Gemini 3 Flash is very good at the search task (it benchmarks quite close to 3 Pro in coding tasks but is much faster). I believe Amp switch to Gemini Flash for their search agent because it is better.
I very much doubt this. I've been using gemini whenever I get hit by codex limits over the past week. 3 pro is very good - a bit behind codex but still very useful. I've tried 3 flash several times and each time what I got back was complete garbage. After the third or fourth attempt I stopped trying.
I actually defended Gemini CLI when someone said this a few days ago. Then Murphy's law hit me with bug after bug, all of which have been reported many times already going back over year or more. I keep having to totally clear out the ~/.gemini folder and then it works again for a while.