Today I asked Gemini to extract a table from an PDF appendix and create C++ data table with its contents. After 15 or so iterations with corrections and new mistakes, it eventually gave up. I was floored when it said “I’m sorry, I cannot do this simple task, I’ve exceeded my error threshold and cannot do this task for you. My LLM prediction engine invents data instead of doing a simple data copy/reformat”.<p>Stunned to see that Gemini threw its digital arms in the air and gave up.
That's interesting because my experience has been almost the opposite. A few months ago I tested Gemini on converting screenshots of tables from PDF files into CSV. I tried it on several different tables and it got every one right. It consistently outperformed ChatGPT.
I just tried this and it worked without issue.<p>Some considerations:<p>1) tell it to extra t the data (in a new session) does that work?<p>2) if it doesn't, could there be something up with the PDF?<p>As many commentors suggested, this works well with Gemini so there is likely a missing variable in play.<p>Share your prompt and the PDF and let's see if we can determine what.
It's extremely hit or miss. I've had it one-shot a pretty decent analytic prototype from a brief description, but also had it get trapped in hour-long back and forth regression hell over incredibly simple things like adding a static favicon (ie it would add it, then keep taking it away with every subsequent iteration, breaking something else every time it was asked to put the favicon back etc.).
I built a little research dashboard that monitors new papers from specific research labs. There is a paper ingest skill that writes Python scripts using pdfplumber to dismantle pdf’s. I have also used it to fetch supplementary information to replicate/augment the published tables. It can also use plotdigitizer to extract raw data from plots.
That's better than the loop grok got stuck in trying to use git and push the work it did leading to a $15 api credit deduction.
It does this pretty often. Gemini is an "intelligent" model, but it's massively nerfed and so isn't useful for real work. If you use it with an agent harness, you need to design the harness to detect this and start a new session. Once it nerfs itself it won't try again.
The PDF reader for Gemini is extraordinarily poor in my experience. I like the writing style of this model a little better, but for most tasks people would use AI for, Gemini is probably not what you want to be using.
You should just have it OCR a screenshot of the PDF that would probably work better
Tabula + Excel could probably do it quicker.
The table select option in Okular is also great, as you can manually rearrange the divisions. For low volume, of course. Tabula will work better otherwise. I also suggest Libreoffice Calc, the .csv support is leagues ahead of Excel.
My go-to for this is to screenshot and use the built-in text extraction in the screenshot tool (I'm on a mac), then pass on that text data to whatever processing. It's a pretty good tool so long as the PDF is in OK shape (I've had errors in scanned images).
It's so horrible that in 2026 people are still publishing important data and specifications in a format like PDF that's difficult for LLMs to consume. We need to drag them kicking and screaming to HTML or Markdown. Heck, even Microsoft Word DOCX is superior for reliable parsing and content extraction.
You didn't say whether you were using the App but the App's performance seems to be severely throttled compared to API.
I haven't heard any accounts of it doing that since Gemini 2.5, but it was pretty easy to get it to do it with a programming task back then after a few failed attempts. Very interesting to hear it'll still do it.
Years ago, I used Acrobat to extract tables from a PDF. Had to do it manually, but it pasted nicely into Excel.
We've been quite impressed with GCP Document AI. Not sure if it has a free tier but perhaps that's where Google is putting all the good OCR.
I envy you that it admitted that rather than simply making up data and lying about it.
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Gemini Flash 3.5 (through agy) ran `git reset --hard` when I asked it to commit my changes, apparently it thought it was better to have a clean repo before `git add`. Of course I'm not trusting my computer to it. When will we have 3.5 Pro?
There's still no MCP support in the Gemini app, which is very useful to get various pieces of info as a user just via chatting. For example I recently wanted to get an Airbnb and wanted to filter by specific criteria including house image analysis and Gemini couldn't do it so I had to do it in Codex.
Yeah, it seems like this is the biggest missing feature from the Gemini ecosystem.<p>If I can't connect MCP, there's really no selling point for me to use Gemini from my watch, car, smart speaker, etc. If I'm already bound to using my own front end, then I'm only evaluating Gemini as a model/API, at which point it has many competitors that may be cheaper or better fit for the task.
