google, I trust them with web search grounding more than anyone else.
- panarky 14d agoIt can also ground with Google Maps data in addition to web search.
- jampa 14d agoI wasn't trying to be precise originally, I just tried to fit activities into "morning / evening" buckets. I did the whole itinerary with Opus first, but when I gave it to Gemini 3.7 Flash to review, it started correcting it with "this place will close 5PM" or "this place is closed for good". It was right on every nit, so it was surprising how well the model knows these things. If I ever release this I'll probably need the SERP API or Google Maps SDK (which I've heard is very expensive now), but for a personal trip where I will verify manually, using the LLM is okay for now.
- BlackRabbit1 14d agoCan G3.7 use Google Maps for distance grounding?
- porridgeraisin 14d agoYep. It has access to much better route planning tools than the other models. The results are really good IME.
- BlackRabbit1 14d agoSounds good! I've been planing around with LLM-based trip planning for a very long time now as it fits my very ad hoc style of traveling very well. But distances always had been.. lets say.. difficult. Will test it with my upcoming trip to Greece then!
- colechristensen 14d agoI 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.
- re-thc 14d ago> Beginning to think Google is a dark horse in this race Google was so hyped up early Gemini 3 era (only some months ago). And now dark horse? The TPU takeover almost crashed nvidia and everyone else.
- colechristensen 14d agoHype that burned out pretty quickly, it's hard to speak to the size and significance of old hype, I never felt it. Every time I personally tried Gemini models up until last week they simply couldn't do the long complex tasks I'd being doing with Anthropic models for many months.
- cousinbryce 14d agoI use Gemini because I feel like Google will win the AI race, and it’s Good Enough
- throwaway219450 14d agoI want to believe this, but every time I try Gemini coding assistance within Colab it's utterly dire. Code gen in a cell is OK, but things fall apart when you try to get into a feedback loop. The system prompt/harness fails to inform the agent about what it can and can't do, or does and doesn't have access to. It will confidently tell you it's done a thing, and then you ask, it admits can't actually do that but will happily try and fail again. Very frustrating, because I really like Colab as a platform for little reproducible experiments that may or may not require CUDA.
- dismalaf 14d ago> 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.
- altmanaltman 14d ago> basically Google with a much better frontend and no ads/seo nonsense so far
- dismalaf 14d agoFair. But I think there's a good chance it stays that way on paid plans. YouTube Premium is still ad free. Also them having their own silicon means they don't have to pay the Nvidia tax and can keep costs a lot lower.
- kridsdale1 14d agoThis thinking is why I am all in on GOOG shares. As a bonus, that means I’m getting part of Anthropic’s gains as well!
- fc417fc802 14d agoI think it already has them but it's much more subtle. Also useful. When I've made certain sorts of queries I've had the distinct impression that it was attempting to very gently steer the conversation with suggestions. But it was brief, still answered usefully, and didn't resist going in the direction I wanted. So a win-win tactic I guess. For example find a beautiful landscape shot of a place that just so happens to be accessible to tourists and ask it something along the lines of identifying the location. IME it will noticably steer the conversation towards relevant commercial offerings and offer (entirely unprompted) to help plan a trip. Or ask it about a certain category of product with some requirements and it will initially present (relevant) options that look like paid placement to my eye. But if you ask it's happy to go on to turn up lots of alternatives and enumerate tradeoffs. Assuming I'm correct the subtlety is on par with product placement in movies. Certainly leagues better than the internet advertising we've suffered to date.
- gazebo2 14d ago[dead]
- dominotw 14d ago> trip planning app. this has to be stong suit of ai agents any model
- robotmay 14d agoI'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.
- mark_l_watson 13d agoI usually use OpenCode for all open weight models but for Gemini I use Google’s agy coding harness (or my own). Venders coupling coding harnesses with their own models is usually a good thing. Poolside.ai has a combined harness with their own models that works well locally, and the DeepSeek harness with their models is very interesting.
- newtwentysix 14d agothanks! this is a very helpful one. I am going to try.
- CamilleScholtz 14d agoI'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/ https://tripstitch.app/benchmarks/
- leokennis 14d agoI 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.
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- Shayk 14d agoThis sounds great to combine with Wanderlog using an unofficial MCP I made https://github.com/shaikhspeare/wanderlog-mcp https://github.com/shaikhspeare/wanderlog-mcp
- dassh 14d agoIn my experience, Gemini 3.7 is excellent for general non-coding tasks. But for coding, especially backend development, I still find models like Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 more reliable.
- antonvs 14d agoI’ve been using Gemini for coding daily since 3.5, mostly on some pretty complex ML engineering projects. It’s great. What’s an example of not being “reliable”?
- menaerus 14d agoIf I strip the dependencies out, I'm using it on a 5MLoC C++ codebase, and I found it performs really really well. I am using the Opus 5/Fable in parallel and I couldn't tell the difference. Both models make mistakes here and there.
- forlorn 14d agoI tried similar travelling tasks but also added transportation and complex transfers (train, bus, walk, next train...). Worked meh and still a difficult thing to do for a llm.
- XCSme 14d agoYeah, most people keep bashing my aibenchy.com benchmarks, because Gemini is on top, but that's because questions are not coding only...
- Fuzzwah 13d agoI've just returned home after doing a 100 day "half lap" of Australia in a camper trailer with my family. I made heavy use of gemini to plan much of it. Getting packed up with a general destination in mind and telling gemini "we're leaving X town at 10am and heading to Y, where should we stop for lunch. My wife has coeliac disease, find us somewhere that does good gluten free options" was one of the many things I regularly leant on it for. Never had a bad suggestion.