gemini is widely touted to the best model out there, and it costs you nothing to try it out? so do that for a few weeks and see?

I exclusively use gemini and I've been very happy with it.

Gemini is like a wild horse. It bucks and refuses to use tools, moves many things, deletes whenever it wants, I want a kind old horse, and I find that in Claude, it does what I want, usually exactly the way I want it, usually clocking in under a dollar per task. I've seen gemini do plenty of one-shots, but I still have not seen it--even in its costliest form--properly navigate large monorepos or less well-trodden libraries. As for chatGPT, I don't like them either. Their codex model is okay, but again the consistency isn't there, I feel like I can ask claude more questions per session and not have it decay

Gemini tells me I'm under 18

If it's free...

which Gemini free are you talking about? Gemini from aistudio.google.com ?

my guess would be asymmetrical information (most non tech people don't know it exist) and the explicit statement that google will use any prompt shared there, in its free tier, for training and improving their own models

I use Gemini because it's free, but I also don't want to support Google dominance.