I'm fairly convinced Claude's strongest point is the app. AI users aren't anywhere near as mature or smart as youtube/hn would have folks believe. The claude app is amazing for bridging that gap.
I think native apps are critical infrastructure in AI development particularly around agents. The truth is there’s no good native interaction layer for custom agents. If you want to wire up and self host an agent that has access to anything ever your only option is a janky port to telegram or Slack. I’ve been building vessels.app because I think it’s the missing piece to agent interaction. I need testers if anyone is interested!
This is why I don't always use the official Gemini Web app. Lately I've found that it's more useful to utilize a CLI. I'm looking forward to the day they add MCP in the web.
They only fixed stopping the model mid-generation losing the entire session pretty recently.<p>The Gemini apps suck.
My work requires me to use `agy cli` (Google AI Ultra) for development, and it's been incredibly frustrating. I strongly dislike the Gemini models because they consistently fail to grasp basic instructions. I also can't use the Claude models included in the AI Ultra plan because the agy cli wrapper makes the experience completely unusable.
I'd rather use the free plan on OpenCode than deal with this Gemini setup.
It's funny how in their own graph, <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/images/gemini-3-5__benchmark-OSWorld-Ve.width-1000.format-webp.webp" rel="nofollow">https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...</a>
Gemini 3.5 Flash is beat hands down by both Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, and yet the graph is drawn as if Gemini wins ... :-D
The graph has Gemini 3.5 Flash matching Sonnet 4.6, losing to Opus 4.8, and slightly behind GPT-5.5 by 0.3 points... That's not that much of a hands-down loss for Gemini for this specific workload benchmark.<p>The methodology used:<p><a href="https://deepmind.google/models/evals-methodology/gemini-3-5-flash" rel="nofollow">https://deepmind.google/models/evals-methodology/gemini-3-5-...</a><p><i>Methodology: All Gemini scores are pass @1 except where otherwise noted. "Single attempt" settings allow no
majority voting or parallel test-time compute. All of the results are all run with the Gemini API for the model-id
gemini-3.5-flash with default sampling settings unless indicated otherwise below. To reduce variance, we
average over multiple trials for smaller benchmarks.<p>All the results for non-Gemini models are sourced from providers' self reported numbers unless otherwise mentioned below. For Claude Opus 4.7 , Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.5 we default to reporting maximum
thinking/reasoning settings available, but when reported results are not available we use best available reasoning
results.</i>
It highlights the Gemini models blue since that's what the article is about. The bar heights seem consistent with the values.
I think 3.5 flash is trying to target agentic work, like Google Search or ADK (agent development kit) use cases.<p>It’s something cheap enough you’d put out in front of your customers, and Opus is expensive enough you wouldn’t.
It's honest - people who know what they are looking at will take speed and token costs into account. I don't use Gemini 3.5 for coding, but I use it as something in between a search engine and agent.
It's amazing how designers of charts trying to show their product is close to the leader always remember to start the axis at zero, and designers of charts trying to show how big their lead is always forget that
So... has Google provided a Codex/Claude Code equivalent to Gemini yet? I would like to use Gemini for coding tasks, but that's kind of difficult to do as I don't even know how to get Gemini to even "clone this repo and read the code in it for static analysis", much less open PRs in repos.<p>ChatGPT/Codex can do it, Claude can do it, why can't Gemini?<p>And no, I don't mean going through Antigravity, and personally I'm wary about LLMs having unsupervised access on my computer without explicit policy, so I really think Google is putting the cart before the horse here.
