In the past week, Gemini, which had successfully built PicoDB and PicoRR V1 over the course of about 8 weeks, has become unworkable for me.

First it spent several days botching a compound IF statement which resolved into 4 conditions. I noticed at one point that it had dropped me from a PRO to a FAST model--which meant it would guess rather than look at the actual code. Then, for the last 3 days I have gotten hours-worth of "Error: can you re-prompt?" or "I'm having a problem, can I help you with something else?". As a result, issues I had hoped to resolve a week ago remain unresolved.

I had seen some of this coming (though I hadn't expected it to be so bad). I bought a MINISFORUM UM870 PC: 32GB DDR5, 256GB SSD, Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS. Yesterday I set up Claude Code Pro on the device, loaded my files, and asked it to do its initialization. Quite impressive--128 lines of assessment, spot on. Then I asked it to analyze the PicoDB library.bas file. Again impressive, with 8 issue areas located. 6 of them were easily fixed; the others are deeper, and I'll have to ask it to resolve them.

We'll see. It was a good 7-week run with Gemini. It showed me what the capabilities were. Claude Code goes to the Anthropic servers for intelligence, so it's also going to be susceptible to this tsunami of token usage that is coming.

I'm hoping, if need be, I'll be able to go entirely local with my setup. But first I want to see what Claude Code can do at the present time.

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Edited 2026-03-23 00:34 by lizby