My own experience is that it is below sonnet and opus 4.0 on capability - but better than gemini 2.5 pro on tool calling. It's really worth trying if you don't want to spend the $100 or $200 per month on Claude Max. I love how succinct the model is.
> you can use CC with any model via
Anthropic should just open source Claude Code - they're in a position to become the VS Code of cli coding agents.
I tried gemini2.5 and while it is certainly a very strong model you really notice that it was not trained to be 'agentic'/with strong initiative for tool calling. Oftentimes it would make a plan, I'd say 'go ahead' and it just replied something like 'I made a todo list we are ready to implement' or something similar lol. You really had to push it to action and the whole CC experience fell apart a bit.
My own experience is that it is below sonnet and opus 4.0 on capability - but better than gemini 2.5 pro on tool calling. It's really worth trying if you don't want to spend the $100 or $200 per month on Claude Max. I love how succinct the model is.
> you can use CC with any model via
Anthropic should just open source Claude Code - they're in a position to become the VS Code of cli coding agents.
Shout out to opencode:
https://github.com/sst/opencode
which supports all the models natively and attempts to do what CC does