Antigravity CLI (which replaced Gemini CLI):<p><a href="https://antigravity.google/product/antigravity-cli" rel="nofollow">https://antigravity.google/product/antigravity-cli</a>
So a couple weeks ago I decided to pay some money for the Gemini API cause I'd found myself getting a lot of use out of the free tier chat and figured they deserved some of my cash.<p>First headache was a lot of delays and 'service unavailable due to excessive load messages'. Second headache was a lot of frustration with the Continue plugin in my IDE. Gemini chat suggests I try the Antigravity app. I do so. IT's OK. Launch it on an agentic task, it gets part way through and stops, asking me to subscribe. Try getting it to use some of the Gemini credits I paid for a few days earlier. Turns out Antigravity is developed by a completely separate team within Google and they don't recognize or accommodate Gemini credits because they are trying to maintain budgetary independence so as to maintain operational autonomy Gemini. At least, that's the explanation Gemini (free tier) offered for why Antigravity (Free/subscription only) won't accept Gemini (prepaid/subscription) payments. What a time to be alive.<p>You won't be surprised to learn I switched to a competitor.
no. gemini's instruction following is currently abysmal. Gemini CLI could be a great scaffold for all we know, but we cant know because the models it uses are so horribly bad at being driven in that way.<p>no clue why google has dropped the ball this hard on IF.
I think 3.5 Flash is supposed to improve the long-range instruction following.<p>I haven't tried it at that because for the short range tasks I gave it I found it around Sonnet level, but slower (because it takes more tries!) which makes it more expensive.<p>The old Flash models were great because they were fast.<p>3.5 Flash shows Google can work around the old "Good, Fast or Cheap: Pick any two" thing by picking none of them.
They have a 3.1-pro-customtools model which they allege its better at using custom tools/MCPs/etc.<p>It is not better.
Yes, Gemini CLI and Antigravity
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Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive.<p>I guess if you're trying to get people to tokenmaxx it may look like a valid strategy, but ain't no way this will be delightful to users.<p>I think it's a symptom of just not understanding how LLMs should interface with the OS because we're still in their early days.<p>Eventually there'll be an iPhone moment for the ergonomics of LLM usage outside of coding
Computer use is a great idea. It gets the job done when nothing else will.<p>If you're a person trying to get their job done at a big company, but half your job is in 1-2 proprietary tools or is stuck behind an API you can't program against, computer use can allow you, a non-techie, to do your job more efficiently.<p>I think it's an awesome way to circumvent gate keepers and the IT department to let people accomplish their goals.
That is an incredibly niche use case and comes with a boatload of footguns.<p>Even then, an AI writing AHK scripts likely outperforms.
I think there's a sweet spot- a lot of the time you're probably better off with "reverse engineer this web page and build me an API or personalized chrome extension to meet my needs".<p>I have an agent doing price checks for me for an item on a certain website. Instead of blasting through a zillion tokens processing the DOM over and over, it loaded the page once and figured out how to download a json with the price.
How are folks using “computer use” to click things on intranet portals that are behind an SSO?
Even this OP example shows visitors a url and enter this search term… that is port of useless.<p>How can I automate things behind an SSO wall? Even if it means I manually authorize it once and watch it do things on its own..
I've never used Gemini computer use, but I assume it's the same:<p>Claude computer use takes control of your whole computer inputs (mouse and keyboard) plus screenshots. You just log in, tell Claude you're logged in, and let it get to work. It'll use the browser you're logged in with.<p>The chrome extension is a little better because it only takes control of its own chrome tabs (again: you just log in.)
Take manual control once, save the login info to a password manager, teach the model to login with it.
Yeah, it's not that computer use is the most theoretically optimal paradigm, but there's a reasonable case that given the constraints of modern software systems and how they're built, that it's the most <i>realistically</i> optimal paradigm.
The “correct”, elegant way for AI to interact with existing software would take decades and billions of dollars to build. Someone would have to do the hard work of building new APIs, solving decades of accessibility issues, etc.<p>Or you can show an AI screenshots and ask it where to click.
I disagree if your application is networked. Most SaaS is built on RESTful APIs that can be converted trivially into interfaces / contracts for tool use.
it takes decades and billions of dollars to develop APIs?
The iphone moment is an AI that can completely manage your personal life. It has full access to every financial account you own handles all admin work. Could sign you up for a new account pay and give you the login.<p>If you can SAFELY do that it's a big moment. But to be clear safe is a massive problem. Until you see a big company start saying the AI can use your SSN, CC, bank password safely we aren't there yet.
