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by HarHarVeryFunny 116 days ago
I use Gemini all the time, but I have to say it's got verbal diarrhea and an EXTREMELY annoying trait of wanting to lead the conversation rather than just responding to what YOU want to do. At the end of every response Gemini will always suggest a "next step", in effect trying to 2nd guess where you want the conversation to go. I'd much rather have an AI that just did what it was asked, and let me decide what to ask next (often nothing - maybe it was just a standalone question!).

Apparently this annoying "next step" behavior is driven by the system prompt, since the other day I was running Gemini 3 Thinking, and it was displaying it's thoughts which included a reminder to itself to check that it was maintaining a consistent persona, and to make sure that it had suggested a next step. I'd love to know the thought process of whoever at Google thought that this would make for a natural or useful conversation flow! Could you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human who insisted on doing this?!
3 comments
edoceo 116 days ago
Yes. That is a salesperson. The next-step is to drive engagement. I know you're not interested in $THiNG now but can I follow up in 3 months?

In persona I think the AIs are that Claude is the engineer and Gemini is the sales-person and GPT is the eager and loud journeyman.

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vrosas 116 days ago
I don’t know, I’ve found the follow ups nice sometimes. You can just ignore them if they’re not useful. The computer won’t get mad…
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HarHarVeryFunny 116 days ago
I find they are extremely rarely useful - they just break my own chain of thought by having to constantly read and ignore this stuff. The same goes for the excessively verbose responses too - a human has a limited "context window" and a shorter response is therefore much more useful/valuable than a long token-maxxed one.

Sure the computer won't get mad, and that is all I do - just ignore what Gemini is suggesting and pretend it never said it - but it certainly makes me mad. The main reason I stick with Gemini is because of the generous free usage limits, but I know this annoying "next step" behavior (which was a relatively recent change) is going to push me back to Claude, even if I need to pay for it.

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debo_ 116 days ago
Yes. Gemini is mimicking its creators: this is exactly how I experienced speaking to most Googlers.
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