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Gemini 4 Argon

1699 points · 1187 comments · bradleyg223

  1. taylorfinley · · focus · HN ↗
    Ten days ago I had an experience with Gemini 3.8 flash that made me wonder if I was being routed to a different model under test. I was trying to use rocm with llama.cpp on my 128gb Strix Halo but could only get it to run Vulkan. I pasted the error message into agy and it proceeded to attach GDB to my GPU driver, reverse-engineer the kernel queue ioctl interface, and author an LD_PRELOAD C shim to get ROCm llama.cpp working on my Strix Halo. My jaw was hanging open the whole time.

    Edit to add the fix: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;birep&#x2F;6f2c8d490c7a29820997d57bd654c351" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;birep&#x2F;6f2c8d490c7a29820997d57bd654c3...

    1. spankalee · · focus · HN ↗
      3.8 Flash is just quite good, and so is the Antigravity harness.

      I use a mix of Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini holds it&#x27;s own. Especially in writing, frontend, and sysadmin work. agy for configuring a NixOS system has been truly incredible.

      1. mapontosevenths · · focus · HN ↗
        Even if agy was the best (it&#x27;s not, and is missing basic features) you wouldn&#x27;t rather have a choice?

        I cancelled Ultra because they forced me into their harness like I should adapt to them, rather than the other way around.

        1. drusepth · · focus · HN ↗
          What basic features are missing from agy? I&#x27;ve been using it and cli-cc + web-cc for months (among a few other random harnesses to test here and there) and they all seem roughly comparable to me.

          I actually just cancelled Ultra also because I couldn&#x27;t subscribe to a YouTube Family plan while I had it active (Google... :[) but trying to use Codex as a replacement while I testdrive Astra makes me yearn for agy again.

          1. walthamstow · · focus · HN ↗
            I have used it for little more than 6 hours or so in total but I&#x27;m pretty sure it doesn&#x27;t have compaction?
            1. honr · · focus · HN ↗
              It certainly has compaction (since the public launch I assume) and I HATE it. I have some remedies but nothing perfect yet. It never retains ALL the crucial bits. If a conversation runs into two compactions it is often a sign that I have to abandon it and retain whatever I can, to form a seed prompt for an adjacent conversation.
              1. tobias2014 · · focus · HN ↗
                That is really the biggest beef I have with agy over others, the forced auto compaction at the 250k token threshold (3.8-flash), while the model itself (via API) would be fine with a 1M context window. Even if the model is great, restricting context to 250k tokens (and auto compacting no matter what) limits certain applications and workflows somewhat.
                1. sigseg1v · · focus · HN ↗
                  I find this discussion interesting. I&#x27;ve had huge increases in accuracy and huge reductions in token usage by capping my Claude models at 200k instead of 1M. I find 1M unusable and wasteful and feel that 200k should be the default. This also makes sense given that the whole reason people use &quot;Ralph loops&quot; is to keep the context window small for all tasks to get better results. Of course, clearing it yourself and manually managing it is better, but if I have 8 projects going in different terminal tabs I&#x27;m not watching any one of them that closely to effectively do that.

                  What are people using 1M context window for?

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