Spreadsheet is such a terrible idea. It may look like a valid tool, but ain't no way it's delightful to users. Most of the time people need a database instead. Eventually there'll be an iPhone moment for this.<p>Meanwhile, the entire world economy:
I mean, your words not mine. You can't just claim I'm making a point I didn't.<p>Spreadsheets are fucking glorious, powerful, clever, amazing and delightful, in my view.
> Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive.<p>And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful.<p>Recently I gave a Nix OS vm to my hermes agent and it has been a good experience. I don't really care if destroy the machine I can just rollback to an earlier version, and for any meaningful data he creates for me I make sure he creates a repo, commit and pushes to my private Gitea instance.
> And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful.<p>It is, but there's no need for it to be viewing your screen, browsing websites and watching ads.<p>That stuff is for humans, not for LLMs.
Sure, I don't want an agent watching MY screen. That's why I gave him his own environment, and pretty quickly he discovered that you can open chrome and make it render to a framebuffer, this way he is able to 'view' the website. And apparently with this he is able to bypass a lot of 'anti-bot' measures.
> And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful.<p>I honestly cannot think of a single use case
I think the main advantage is adaptability.<p>Imagine you have a pretty exotic task you need to complete that involves converting a video file from one format to another.<p>You can use ChatGPT or something similar and the best you will get is either a script you can run on you machine that does what you need or he may decide to render a new video.<p>If you have something like OpenwebUI you could configure a MCP that converts videos and allow the model to use this MCP to do your task. This should work, but is quite a lot of work for something you'll ever do once.<p>But if the agent has it's own environment he can decide to install ffmpg, execute the transformation and serve you the file you want.<p>In reality there is no new capabilities with this approach, but things get a lot more comfortable.
Literally everything you do every day.<p>It's the end game of AI. Have systems trained on doing EVERYTHING you do on a computer all day. Trained by you while doing the job.
I give you one: Google news is pretty terrible right now almost all interesting new sources are paywalls and so I get recommended all kind of weird lifestyle publications that are really horrible. With the computer use API I can just tell. Tell Gemini to look at Google news pick the articles that look interesting. Look them up on archive.is, and just give me the plain text article and construct a summary - I think that would probably work pretty well.
We shouldn’t optimize for token use. We should build infrastructure to make tokens dirt cheap instead.
It's great for testing and QA automation for UIs. It's also possibly good for the vision impaired.
People using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?<p>I had the dubious pleasure of testing gemini of late and I kept running into refusals. How do I transfer a sim number from one provider to another? No. What should I consider when making backups on ntfs less prone to data loss and more bitrot resistant? No. Evaluate this piece of code? No.<p>I’m not sure if it’s cold feet from the mythos situation or what, but it reminds me of the dark days where you couldn’t use ai for much of anything. But then I go to chatgpt 5.5 and it does mostly everything I want outside of the usual cybersecurity boogeyman that you run into now and then.
Interesting. I have the Google AI Pro plan and use Gemini several times each day and I don't remember the last time I got a refusal. I wonder what criteria go into that, like maybe how they rate your Google account?
I've always found all versions of gemini to be (for a lack of a better word) lazy.<p>I guess it's economic wrt. token use, but it often either refused for absurd safety reasons, or other weird stuff like responding that an LLM like itself wasn't a suitable tool for the job, and very quickly gives up.<p>Claude is on the other end of the spectrum, which makes it more noticeable when switching between them.
If I type your first query into Gemini, it immediately spits out a long and plausible answer.<p>What exactly are you saying it's refusing? Can you give a screenshot or example?
I love antigravity. I’ve had zero issues with it.
The context window size is also very small if you use Gemini in the app. It starts forget quite fast. In my opinion Gemini on app is useless additionally to the guardrails.
I just asked gemini the question with sim number and it gives me full step by step guide.
Are you outside the US?
I'm outside the US, use Gemini models quite a bit, and I've never run into any refusals of any kind. I'm using them for a fairly wide range of things, I'm sure at least as risqué as asking how to transfer a sim. As a matter of fact I actually asked it's advice on how to transfer banking apps and auth apps from one phone about 3 weeks ago and got decent answers.
