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> Only downsides are in the polish department

What an understatement. It has me thinking „man, fuck this“ on the daily.

Just today it spontaneously lost an entire 20-30 minutes long thread and it was far from the first time. It basically does it any time you interrupt it in any way. It’s straight up data loss.

It’s kind of a typical Google product in that it feels more like a tech demo than a product.

It has theoretically great tech. I particularly like the idea of voice mode, but it’s noticeably glitchy, breaks spontaneously often and keeps asking annoying questions which you can’t make it stop.


ChatGPT web UI was also like this for the longest time, until a few months ago: all sorts of random UI bugs leading either to data loss or misleading UI state. Interrupting still is very flaky there too. And on the mobile app, if you move away from the app while it's taking time to think, its state would somehow desync from the actual backend thinking state, and get stuck randomly; sometimes restarting the app fixes it, sometimes that chat is that unusable from that point on.

And the UI lack of polish shows up freshly every time a new feature lands too - the "branch in new chat" feature is really finicky still, getting stuck in an unusable state if you twitch your eyebrows at wrong moment.

i basically can't use the ChatGPT app on the subway for these reasons. the moment the websocket connection drops, i have to edit my last message and resubmit it unchanged.

it's like the client, not the server, is responsible for writing to my conversation history or something

it took me a lot of tinkering to get this feeling seamless in my own apps that use the api under the hood. i ended up buffering every token into a redis stream (with a final db save at the end of streaming) and building a mechanism to let clients reconnect to the stream on demand. no websocket necessary.

works great for kicking off a request and closing tab or navigating away to another page in my app to do something.

i dont understand why model providers dont build this resilient token streaming into all of their APIs. would be a great feature

exactly. they need to bring in spotify level of caching of streaming music that it just works if you're in a subway. Constant availability should be table stakes for them.
I get that the web versions are free, but if you can afford API access, I always recommend using Msty for everything. It's a much better experience.

https://msty.ai/

> ChatGPT web UI was also like this for the longest time

Copilot Chat has been perfect in this respect. It's currently GPT 5.0, moving to 5.1 over the next month or so, but at least I've never lost an (even old) conversation since those reside in an Exchange mailbox.

I lost thousands of conversations I'd had back in the move from "Bing" to "Copilot". Moved straight to Claude and never touched a GPT again.
I downloaded my archive and completely ended my GPT subscription last week based on some bad computer maintenance advice. Same thing here - using other models, never touching that product again.
now I kind of HAVE to know... what was the aforementioned bad advice was?! So mysterious!
I'm referring to Copilot Chat. The data resides in your Exchange mailbox. You're referring to the consumer product.
There is no competing product for GPT Voice. Hands down. I have tried Claude, Gemini - they don't even comes close.

But voice is not a huge traffic funnel. Text is. And the verdict is more or less unanimous at this time. Gemini 3.0 has outdone ChatGPT. I unsubscribed from GPT plus today. I was a happy camper until the last month when I started noticing deplorable bugs.

1. The conversation contexts are getting intertwined.Two months ago, I could ask multiple random queries in a conversation and I would get correct responses but the last couple of weeks, it's been a harrowing experience having to start a new chat window for almost any change in thread topic. 2. I had asked ChatGPT to once treat me as a co-founder and hash out some ideas. Now for every query - I get a 'cofounder type' response. Nothing inherently wrong but annoying as hell. I can live with the other end of the spectrum in which Claude doesn't remember most of the context.

Now that Gemini pro is out, yes the UI lacks polish, you can lose conversations, but the benefits of low latency search and a one year near free subscription is a clincher. I am out of ChatGPT for now, 5.2 or otherwise. I wish them well.

Just a note, chatGPT does retain a persistent memory of conversations. In the settings menu, there's a section that allows you to tweak/clear this persistent memory
I found the gemini cli extremely lacking and even frustrating. Why google would choose node…

Codex is decent and seemed to be improving (being written in rust helps). Claude code is still the king, but my god they have server and throttling issues.

Mixed bag wherever you go. As model progress slows / flatlines (already has?) I’m sure we’ll see a lot more focus and polish on the interfaces.

Codex is king
What's that near free subscription? I don't see it here
They had 9.99 for the first year.
Oh I must have missed that, thanks.
yeah, the best Ive seen is like 1.99 for two months, then back to normal pricing....
> It has me thinking „man, fuck this“ on the daily.

That's sometimes me with the CLI. I can't use the Gemini CLI right now on Windows (in the Terminal app), because trying to copy in multiple lines of text for some reason submits them separately and it just breaks the whole thing. OpenCode had the same issue but even worse, it quite after the first line or something and copied the text line by line into the shell, thank fuck I didn't have some text that mentions rm -rf or something.

More info: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/14735#iss...

At the same time, neither Codex CLI, nor Claude Code had that issue (and both even showed shortened representations of copied in text, instead of just dumping the whole thing into the input directly, so I could easily keep writing my prompt).

So right now if I want to use Gemini, I more or less have to use something like KiloCode/RooCode/Cline in VSC which are nice, but might miss out on some more specific tools. Which is a shame, because Gemini is a really nice model, especially when it comes to my language, Latvian, but also your run of the mill software dev tasks.

