LIVE Vibe Check: Gemini 4 Carbon
Every team members, including Kieran Klaassen, test Google's new Gemini 4 Carbon model live. Their shared verdict: it's a strong, different-thinking second opinion with standout multimodal skills, but not yet their daily driver.
The gist
-
Kieran ranks Carbon second for coding, behind Anthropic's Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.2 but ahead of OpenAI, praising maintainable code while finding it verbose.
-
On the host's junior engineer benchmark, Carbon finished 15 to 16 tickets over four and a half hours, while rivals did eight to nine within an hour.
-
Randy says Carbon caught audio and video glitches other models missed, and the host gives Claude a Gemini API key for multimodal work.
-
Kieran runs tasks across models with T3 Code and can hand work off to Anti-Gravity, but tests new models alone to learn their personality.
-
Jack found Carbon excellent at a detailed app icon task but cluttered by default, and the team says its writing slipped compared with Argon.
"Even when I'm using Claude as my daily driver, which is still my daily driver, Carbon hasn't supplanted that... I just use the Claude desktop app and tell Claude to do everything for me... If you're a developer I still think that choice would be Claude."
▶ Play at 11:30251 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Chris Koerner, and This Week in Startups.
See all on the Claude page"I give Claude a Gemini API key. And that's like my secret for anything multimodal because Claude can see images, and it can kind of watch video, but the way it watches videos is it slices the video up into different scenes... Gemini is native multimodal."
▶ Play at 11:412 creators recommend it, including Vadim.
See all on the Gemini API page"Yeah, so I do definitely do this and I use T3 and I kind of like it. I'm using it now for 3 weeks."
▶ Play at 12:472 creators recommend it, including Ras Mic.
See all on the T3 Code page"I did want to just kind of have pure usage of Antigravity with this as well, and I was pleasantly surprised by that experience. I think Antigravity has always been like second, third best, but it's getting up to feature parity in a way that feels like, okay, I can use it."
▶ Play at 15:542 creators recommend it, including Remy Gaskell.
See all on the Anti-Gravity pageWhat they recommend · 4 picks
"Even when I'm using Claude as my daily driver, which is still my daily driver, Carbon hasn't supplanted that... I just use the Claude desktop app and tell Claude to do everythin..."
"I give Claude a Gemini API key. And that's like my secret for anything multimodal because Claude can see images, and it can kind of watch video, but the way it watches videos is..."
"Yeah, so I do definitely do this and I use T3 and I kind of like it. I'm using it now for 3 weeks."
Also mentioned
Related episodes
Episodes covering similar topics
More from Every