Matches my experience. When I need to think or reason about something, between Clause and ChatGPT, the latter is my go to. With more to read, there’s just more to work with. For the same reason it’s bonkers for tech issues. How many times did I get a ChatGPT reply a mile long, do the first thing, and then read more after it didn’t work. Only then realize chatgpt didn’t offer the best answer first.

Yeah it's hard to get good data on what's best. We did read the a good sample amount of essays. Lots of arguments about what made them better, but its uncontroversial that longer ones were more preferred.

Interestingly we trained a simple LORA layer on top of Inkling and it turns out a model can smell which model wrote a response 70% of the time. I wonder if the smell of gemini is just more preferred by students.

Hmm, seems like which model teachers prefer would be the more important headline…

TBH i did a bit of both - we used AI to get us insights in the db, we then wrote and rewrote the article to be readable. It's really hard because usually when i write reports they're so terse its not fun to read

My professor and teacher friends are painfully aware of how many students submit AI generated essays.

They're adding steps like having the students discuss and defend their essay, which immediately reveals the people who had AI write something and thought they could bluff. This triggers complaints about social anxiety and such, which are unfortunately becoming the go-to defense when unable to discuss the work.

They're also moving toward more in-person writing. Instead of long essays, shorter writing segments as part of the test. Submitting a written essay earns you feedback from the professor and a better understanding of the topic, but that's it.

I think it's less about curricula and more about how professors should eval their students. In previous era's essays are a proxy of the students ability to reason, remember and argue certain points - but its clear they fall short now.

I suspect the best schools into the future will integrate lots of socratic defenses of theses, building real things in real time or solving problems with a professor in a case study manner. My last company was a good hint to the future.

The homework essay is dead. High schoolers in my home state were just relieved of any take-home assignments because it was pointless now, I guess universities won't be far behind.

TBH :') that one was an AI slip through. In other comments i've flagged the things that were hard rewritten - but even on me that's bad.

Gemini is the best general-purpose model. We hear a lot about the other ones here because we are focusing on coding.

So, given that developers these days mix and match models anyway with harnesses like Pi, has anyone tried letting Claude or GPT do the coding, and Gemini do the comments and documentation? Maybe even asking it to "translate" Claude's output messages to better human language for the developer or subagents?

I wonder how much is due to their investment in notebook LLM + gmail work

For real, the "Claudish" has become so painful to read that it just takes me out of whatever task I was working on.

When prompted to use simple English without jargon, it's still filled with load bearing honest caveats in every footgun seam it talks about — what I should have led with. <Insert whatever other Claude cliche you prefer>

And I'm not the only one to notice this. Next time it's up for renewal, my team is abandoning it for GH Copilot in order to use literally any other frontier model.

You make some good points, but the best one is the one you might not be aware you've made.

It's so bad that my workflow has Sol rewrite all comments and error messages produced by Claude.

yeah i think Claude might just be compounding its way to a local maximum rn

Fair challenge, the ability to write good prose is load-bearing for essential tasks.

Gemini is not bad at coding? Give it a /plan and it does a very decent job in a fraction of the time/tokens that Claude needs.

Makes sense when you consider what type of data Google had available in abundance. Natural written language (e.g., Docs, Gmail, Books) and natural spoken language (e.g., YouTube).

One could argue that Google Colab would supply the training data for better coding performance. I would argue that Colab is mostly used for non-complex (e.g., small number of variables) and self-contained (i.e., runnable in one page) code that can’t train a model for multi-folder and multi-page projects that rely on global connections, which real-life coding would often require.

Will give this a shot - we're going to try to work with students and schools better on normalizing this stuff out

As in they should make their own foundation models for essays?

Students do have different incentives in writing than SWE's. There's the habit of reaching word counts for assignments, some social signalling of how intellgent you are with essay length etc.

The data we have is just there to compare for the student base. I'd love to try it out on other cohorts - but the acquisition of such users and the product to make them happy is hard to achieve!

My settings are similar. I also added to be very concise without losing important information. It's output is so slim now that I can ask yes or no questions. Asking for a code snippet gives me just a snippet without an accompanying paragraph of explanation that I would just ignore anyway. Of course I can still ask follow up questions, but it gets right to the point. No filler is a dream.

You'll find some paragraphs are half written by Ai and some written totally by me. It's heavily edited from its original form (as it was a data report by codex on our db) - but some paragraphs which were good enough stayed.

E.g. Contrast my human written paragraph vs the AI written first paragraph

Human written:

"The three most popular AI models used by college students are ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. As of August 2026 the data on StudyArena shows they prefer Gemini. "

vs

AI Written "Most AI comparsions are written like wine reviews. Claude is subtle. ChatGPT is dependable.."

its starting to feel that way with newer models. right after opus 4.6, I have started to notice the same

Most students can write an essay - but most are also smart enough to try to save time too haha

Codex - at least initially haha! I wrote lots of insights and findings and pushed out a lot of false logic it picked up. Personally I hate claude writing cause it feels bureaucratic. But definitely wrote a ton more with my bare hands and brain.

Interestingly, the smartest students I've worked with do use AI - but more in the sense that AI is a good comparison tool and a good bottom ceiling of the quality of work they should bring in.

Lots of research shows being able to see different answers improves the quality of a student's output - especially as the good ones are able to pick out what's good from the other work and then add their own insights or takes on top.