In comparison, Codex feels quite slow, whereas Claude Code is what I gravitate towards most of the time but even Sonnet 4.5 ends up being expensive when you shuffle around millions of tokens: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=46216192 Cerebras Code is nice for quick stuff and the sheer amount of tokens, but in KiloCode/... regularly messes up applying diff based edits.

Google’s standard problem is that they don’t even use their own products. Their Pixel and Android team rocks iPhones on the daily, for example.
You cant buy an iPhone without a director approval. And it's like 3 gen behind as well. So no, they don't use iPhones.
Google tells its employees what products they're allowed to buy for personal use?
Seems like they meant for a work device.
lots of googlers use BYOD iPhones and the corp suite for this use case is fairly well-supported
Which makes tons of sense because iPhone users are higher CLV than Android users. If Google had to choose between major software defects in Android or iOS, they would focus quality on iOS every time.
that explains why their ios gemini app is so ridiculously bad. in private they probably use iphones and just chatgpt instead.
you have to get premission from director for your presonal phone? wtf
For the work phone.
I would think this is not true
You'd be wrong (source - worked in the Android org).
How long ago?
Yeah, I've heard that Sundar Pichai dogfoods the latest Pixel at least once a month and sometimes two or three times.
That's inexcusable.
That’s because they will be bullied out of the dating market if they have a “green bubble”.
What is a green bubble? iPhone's carbon footprint?
iMessage renders other iMessage users as blue bubbles, SMS/RCS as green bubbles.

People who can’t understand that many people actually prefer iOS use this green/blue thing to explain the otherwise incomprehensible (to them) phenomenon of high iOS market share. “Nobody really likes iOS, they just get bullied at school if they don’t use it”.

It’s just “wake up sheeple” dressed up in fake morality.

As someone who switches between platforms somewhat frequently, iOS perpetually feels like people have Stockholm syndrome.

'Oh, that super annoying issue? Yeah, it's been there for years. We just don't do that.'

Fundamentally though, browsing the web on iOS, even with a custom "browser" with adblocking, feels like going back in time 15 years.

It wouldn't be an issue if they didn't pick the worst green on earth. "Which green would you like for the carrier text messages Mr. Jobs?" ... "#00FF00 will be fine."
I mean there is benefit to understanding competitor well as well?
Outweighed by the value of having to suffer with the moldy fruits of their own labor. That was the only way the Android Facebook app became usable as well.
There certainly is.

To posit a scenario: I would expect General Motors to buy some Ford vehicles to test and play around with and use. There's always stuff to learn about what the competition has done (whether right, wrong, or indifferent).

But I also expect the parking lots used by employees at any GM design facility in the world to be mostly full of General Motors products, not Fords.

The CEO of Ford was driving a competition EV for months;

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a62694325/ford-ceo-jim-far...

>But I also expect the parking lots used by employees at any GM design facility in the world to be mostly full of General Motors products, not Fords.

I think you'd be surprised about the vehicle makeup at Big 3 design facilities.

Maybe so.

I'm only familiar with Ford production and distribution facilities. Those parking lots are broadly full of Fords, but that doesn't mean that it's like this across the board.

I wonder how many apple employees walk in to the office with android phones
Effectively zero.

Disclosure: I work at Apple. And when I was at Google I was shocked by how many iPhones there were.

That doesn’t surprise me at all haha appreciate someone a little closer to the question answering it! I know it still counts anecdotal but I’ll take it
This is flabbergasting, how could such a large proportion of highly technical people willingly subject themselves to being shackled by iOS? They just happily put up with having one choice of browser, (outside Europe) no third party app stores, and being locked into the Apple ecosystem? I can't think of a single reason I would ever switch from an S22-25+U to an iPhone. I only went from 22U to 25U because my old one got smashed, otherwise the 22U would still be perfectly fine.
I also love that I can leave the microphone on (not in live voice mode) while dictating to ChatGPT and pause and think as much as needed.

With Gemini, it will send as soon as I stop to think. No way to disable that.

How did you do this?
Record button in the app if you’ve got the feature.
Any time its safety stuff triggers, Gemini wipes the context. It's unusable because of this because whatever is going on with the safety stuff, it fires too often. I'm trying to figure out some code here, not exactly deporting ICE to Guantanamo or whatever.
The more Gemini and Nano-Banana soften their filters, the more audience it will take from other platforms. The main risk is payment providers banning them, I can't imagine bank card providers to remove payments to Google.
On a flip side chatgpt app now has years of history that sometimes useful (search is pretty ok, but could improve) but otherwise I'd like to remove most of it - good luck doing so.
Claude regularly computes a reply for me, then reports an error and loses the reply. I wonder what fraction of Anthropic’s compute gets wasted and redone.
Try using a VPN, my ISP was killing connections and claude would randomly reset. Using a VPN fixed the issue.
The colab integration is where it shines the most imo.
You may be interested in tools like OpenMemory
Yeah I eventually noped out as I said in another comment and am charging hard with Codex and am so happy about 5.2!!

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