Gemma is amazing with tools for anything that is not crazy complex. I think a lot of people have a wrong perception of it because Google's new prompt format broke implementations like llama.cpp and it took quite a while to get everything sorted. But even the tiny variants running on edge devices are surprisingly capable when used right.
The frontier will probably keep moving for a while, but it will be increasingly disconnected from normal human use. In the future, if you're not trying to solve a research level math problem, you'll probably do it locally and fully privately. Which also means the payday when they will fundamentally no longer be able to reach a billion users with frontier models will come soon for the labs. Even if they do get their IPO out, it will probably crash and burn at current valuations.
Do you guys actually work with these models?
I have to use GPT 5.4 Mini at work. It benchmarks higher than that Gemma 4 model.
In my experience it's next to useless. It cannot even move 20 existing lines of code from A to B without breaking them half of the time.
If you tell it to look something up in your dependencies, it's 50/50 on whether the answer is correct, incorrect, or it simply didn't perform the search at all.
I find it next to useless, and I'm mostly better off doing the work manually.
It's a night and day difference to even Sonnet, not to mention the SOTA.
>It benchmarks higher than that Gemma 4 model.
Depends on what you look at. Gemma 4 31B without reasoning benchmarks significantly higher than GPT-5.4 without reasoning on artificial analysis. Even the new Gemma 4 12B beats it. And while GPT-5.4 with xhigh reasoning beats the reasoning version of Gemma 4 31B, the question is why you would throw such a complicated task that needs so much reasoning at such a small model to begin with. So if you do coding, you'll probably not have much success with either model. But for actual simple tasks that these models were made for, they are extremely capable. E.g. hook it up to the Atlassian MCP and have it do all the stuff that is supplemental to coding in big enterprises.
Counter: I use 5.4 mini all time for coding. No trouble letting it implement features. Entire new screens, APIs and various components.
It ain’t the best for sure, but if you have trouble letting it move 20 lines I don’t know what’s the cause but that’s not my experience at all. I do make pretty extensive use of guardrails and proper instructions in my AGENTS.md.
I also value super boring code bases with an as much as possible uniform shape. I guess that’s also helping out.
Like I said in my original comment, it’s fine for non-coding tasks, meaning I primarily use it to answer questions
Cursor 2.5 is essentially kimi and I find it eminently usable.
i use for tasks like object recognition in my family photos and cooking videos . seems to be fine
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