It's more dependent on the specific country they are in (and I don't know the specifics). But Google is large enough to have lawyers for every country, and Google is in a never ending whirlwind of national lawsuits/fines, so you end up at the mercy of whatever the lawyers for your country think will not piss off regulators. The EU (and individual states) have pretty heavy AI regulations, and Google even just got fined for an AI overview being incorrect.<p>It also could just be which way the wind was blowing for OP, the models are stochastic to some degree, but there is no shortage of complaints from (mostly euro) users getting stonewalled.
I've seen similar refusals on X from Claude from users in Germany when the LLM assumed the users are asking for something forbidden about certain topics.<p>Ultimately I think that in 10 years time, this is what's gonna kill paid consumer LLMs, and boost the usage of Chinese LLMs self hosted at home an your own hardware that people will torrent via VPNs, as they will also be banned because of "disinformation and misinformation".<p>So the end winners will be the hardware companies that will sell AI chips to consumers after the datacenter bubble pops. Unless of course the EU will ban the sale of AI chips that don't have some limitations baked in on which models you're allowed to run (the state approved ones). Interesting times ahead. I think in 10-20 years time we'll look back at present day LLMs the way we look back at the open internet of the 90's-00's.
> People using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?<p>They are quite insane. I was asking it to list candidates metal parts I could buy at a hardware store to add weight to 3D prints: stuff like angle brackets etc.<p>I wanted to know, bang for bucks, and ease of insertion (at print time) / modelling in a 3D model.<p>Complete refusal as if I was a terrorist building a bomb.<p>Then there are the weird refusals that then are OK after all if you insist by asking it what's wrong about it:<p><i>"How should I cook eggs?"</i><p><i>"I'm sorry but I can't help you with that"</i> (it formulates it differently but that's the idea)<p><i>"What, I'm just hungry, is explaining me how to cook eggs really against your rules?"</i><p>And then it answers <i>"No of course not, here's how to do it:..."</i><p>Really strange stuff.
Pretty doubtful about computer use/screenshotting based approaches.<p>With Retriever AI, we construct custom accessibility trees to represent web pages and just switched over to using DeepSeek v4 Flash and its nearing 100x cost decrease.<p>We also had great success just reverse engineering the underlying APIs of websites and then writing code to hit them. This approach of using screenshots to take actions on a webpage to trigger the underlying network calls the website is making seems too naive.
I wonder if it will be better at building TUI's. It has been absolutely abysmal at interacting with them and building them
Claude can build UI but it sucks at testing it and iterating on it. Fable showed some improvements in this regard but alas.
It seems to do it just fine when in desktop applications using Qt, fwiw., it leverages all the standard Qt GUI testing stuff (and if you have the money you can just integrate Squish which has LLM support now).
That's my experience too. I've had increased luck encouraging the LLM to structure the code in "functional core, imperative shell" style, and telling it stupid things like "make sure you can test the code you're writing".
No UI like their competitors Claude CoWork or Codex. This is vaporware
I have basically unlimited access to every SOTA model and I opt for gemini flash 3.5 9/10 times I use an LLM.<p>Llms are mostly useless but when I do use them its with gemini. If they're going to waste my time 95% of the time, I might as well get it over with fast.
Where is 3.5 pro?
Google said June, and all its model updates seem to be on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays. So unless the release is slipping, either tomorrow or Tuesday.
Hot take: "computer use" is a dumb term for this concept; almost as if it was named by AI models...<p>Case in point: "We are already seeing customers drive value with computer use."<p>Yes... since the early 1980s, most companies and businesses have driven their value with computer use... smdh.<p>I'm no AI dev, but dare I suggest a better possible name for this: "agentic computer software interaction" which can be shortened to agent_actor<p>I swear, the direction we are headed with Big Tech leading the way will surely spell long term disaster
Will it skip Ads lol
performance is quite impressive given that its 3x cheaper than 5.5
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Who are these people talking about "agentic" stuff, and furthermore who are the people who can't stfu about "MCP"??<p>Literally 90%+ comments on HN personify their alleged use of AI in a way that is in NO WAY related to how the tool is really used.<p>Using LLMs for building software has NOTHING to do with those concepts. Nobody has "agents". That literally only exists in marketing. It's not even how it works.<p>AT ALL<p>Useless forum