I've been using the preview flash model exclusively since it came out, the speed and quality of response is all I need at the moment. Although still using Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 for dev work.

Google keeps their models very "fresh" and I tend to get more correct answers when asking about Azure or O365 issues, ironically copilot will talk about now deleted or deprecated features more often.

I've found copilot within the Azure portal to be basically useless for solving most problems.

Me too. I don't understand why companies think we devs need a custom chat on their website when we all have access to a chat with much smarter models open in a different tab.

That's not what they are thinking. They are thinking: "We want to capture the dev and make them use our model – since it is easier to use it in our tab, it can afford to be inferior. This way we get lots of tasty, tasty user data."