# Gemini Flash 607 Hacker News commenters recommended Gemini Flash and 352 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.3 years (12 owners). **Verdict:** A fast, cheap model that many find good enough for everyday and focused tasks, though critics say it hallucinates and falls short on complex or long agentic coding work. ## Why people recommend it - Fast and cheap (10 comments): "Gemini does feel like code-red for basically every AI company like chatgpt,claude etc. too in my opinion if the underlying model is both fast and cheap and good enough" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305005)) "The model seems fast enough to solve your problem before Google finishes explaining which of its three products you need to open to access it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49539538)) "it's exceptionally good and fast as a HA assistant while being much cheaper than the electricity that would be needed to keep a 3090 awake" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399332)) - Near-frontier quality for less (6 comments): "Gemini 2.5 flash and 3 flash were highly underrated models that performed way better than the peers and we used the hell out of them." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50288840)) "Gemini 3 Flash nails it sometimes even better than the Pro version, with nearly the same times as 2.5 Pro does on that usecase." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46314047)) "I was disappointed with 3.6 flash" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49521855)) - Reliable on well-defined tasks (4 comments): "if I can isolate a problem and put it into a straightforward prompt then Gemini 2.5 flash - the most basic and cheap commercial model - is actually very reliable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49965541)) "I have run this thousands times against Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8 and Gemini-3-Flash with consistently working results." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063958)) "I can get multiple sets of footnotes (critical + content notes) reliably recognized and categorized using gemini-3-flash-preview." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984260)) - Capable for coding work (5 comments): "The auto-complete suggestions from FIM models (either open source or even something Gemini Flash) punch far above their weight." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46098023)) "I set Gemini 3.8 Flash the task, using my own VERY shonky coding agent tool (llm-coding-agent) - and it did a solid job." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49539815)) "For frontend work, the model/harness/tool combo of 3.8 flash extended/agy/chrome dev tools MCP is shockingly good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49954164)) ## What people warn about - Weak at hard or agentic tasks (4 comments): "I wouldn't use Gemini 3 Flash or GPT 5.4 mini for anything except the most trivial work, although both are useful for basic exploratory work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47993162)) "i might consider 3.8 flash for simple side hobby projects or quick scaffolding but would not trust it for long agentic tasks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49542803)) "Google is lagging the big 3 (Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI) when it comes to frontier models for programming and hard problem solving." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290005)) - Hallucinations and false positives (4 comments): "Based on my experience, even Flash could sometime make mistakes including something as obvious as simple arithmetic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943770)) "Gemini 3-pro-preview and 3-flash-preview, respectively top2 and top3, had 44% and 37% true positive and whooping 65% and 86% false positives." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47113993)) "Haiku/Flash/small models are underpowered for literally anything where being non-false-positively correct on details matters" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377403)) - Token bloat drives costs up (4 comments): "in my tests it's actually LESS token efficient than 3.5 Flash, so despite the output price reduction, it still costs more" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994783)) "Gemini 3.7 flash outputs so many tokens per answer it doesn't matter how fast its TPS is" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49540262)) "high effort on gemini 3.5 flash caused it to over think, generating large amounts of tokens without a substantive improve in performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48290472)) - Rising prices across versions (2 comments): "I appreciate that they are delivering on both of those, but personally I would appreciate if they could create an incremental knowledge improvement while holding price steady" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197490)) "I think it's good, they're raising the size (and price) of flash a bit and trying to position Flash as an actually useful coding / reasoning model." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46302038)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Claude Opus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus.md): 3331 recommend - [OpenAI GPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-5.md): 1205 recommend - [Claude Sonnet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-sonnet.md): 854 recommend - [DeepSeek V4 Flash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-v4-flash.md): 828 recommend - [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable.md): 823 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://gemini.google.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Gemini Flash", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemini-3-flash/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).