There's few times that I think something is a game changer. Uber ws one of those. iPhone was one. Apple's M-series processor was one. SSDs were one. ChatGPT was one. Gemini 2.5 Pro is officially the best AI Model I have ever used.
It's crazy because Gemini was just categorically and unequivocally bad. Gemini 2.0 made a leap, but still. Claude 3.5 was as good or better than ChatGPT at times, but Gemini 2.5 Pro has taken a lot of my attention away. I still use GPT and Claude for smaller tasks, but for programming full applications Gemini is the best.
For the past week or so I've daily driven Gemini 2.5 Pro and been using it on a new project, an online multiplayer card game. In less than 7 days (started March 31), I got a working efficient multiplayer game. Backend is in Rust, Frontend is in Dart/Flutter with Flutter Flame. I installed it to my phones over the weekend to test and it is just chef's kiss. I'm impressed.
This card game came into head when I was in Singapore thinking about the political situation in the USA. I can say it was somewhat influenced by Queen's Blood, but its more influenced by the political situation in the USA of people just constantly fighting for attention. I think it is an innovative game unlike any other, I had Google deep Research the hell out of the card game landscape and nothing compares to it.
Of course the imagery in the game is AI Generated too. It would be expensive to give the work to artists. It is hard to find good artists that know how to explore with their own sense and take charge once you've given them descriptions of what you want.
Gemini 2.5 Pro is a big part BIG PART of why I started on this game. I was doing another project, but that went by the wayside as I deeply explore what Gemini 2.5 Pro can do here. Multiplayer games are hard, hard, hard to build and maintain. I can really see this helping with my other code bases that need to transition to Rust.
Of course having worked on past projects helped a lot too. I mean I wouldn't know what to do to make this efficient or workable without past unfinished project code especially with multiplayer or choosing Flutter Flame. Gemini is good, but not THAT good.