I love this never-ending people having vastly different experiences situation with LLMs. In my experience, Gemini flash 3.8 is an exceptional model and is the bulk of my agentic use as someone who bounces around models as soon as they come out. I would say it’s the best flash model until 1017 came out. It might still be better than 1017.
On the free and "AI Plus" plan you are only allowed 3.6, 3.1 Pro and flash "lite" (3.5), 3.8 is for the Pro users (the ones paying the full membership)...
Daily usage: normal task, modify this document, do this do that basic office task... anything that requires precise context is doomed for any google-based llm, that is a well known issue of even the gemma models. Only time it has been useful is while using antigravity that makes sure everything has context on every turn therefore wastes more tokens than Fable on the same prompt. Any other LLM will do it faster, burning less tokens and with better results.
Bizarre to me as well, but it's obviously a use case difference.. I wonder what they are doing? I have found it to be excellent for my tasks (reverse engineering 6809, SH-2, FPGAs, etc).