# Google Gemini 2195 Hacker News commenters recommended Google Gemini and 2236 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.5 years (98 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for everyday questions, image and handwriting understanding, and coding or scripting help, but many report confidently invented facts and dislike it being pushed into every Google product. ## Why people recommend it - Answers everyday questions well (5 comments): "Someone who can't afford to get ripped off by a mechanic... has a decent chance of solving simple car problems instantly on their own by asking ChatGPT or Gemini." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46978062)) "Gemini was able to help me confirm with and provide resources from specialists about this because the average psychiatrist knows nothing about this." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48388853)) "Gemini's integration is, I think, absolutely awesome - it's completely changing the way I interact with the concept of googling and finding answers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49058994)) - Strong multimodal and image understanding (4 comments): "Gemini's multimodal understanding, things like identifying what a plant is, normal user use cases (other than chatting), integration with other tools, is much better." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47596888)) "I used Gemini to decode and transcribe an old (and well known) cursive hand written mail. I couldn't read it at all. It managed to do this in a few seconds." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794381)) "Gemini is still excellent at simple, short-term, and even multimodal tasks, but it is not well-suited for long-term planning scenarios for AI agents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858611)) - Handy for scripts and code (4 comments): "I find that I can ask Gemini to blurt out an XSLT implementation of my requirements given a snippet of example doc, and I have used this to good effect in some web scrapers/robots." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45956026)) "I find Gemini to be quite good / acceptable at code review, design, and design review, but it's notably far behind Claude Code for implementation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030795)) "I asked Google Gemini to write me an AutoHotkey script to do the Caps Lock / Shift Caps Lock for layout 1 or 2 respectively, it works well!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48591557)) - Reliable structured output via API (3 comments): "the gemini cli agent with gemini 2 half the time writes its own tool call parameters incorrectly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547490)) "Gemini 1.5 Pro did a much better job across all of our language pairs, it wasn't close" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883314)) "I have pushed Gemini 2.5 Pro further than I thought possible when it comes to ridiculously over complicated (by necessity) structured output." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46390753)) ## What people warn about - Hallucinates facts and sources (6 comments): "Earlier today I asked Gemini Pro to find information on a person's death that was turning up nothing for me otherwise, and it just imagined finding verbatim Obituary quotes in every source" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46308270)) "there is no album called "Wild Kingdom" by an artist named Deadbeat, and while Hassan does appear on "Red Hot + Cool" it is on a differently named track written by himself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46098573)) "Gemini might be wrong all the time and absuredly unreliable for anything that's not consensus or adversorial based, but at least it freaking apologizes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920433)) - Forced into all Google products (3 comments): "Being able to push Gemini into your face on Gmail, Gdocs, Google Search, Android, Android TV, Android Auto and Pixel devices sure is: Annoying, disruptive and unfair." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46111656)) "It is deliberately designed for maximum accidental invocations so the managers and execs behind it can claim the large user numbers in their promo packets." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113134)) "A blast of gmail messages from Google has announced how it's part of everything and given instructions on how to find out the little you can do about it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266955)) - Weak at agentic, long tasks (3 comments): "Gemini is still excellent at simple, short-term, and even multimodal tasks, but it is not well-suited for long-term planning scenarios for AI agents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858611)) "Asking gemini 3 to refactor things or in very narrow things to help was ok, but it was quite bad at getting the general context, and spotting bugs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836227)) "It's stunningly good at reasoning, design, and generating the raw code, but it just falls over a lot when actually trying to get things done" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076453)) - Buggy apps and settings (3 comments): "Gemini thinks my name is my brother in law's name, and despite explicitly telling it that's not my name + digging through the settings, it still amusingly calls me the wrong name." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976521)) "Having a "bug" that changes available model options for some small set of Pro users 3 months after launch certainly qualifies as a wtf-are-they-even-doing level of bug" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915265)) "The Android and web app is also riddled with bugs, including ones that makes you lose your chat history from the threads if you switch between them, not cool." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47863818)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Claude](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude.md): 5175 recommend - [ChatGPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chatgpt.md): 2186 recommend - [Grok](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grok.md): 727 recommend - [Microsoft Copilot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-copilot.md): 139 recommend - [Claude Desktop](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-desktop.md): 104 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://gemini.google.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Google Gemini", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemini/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).